Business leaders are terrified about the power of social technologies, but they are also intrigued and excited about the opportunities. These new technologies allow us to let go of control and still be in command, because better, cheaper communication tools give us the ability to be intimately familiar with what is happening with both customers and employees.

The result of these new relationships is open leadership, which I define as: Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals. Open leadership fosters new relationships and to understand and govern how they work, we need some new rules:

1. Respect that your customers and employees have power
Once you accept this as true, you can begin to have a more equal relationship with them. And if you ever need a reminder of what customer and employee power looks like, read a social media monitoring report on your company – you’ll quickly be humbled.

2. Share constantly to build trust
At the core of any successful relationship is trust. In today’s increasingly virtual, engaged environments, this often comes from the daily patter of conversations. The repeated successful interchange of people sharing their thoughts, activities and concerns results in relationships. Blogs, social networks and Twitter remove the cost of sharing, making it easy to form these new relationships.

3. Nurture curiosity and humility
Sharing can quickly turn into messaging if all of the outbound information isn’t accompanied by give and take. Expressing curiosity about what someone is doing and why something is important to that person keeps sharing focused on what other people want to hear, balanced with what you want to say. The natural outgrowth of curiosity is humility, giving you the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that you still have a lot to learn, and to admit when you are wrong.

4. Hold openness accountable
In relationships, accountability is a two-way street. So if your product causes someone problems, what’s the first thing you should do? Apologise and figure out how to resolve the problem. Likewise, if you give someone the ability to comment on your site and they misuse it, they should understand that you will deny them future access.

5. Forgive failure
The corollary to accountability is forgiveness. Things go wrong all the time in relationships, and the healthiest ones move on. This is not to say that failure is accepted; rather, that it is acknowledged and understood.

• Extracted from Charlene Li’s new book, Open Leadership: How social technology can transform the way you lead (published by Jossey-Bass).

Charlene Li is one of the world’s foremost experts on social technologies. She co-authored the bestselling Groundswell, is founder of Altimeter Group and formerly a VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research.