Communities at work!

This year I am working on creating 2 communities – horizontal grouping of employees who come from different teams but are characterized by some similarity (e.g. – role, past experiences, gender, etc).

Why am I attempting to form a community? Well, there are changes that I am attempting in these 2 horizontal employee groupings. The attempt is to make the members of these communities far more effective at work and in their careers.

I have option of rolling out initiatives for them or to make them involved in entire ´upping the bar´ process (from design to execution).

Again  I have option of forming having a representative committee working on changes, or to involve the entire community – let them even own formation of representative committee (if that´s the path they want to choose).

So in essence, i am trying to create an impact on the 2 communities by working through community itself.

I am grappling with a few further questions.

• What makes community members come together and do something beyond their own self interest? 
•  If community has to work and make an impact, what is my role?

Would a community be different than a group?

I think word community has a much more involved sense – there is a sense of informality and also of belongingness/identity.

What are principles I can use to create a community from group of individuals who don´t necessarily work with each other/come across each other infrequently?

Well, I see 2 possibilities.

• Goals that inspire members to action (at times there may be no immediate self-benefit associated). 
• Goals pursuing which would further the self-benefit of members too.

I also see a possible hindrance- the need to show a green scorecard in a quarter (bane of stock market registered companies) is an opposing force to need to act today on something that needn´t necessarily yield results in short term.

How will these communities span out? I am not sure. There still are questions I don´t have answers to. 

I would share more as I create.

What have been your experiences in creating a community?

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Sourav