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

 

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