Setting Community Goals
Taking the opportunity to help your community set itself goals for the coming year
Oh good its January again - like December but without anything to look forward to. The time of year we commit to ourselves that this will be the year we lose weight, go to the gym three times a week, read for an hour every day, or whatever else it that we think will make us happier and more complete people. For most of us, it also tends to be the month where we find ourselves sitting on the sofa eating, criticising the professional athletes we’re watching play football on the TV as we scrabble to pick up the beer can sitting on top of a book with no bookmark in it.
Setting, sticking with, and achieving goals is hard. Even harder when it’s a collective goal – if you decide to read for an hour every day, its up to you how and if you make time to commit to it. If you set a collective community goal however, its beyond the control of individual members to ensure whether it’s achieved or not. We can influence others to behave in a certain way, but we can’t force them to do something if they can’t or don’t want to. I can’t solve that, but as I would assume many Community Leaders will be thinking about setting goals for their communities, I thought I would take the opportunity to share some hints and tips gathered from (sometimes brutal) experience to help you and your communities on the path to success
Don’t set goals for your community – The first and easiest mistake to make is when a leader turns up to the first community session of the year and tells the group “right everyone, this year we’re going to grow the community and double its size” or whatever inspiration has taken their fancy over the winter break. I’ve done this before – I used to run a meetup and at the end of our first session in January one year I stood at the front of the room and told them my goal for the year; that we would run sessions where people came along one day and learn a skill that they could take back to their respective day jobs tomorrow. At the time it seems like a noble thing to pursue, and although ultimately misguided I’m sure I’m not the first to make that mistake. Whilst we say these things with the best intentions, they are YOUR goals – YOU decided that’s what YOU want for the community. If you’re on the other side of this scenario, it’s the equivalent of your partner telling you “good news, I’ve decided you’re going to lose weight this year”. For goal setting to have any hope of being successful, it has to be done collaboratively with the all the members of the community. Members need to be committed and invested in the goals and the mission and the purpose of a community, and that can’t happen if the leader decides to do it for them.
Make them measurable, and then measure them – We’ve all been in an uncomfortable goal setting session at some job where our manager has told us that our annual goals must be measurable, and that we should use the STAR model – Situation, Task, Actionable and Result – and as we nod absentmindedly along we die a little inside over how soulless and boring the whole thing is. Its good advice in the same way a paint-by-numbers picture works – it gets results, but it does not kindle joy. Goals should be exciting. They should inspire you towards greatness. When you achieve them, you should be able to look back over your shoulder and see how far you’ve come. And a big part is the ability to visualise both what success and progress looks like. The leader should consider it their role to challenge the community on how they intend to measure their success, by simply asking “what would success look like here? How do we know we are succeeding?”. This presents the community the opportunity to visualise what the journey looks like, and makes it all seem that much more real and achievable.
Iterate over and over again - Let us assume that as a community you have held a session together where you’ve collectively set yourselves a goal – for the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve collectively decided that you use your community as a force for good and share the good standards you come up with beyond the borders of the group – it’s the right thing for the Community Leader to ask “how can we measure this? How can we hold ourselves accountable?”. “Perhaps” someone speaks up “we could count the number of projects that our company delivers that use these standards we’ve come up with?”
Great work, we now have a measure of success.
Three months pass by and the Community Leader holds a retrospective, and the news isn’t good. It turns out only two projects have adopted the standards the community has set.
“Ok” says the Lead “what’s been the challenge here?”
You’re not going to believe this, but it turns out that no community member is present at the start of a project or have any contacts with the Product Managers or PMOs or whoever it is at this particular company that decides how the work gets done. And so a clear blocker and action comes to light, and (if its needed) the Community Leader can go to the right people and advocate and evangelise the standards in question to the people actually in a position to make it happen.
Another three months go by and whilst there’s improvement, its lopsided. The senior members amongst the community are happily and regularly engaging with the Product Owners, but the more junior members are finding it hard to feel safe and comfortable to speak up. Another sub-goal appears as the community agrees that the senior members will provide support to those more junior, or even invite them along to shadow and learn through observation.
This iteration of goals is important for two reasons – firstly, it increases the overall chances of successfully achieving the goal you set out to achieve. Regularly checking in, gauging progress, and course correcting is an important part of the process and empowers both the leader and the community the chance to stay in control of their progress.
Secondly, it allows for the process of growth even if you don’t reach the overall goal you originally set out to achieve. On 1st January we have nothing but good intentions on how we want to change ourselves and the world around us. As we progress through the year we might realise that actually the challenge is bigger than we thought and more ground work is require than we’d initially planned for. Come June we might have realised that what we are striving towards is no longer the best thing for either the community or with domain space it exists in. By breaking things down into smaller and frequently reviewed chunks, we’re able to focus on the right things above and beyond the things we thought would be the most important. And even if we come to December again and we find that we haven’t achieved what we set out to do, we can look back over our shoulder and see the meaningful change that we’ve actually brought about.
Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)