52: Leadership Transition and Social Media
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Transcript:
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the reality of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose, and when possible, joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. Season 1 of this podcast features guests experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace, and Season 2 features solo episodes sharing my best practices and Leaving Well framework.
Expect to be inspired, challenged, and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice of leaving well as you seek to leave your imprint in this world.
This is going to be a super short and hopefully super actionable episode about the importance of social media and what it has to do with workplace transitions. So when I think about my leaving well clients, I see this happen every single time. I also see this happen all the time with organizations that I'm not yet working with, and I think, oh my gosh, the one thing, if I could tell you one thing, it would be to double down on your social media when you have a leadership gap, when you're hiring, or when you have a workplace transition at the executive leadership level.
So here's why when you go quiet on social media, whether people know that you have a leadership transition or not, it doesn't do you any good. First of all, the algorithm, social media algorithms, they like consistency, right? There's some continuity algorithm things that happen. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on that, but when you have had consistency with posting things, whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram or X or whatever it is that you're posting on.
When you have consistency, it helps keep you top of mind. If you're a non profit organization or a social impact company, you thrive on people knowing about your services or about the work you offer, whether it's because of the community that needs to take advantage of your services, or if it's because you need to be top of mind for your funders and the donors and the community that might be participating in grassroots.
Uh, movement building or policy work, whatever it is, you need to stay top of mind. And so the worst thing that you can do during a leadership transition is to go quiet and be, um, ghosting the community on social media. The other reason that it's a really bad idea to slow down on your social media and your marketing is because you are eventually most likely going to be hiring for that leadership gap.
What is the one thing that probably the first thing that folks are going to do as they hear about a job opening that you have, especially when it is at the result of a big workplace transition, they're going to look on social media. They're gonna check you out. They're gonna see what you're up to.
They're gonna see what programs you're offering. They're gonna see how you represent you and your mission and your values to the outside world. If you've gone quiet because of a leadership transition, they're not gonna find anything except for old news. So what I can recommend to you is obviously that you don't pull back on your social when your CEO leaves.
And the way that I would recommend this is in a couple of different, um, tips or tricks or things to think about. If you have a social media team, or even if you don't, have a meeting that specifically is to talk about repurposing content. You're going to look back at the last year or even two years of maybe blog posts or articles or things that you've posted that you can repurpose.
Maybe you'll find a treasure trove of things that you haven't really even adequately shouted out. We're so bad about, uh, just trying to get the work done every day of, of achieving our missions that sometimes we don't celebrate the things that we've accomplished or we don't share out things adequately enough.
And, uh, As the human nature, we need to see things more than once or twice, twice anyway for it to land in our subconscious. So, don't hesitate to go back, review older content, and repurpose it. Here's a couple of very, um, specific examples. If you were featured in a news media, whether it's an article, or an interview, or even just mentioned in an article, Even if you've shared that out before on social, bring it back and revive it.
Take a clip from maybe the quote or a clip from the interview and make a very specific and focused post about it. If you've written an article, take a highlight piece of that that you really wanna drive home. Make a graphic of that quote. Put it out again. Point people back to your website. If you have volunteers, this is a great opportunity to go back into your volunteer archives, see who's been volunteering over the last three to six months, and do a shout out post to them.
If you've got staff anniversaries, that's a great thing to pull out, even if you don't regularly do this, to just get your social media up and going and stay continuously active. Uh, present for for your community. The other thing that you can think about, if you're willing to go even one step further, is to explore your values during this time and have that be what you send out into the social media algorithm and into the universe.
If you're looking for someone to fill your current leadership gap who matches your organizational culture and matches your values, they're going to need to see what those values are and not just in copy buried on your website on your About Us page. I often talk about ways to operationalize your values and I also recommended in episode 49 about onboarding tips that you go one step further and let folks know that are joining your team, how they will know if your values are being lived out on the day to day operational efforts of your organization.
So take that into consideration when you think about not letting your social media go quiet during a leadership gap. Maybe you have four values. Maybe it's equity, maybe it's transparency, accountability, and Innovation. Let's say those are your four values. You could make a whole month worth of posts in a series, even if you would like to, where you interview members of your team for a quick 30 seconds to 60 seconds about why that value is important to them.
You could correlate your values with programs. The program that we wanted to share with you today and highlight during the rest of this week is this program. One of the reasons we love this program is because it lets us show the value of Innovation every day, every time that we offer this program, you get what I'm saying, dive deep and really think about how you can keep your social media game and your strategy up and going, even when, and especially when you have a leadership gap.
That's all I have for today. I promised a super short episode with hopefully some actionable tips and some encouragement to not let that die. Actually, you know what? One more thing before I go. Most of you listening at a non profit will have an email newsletter. That's another thing I didn't mention with social media.
I was thinking more of platforms. But your email newsletter is another great opportunity to not let that go quiet. Keep, if you're currently sending one email newsletter a month, keep sending the email newsletter. If it feels like it's too much to navigate during this time of transition, block it out, spend some time with your team, whether it's a communications team or your leadership team, and think about the things that I mentioned earlier.
Maybe you should talk about your values. Maybe you do a volunteer shout out. All of those things can also go seamlessly into an email newsletter and you can even pre prepare those so that they're just scheduled to go out so you don't even have to think about it with all the other things that you have going on during a transition.
But do not, do not, Ghost your social media, double down on your social media. If you have questions, if you have thoughts that you'd like to run by me, um, I love talking about this. Send me an email, Naomi at athenhome. com or send me a speak pipe with maybe something that still feels like it's a challenge.
There will be a speak pipe link in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you think about this challenge to not let your social media go quiet just because you have an executive leadership gap in your workplace. That's all for now. Thanks for listening. If you've not yet taken the Workplace Transition Archetype quiz to discover your natural relationship to change and transition, you can do that at NaomiHattaway.com/quiz. To learn more about living well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit NaomiHattaway. com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation.
Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.
