Social learning in action

Imagine being promoted to manager of a team of 10 for the first time in your career, and you have no idea what you’re doing. You have no experience managing a team and you need help, now! 

Now imagine having the guts to confess to the other 250 managers in your company that you have no idea what you’re doing and asking them for help. Would you do it? 

That’s exactly what one new manager did at Danish carbon reduction technologies company Haldor Topsoe. He asked the first question on the company’s new Manager’s Club Yammer Community. 

He posted on Yammer saying: “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never been a manager before and I have no idea where to start. I have a team of 10 people, how do I start?” 

Help immediately came flooding in and not one negative comment was to be seen, said Mette Pihl Køster, Digital Workplace Lead at Haldor Topsoe. 

Mette Pihl Køster.

Replies included having one-on-one meetings with all employees to get to know them.  

“Just to find out who are my employees? What do they like? Do they have a dog? Do they have kids? Just ask personal questions, get to know them and also show you who you are as a person, not as a manager, but as a person,” Mette said. 

Because Haldor Topsoe is a multi-national company with employees from around the world, managers also gave advice on dealing with geographically dispersed teams, and teams with different cultures and backgrounds.  

The answers to the question from the new manger helped not only the original manager but all 250 managers in the company who could all learn different management styles, or gain new ideas, from the responses, Mette said. 

Importantly, no executives are included in the private Yammer community. All 250 managers are peers in the organisation and Mette said by excluding their bosses, it has created a psychologically safe Yammer community. 

“I think it’s crucial that the senior leadership team is not part of this group,” she said. 

“If you thought your boss was looking over your shoulder, asking ‘Why is my employee asking these questions?’ it wouldn’t have the same impact.” 

Launching Yammer at Haldor Topsoe 

Yammer was launched to Haldor Topsoe’s 2,300 employees in January 2020, just before the global pandemic changed the way the world worked. 

Initially, Yammer was mostly used for social groups to have a place to connect. There was a company football club and office clubs for each office location. Mette said it gave people a forum to connect with colleagues to talk about things they were interested in, especially as most people were now working from home. 

It was the HR department that came up with the idea of the Manager’s Club. The vision was to make it a safe place for managers to ask questions and share ideas. 

“They wanted to give all the managers a safe space where they can ask questions because when you’re a manager it’s not always easy to say; ‘I don’t know how to handle this specific thing, I would like some help with this’. So it was closed off,” Mette said. 

“You had to be a manager with people responsibility to access it and then of course HR can also look in and see how things are going and facilitate stuff.” 

Mette said it’s not just new managers who ask questions in the Manager’s Club. 

“The seasoned managers also ask questions like; ‘Now we’re having a new strategic direction, how do I get my employees to be engaged in this?’,” Mette said. 

She said the willingness to be so open and, at times, vulnerable in the Yammer community is a reflection of the culture at Haldor Topsoe. 

“Some of it is the Topsoe spirit, a feeling of belonging to a company and a family which makes people more willing to ask the tough questions and maybe show people that you don’t have all the answers from the beginning,” Mette said. 

Social learning in action 

Haldor Topsoe’s Manager’s Club Yammer community is a stellar example of social learning in action, and doing it digitally means it can be scaled across geographies and operate at very low cost, said SWOOP Analytics CEO Cai Kjaer. 

Cai Kjaer, CEO, SWOOP Analytics.

SWOOP’s analysis of thousands of Yammer communities across almost every industry sector has found high performing communities like Haldor Topsoe's Manager’s Club has a set of commonalities. 

“One of these is that there's a core set of people who are actively contributing and through them we see a strong cohesive core of relationships,” Cai said. 

“This is essential to build the trust that is fundamental for communities to thrive.” 

Another aspect is that there is no single person managing the community. Instead, leadership is shared. As Mette explained, HR was the catalyst for starting the community, but HR is no longer the central player.  

“When that happens, you know that you have a self-sustaining community,” Cai said. 

“From a measurement perspective it is now possible to quantify just how far, or close, a community is to having the characteristics of Haldor Topsoe's Manager’s Club.” 

You can measure how distributed leadership is, and if you have become too reliant on a small number of contributors, in SWOOP’s “What 'good' looks like” as well as SWOOP’s annual benchmarking of Yammer communities.