Today, I spent the day at the Connecticut Health Foundation’s All Fellows Retreat. As always, it was a source of plenty food for thought. At a previous fellow gathering, I learned about the conscious competency learning model. In this model, we start off as being unconscious of our incompetence in a particular area. The first part of learning is discovering our incompetence, becoming consciously incompetent. We then develop competence becoming consciously competent. We continue using the skill until it becomes second nature. At this point, we cease being conscious of using the skill, and we become unconsciously competent.

The original context I learned this in was in being culturally competent. When dealing with people from a different background, how often do we end up saying something unhelpful or unkind, without even knowing it? We might be offended or defensive when someone brings it to our attention, but hopefully, we start working on becoming more competent in our cultural communications.

I thought about this today, as I drove up to the All Fellow Retreat in another context: How does the competency model apply to social media? How many of us have gotten to the point where using social media is second nature to us? Do we remember when we struggled over whether or not to post certain things?

Today, we talked about three aspects of the actions of individuals, teams, and organizations: Robust, Relevant, and Relations. Many organizations get stuck with robust activities. They may be really good at doing something, but how relevant is that to the organization? From a social media perspective, this is like looking at how many followers you have, or how many hits your webpage gets. (Remember the old definition of HITS? How Idiots Track Success). This gets to the relevant part. If you have a lot of followers, a lot of traffic to your website, even a lot of likes or comments, if it isn’t helping you achieve your organizations mission, if it isn’t relevant, does it really matter?

The sweet spot comes when you add in relationships. During the discussion today, one person mentioned a coworker who always showed pictures of her kids. The person at the retreat spoke about learning that if she wanted to motivate and engage that worker, starting the discussion around kids seemed most effective. I think this captures some of my frequent comments about tweeting about breakfast. It is part of building the relationship that gets other people engaged.

I hesitate posting this, for fear of sounding too much like too many ‘social media experts’ posting their thoughts about how to do social media. Yet I’ve decided to share it, hoping it will resonate with some people and perhaps generate further thought.