Look upon my works ye mighty and despair
Today, we meet Steve. Steve leads a thriving community of Project Managers from across the country in the company that he works. They meet every three weeks and share stories together, and they learn from each other’s experiences and the latest new ideas within the domain. And this is a SERIOUSLY good community of practice – all the members are contributing, they’re taking actions, senior management recognises them and the value they’re bringing to the business and readily invest when its required. The members love being part of it, and Steve loves the community he leads. It was his idea to start, and although he’s not the most senior person in the room has always been readily recognised as the groups natural leader. He coordinates the tasks that need completing, chases the actions that need chasing and will quietly but happily spend a couple of hours of his own time each week finding new and inspiring things to bring to the table. Steve is a genuine inspiration to many of the members, and he gets a lot of professional joy from seeing the community succeed. To him, there’s something special about leading a community that supercharges other people – seeing that he’s helped them go further than they would have done alone, feeling that moment of electricity that runs through the group when a potential idea begins to take flight and build momentum into something truly wonderful.........it brings him a satisfaction that no other task in his working life comes close to.
Then one day, Steve is offered and accepts a job offer at a competitor company and hands in his notice. No one can begrudge him taking the opportunity – there’s a pay rise and a shiny ‘senior’ in his new job title – but as it’s a position with a direct competitor it comes as no surprise that as of Friday he will be placed on garden leave until his notice period is up. Handovers are handed over, final updates are updated, and well wishes are well wished before he turns in his laptop and door pass and is gone in a flurry of flowers and goodbye and good luck cards.
Immediately, something is wrong in the community of practice. The invites came from Steve’s calendar and in the rush to hand over all the ‘proper’ work, its not been transferred to someone else in the community. Now no one has control over the invite so it can’t be moved depending on availability (not that anyone knows how many people are available of course – they can’t see the accepts and declines), and members find themselves turning up to sessions where only one or two people could make it. No one wants to be the one to step up and replace it; in part because they don’t want to be seen as stepping into Steve’s shoes as soon as he’s out the door, in part because they don’t want to deal with the hassle of trying to get the invites from a dead calendar removed for everyone, and in a big part because that would lead to comparisons with Steve and how good a job he’d done with the community.
As is so often the case, in the absence of anyone else the most senior person in the group eventually volunteers to take on organising the sessions, as much out of guilt and awkwardness as anything else. Inevitably though, they don’t have the time to dedicate to it. They don’t have the time to arrange for the sessions to be organised and lined up, they don’t have time to check in with members outside of the community sessions to find out how they’re doing and what they’re up to, but sadly when they issue the call-to-arms a couple of sessions later asking for help and volunteers, its already too late. Now it looks like a chore. A chore that no one needs and no one wants.
In just a few short months a thriving community of practice has completely deteriorated.
You may be familiar with a variation of this story, and you may have seen it through to one of a number of endings – your CoP may have died with a whimper, just quietly disappearing from peoples diaries with no fanfare or concern. It may have been forced to continue, milked of all goodwill and investment until its considered a failed approach never to be attempted again. Either way, we’re left with a fairly controversial question to answer – is any of this Steve’s problem? I mean, he doesn’t work there anymore, he doesn’t owe the community members anything beyond professional courtesy and really, if they REALLY wanted it to succeed, they could have made it succeed couldn’t they? I mean, HE started from nothing, if it really mattered to them surely they could have made it work?
Communities are hugely powerful groups. Together, members can move mountains and change the world. But they can also be remarkably fragile things too – an apparently small change can have enormous consequences. From the initial description it might have appeared that the Project Manager community was fairly robust and decentralised, but the community dissipated almost immediately after the removal of just one member. In a purely survival of the fittest sense, we can’t consider this community to be successful or robust, because it couldn’t survive the most inevitable of workplace scenarios – someone leaving for a new job.
It's incredibly important for community leaders to think about succession planning for all the key roles within their community as part of their day to day work with the group. I believe that if a community can’t survive without any one member then it isn’t a healthy community, and it’s the leader’s responsibility to help it build resilience to the departure of any person, including themselves. Having a small group of members act as a community leadership team around you (the leader) is a good start, as it provides resilience to not just you leaving but to other members too. Better yet, between you and the rest of the members, identify who could be the next leader if and when you get a new job or get runover by the lottery or whatever. Get them to shadow you, be hands on, make mistakes in a safe environment with you to help them learn, so that if and when you do move on, they are ready to step in straight away. The perfect departure leaves no ripples – no one takes any real joy (or credit) from seeing how fundamentally crucial they were as the project they have been working on for months fall apart as soon as they leave, and the same applies with a community of practice. Our goal as leaders should be to leave it stronger than we found it, and we can’t do that by making ourselves irreplaceable or indispensable.
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