Is it always good to share?

A couple of years ago, while I was conducting research for a new book, I asked some of Facebook’s leaders how they felt about using social media to talk about — or “share” — their personal lives.

The discussions were fascinating. In the early years of Facebook’s breathless expansion, many of its leaders avoided talking about personal matters. Indeed some, such as founder Mark Zuckerberg, were infamously — some might say obsessively — private.

But earlier this decade, they decided that they were going to start “sharing” with a vengeance. The reason? Partly business expediency: the Facebook managers reckoned they needed to know how their own social media platform worked, in every sense.

But there was a second issue. As Facebook exploded in size, leaders such as Zuckerberg concluded that the best way to be effective was to connect with employees on multiple levels.

This is not just because anybody who has grown up in the cyber age expects leaders to be “authentic” and “accessible”. There is another issue of corporate philosophy: if you want to build a tightly knit organisation in a world of gigantic bureaucracies, you need to create as many overlapping webs of connection as possible across the group, be that through ties of friendship, hobbies or just sentiment.

To put it another way, since humans are complex, multi-stranded creatures, using that complexity enables you to build connections with a wider pool of people. And the larger an institution becomes, the more these three-dimensional connections matter.

Overlapping webs can stop bureaucracies fragmenting into one-dimensional warring tribes (or “silos”, to use the word that I employ in my book). As Jocelyn Goldfein, former director of engineering at Facebook, explained to me: “You need to create multiple points of contact across a group. I am a pretty shy, introverted person naturally ... before I joined Facebook I didn’t post very much at all. I was pretty inhibited.”

“[But] every time I share a little more outside my comfort zone, it feels so rewarding. I end up making new connections in the company, and it’s become like a positive feedback loop,” she added.

It is a thought-provoking concept, particularly right now. Zuckerberg recently sparked a cyber storm with a Facebook post revealing that while he is (happily) now expecting a baby with his wife Priscilla, the couple previously suffered three miscarriages. He said he shared this “private” news to spark a badly needed public debate about the tragedy of miscarriage.

“It’s a lonely experience. Most people don’t discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you ... So you struggle on your own,” he observed. “We hope that sharing our experience will give more people the same hope we felt and will help more people feel comfortable sharing their stories.” And the post succeeded admirably in its stated goal, sparking a deluge of praise and support.

But, amid all the discussion about the shame of miscarriage, what received less attention was how Zuckerberg’s post changed his ability to connect. Before this post, most women probably did not feel that much empathy with the billionaire tech-nerd; now, however, more have a sense of shared humanity.

So too with Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Until recently, she seemed something of a glossy tech goddess (not least because she wrote an influential book, “Lean In”, urging women to achieve more at work). But when her husband tragically died earlier this year, she shared her feelings on Facebook in very moving posts — and, at a stroke, built powerful links with a wider community, as well as with her own staff.

Of course, some people might view this as tacky and distasteful — or dismiss it as a manipulative public relations move. Others might question whether it makes managerial sense; it used to be assumed that leaders in both the corporate world and the public sector had to maintain a sense of aloof separation to command respect and credibility. Intimacy can undermine authority.

In practical terms, the Facebook managers themselves admit that they did not initially find it easy to share. Zuckerberg’s early posts were rather wooden, restricted to “safe” topics such as the foxes who live on the Facebook campus.

However, living in a world dominated by the internet changes us all — even Zuckerberg, it seems. And the more embedded social media become in our lives, the more social attitudes shift.

The question this now poses for us all (particularly other CEOs) is whether the new sharing mantra is something to be celebrated or merely tolerated. Answers on a postcard — or, better still, in a social media post.

–Financial Times

Gillian Tett is the author of “The Silo Effect”, to be published by Simon & Schuster in September.