By leveraging social software tools when dealing with teams, managers can quickly and easily set up team spaces to help team members meet deadlines, deliver results and develop best practices along the way.

What follows are more basic tips on how to use social software to help you foster high performance teams (continued from my previous blog).

5.    Encourage collaborative leadership models within your organization. Advocacy within your organization is as important as advocacy beyond the firewall to encourage customer engagement. Your executive management team should visibly display their leadership with frequent and authentic communication. Leading by example, management can test drive social media tools including blogs, podcasts, broadcasts and videos. Social software delivers great tools for quickly and easily disseminating information that gives those on the receiving end the opportunity to respond.

6.    Collect and distribute your best practices. One of the key benefits to a social software system is the ability to establish, store and share standard operating procedures to prevent duplicated efforts and ensure that projects stay on schedule. Social computing tools like wikis can provide a valuable piece of the high performance team puzzle. Wikis are web pages that any member of your team can create and edit quickly and easily. Content is created, shared and updated by a community of users. Wikis are ideal for aggregating and sharing standard operating procedures within teams, across departments and branch offices or the entire organization.

7.    Appeal to the guidance of professionals to help to educate your team members. As social software tools gain greater acceptance among knowledge workers, guidance from experts in this field is necessary to ensure that organizations realize value from their investment. IGLOO offers a Community Playbook, a collection of proven social software implementation methodologies, as part of its customer engagement strategy.

8.    Provide a consistent level of resources and support. One of the best ways to diminish motivation and hamper productivity is to expect people to perform without the tools and resources they need to deliver real results. Make sure that everyone on your team has access to the information and the tools (and the information about these tools) they need to perform.

In Conclusion

Collaborative expertise is the new key qualifier for business success. Social software is revolutionizing the workplace by replacing structured, hierarchical teams with cross-functional, collaborative high performance teams and traditional ineffectual methods of communication like email with collaborative workspaces, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, profiles, messaging, and more. The business value of social software should be measured according to how effectively your teams are performing, and how well your overall business units are doing to meet the business challenges they are working to address.