Communities!

How does one build a community out of a large group of managers?

 

I am not talking of just setting up a body and asking them to meet in regular intervals. The members must feel they are a part of the community and they are invested in success/failure of community.

 

Well!  Over last few months we took our first steps towards creating a community of managers.

 

We have rallied leaders/managers around a common purpose. So relevance seems to be there.

 

There was high business involvement in creating community. Leaders and managers are actively involved in running community.

 

So basic design elements for a successful community - relevance and business ownership - seem to have been taken care of. This is getting manifested in predictable periodicity- community has determined frequency in which it meets and agenda items for their meetings.

 

 

So what next? What should be imperatives in remaining months?

 

A core managerial/leadership group has been involved in designing and launching the community.  How do we get even more managers invested in success of community? That surely is an upcoming agenda.

 

We have made decent progress in facilitating sessions. 

But I feel facilitator’s needs upskilling in facilitation skills. Additionally discussion need to be more conversational – this will ensure higher peer learning during sessions.. These two surely are focus areas for next few months.

 

I like the term go-dos. It's catchy and it brings in element of transfer of learnings to workplace. We have made go-dos a unit of conversation of this community. 

But how do we know whether these  go-dos are getting done? How do we enable community members to egg each other on in execution of go -dos?  Are go-dos actionable enough?  These are areas we could further look at.

Technology can play a role here. We can create a virtual community space where managers come together and exchange notes at regular intervals (how do we build consensus around frequency?) on progress against and further learnings from go-dos.

 

 

A related thought – manager community is a large group- consisting of around 90 managers.

‘Large group interventions’ is a separate field of study. I am not sure whether this means that I need to do different things for this community or do things differently. That's something I want to explore further too.

 

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Sourav