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Today I was taking my dog (Molly) for her regular morning walk, before I started work.  Half way through the walk, a car pulled up beside me and asked for directions to a local hotel.  Now I don’t want to know why he was looking for a hotel at 7.30am in the morning, but I digress.

I thought about the best way for the driver to get to his destination, and of course there were many ways to skin the cat.  I ended up giving him the route with the least number of directions to follow, even though it was not necessarily the quickest route.  The problem with the quickest route was that it probably would have required him to have a good knowledge of some local landmarks.

This got me thinking about the ways in which I work with individuals and teams when trying to get them to improve their communication and collaboration via Social Media.  It is quite often a case that it is not the destination that is the most important, but the route that is travelled to get to the destination.  You can give an individual/team/organisation, the most direct route to resolving their communication and collaboration issues; in fact it can sometimes be quite obvious to you (as an expert) what the appropriate solution is.

However sometimes it is important to be a little more indirect in your approach.  Give the party you are working with, the flexibility to find the destination on their own.  I am a firm believer that we sometimes have to let go and not always assume we have all the answers.  Only interject if you think it is necessary and they are straying off course completely, for example going back to my analogy, if they go the wrong way down a one-way street.

This week I am running a workshop in which I will be working with a group to help them see where Social Media can improve their communication and collaboration issues.  Even though it might be apparent to me quite early in the session what the solution might be, I think it is very important to let them come to that conclusion themselves.  Who knows they might even come to a better solution!!  At the end of the day, they are the people who know their process better than anyone else.

So what about you?  Do you like the direct approach, or do you prefer to take the road less travelled, and perhaps come up with a better solution?  Please sound off in the comments.

The views expressed on this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

photo credited to http://www.flickr.com/photos/eqqman/