Stage Five - It's hard to lead the life you choose
Sometimes the hardest part of leading is the discovery that your community is succeeding with and without you
As a leader, you care about the success of your community. You care about the people who are part of your community. And you work hard for them. You and I both know there’ve been times you’ve sat in front of your laptop screen long into the night writing slides, notes, whatever, when you would have rather been in bed. You’ve fretted about whether something is going to work, and you’ve beaten yourself up over things that didn’t. You’ve made sure you’ve got an emergency session on standby for when all your hard work was for nothing and a speaker’s wifi dropped out, got stuck on a train, or literally just didn’t feel like turning up that day and couldn’t be bothered to tell you. You’ve spent days planning a meetup and arranging to pay for a speaker to turn up only for six people to turn up.
Blood. Sweat. Tears.
Ultimately, we know it pays off. Our communities grow and they mature. We find people as passionate and as motivated as we are, and they start to step up. They volunteer sessions. They volunteer to organise, schedule and host sessions. They notice that the community is starting to outgrow its goals, and self organise to retrospect and pivot their focus. And all the while you stand back and smile – the hard work you’ve invested is paying off and the community you helped nurture is becoming self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Slowly but surely though, a niggling feeling starts to occupy your thoughts…
Do they even need me anymore?
Time continues to pass and as it does there is less and less for you to do. You now have a motivated group of community members who are arranging sessions, and what sessions they are! Someone has found an external speaker who’s come along and delivered a banger of a session! Someone else has run a training session that one of the Senior Manager’s around the business has heard about, and wants them to run it again for their business unit! Every success is better than the last but still comes with a pang of anxiety – do they even need me anymore?
I’m not ashamed to say it - it’s nice to be needed. If the natural conclusion of all your hard work is that the community becomes self-sustaining and you are no longer needing to do all te things you used to do, there will come a point where you’ll have to come to terms with that. And its ok to find that hard.
I’ve tried to articulate the different demands on a CoP leader by thinking of the community’s maturity in two ways – is the collective community high or low capability (how skilled are the membership in their domain?), and does it have high or low investment (do they value the community and being part of it?). There are four possible combinations and the demands on the leader differs for each state combination…
High Capability/Low Investment – Leader has to pull content
Low Capability/Low Investment – Leader has to push content
Low Capability/High Investment – Leader has to coach individuals
High Capability/High Investment – Leader has to get out of the way
….but today we’ll specifically look at the scenario we’re describing above; where the community is or is becoming self-sustaining, is of high capability and is highly invested. The role of the leader therefore is to get out of the way and let that success blossom and grow.
‘But wait!’ I hear you cry ‘I already knew that, that doesn’t solve my problem!’. You’re right, it doesn’t. But perhaps we should think of this another way. Imagine you’re a manager at your place of work (and before you say anything, yes I know that community leaders aren’t managers), and are responsible both for other people and for the delivery of work. If you are a bad manager, you may find yourself micromanaging everyone in your team. You may find yourself unable to give up any control on how things should be done or what gets delivered as the end result. You might even be the kind of manager who cannot be satisfied with the quality of the end result unless you personally are hands on and involved. After all, that’s why you got promoted to being a manager isn’t it? Because you perform your task better than anyone else does right?
Where does this leave us? It leaves us with a team that is limited in terms of what it can deliver (by you), a team that cannot learn or improve because of the constraints placed on it (by you) and a team of people who, without any autonomy or agency over their role, become bored disenfranchised and apathetic to it (because of you). That isn’t who you want to be – you wouldn’t be involved in Communities of Practice if you were.
The best managers (at least in my experience) are the ones who give the people they are responsible for the freedom and agency to do their role the way they see fit. The ones who give you the space to succeed and the safety to try new things, and they are rewarded by a highly motivated team who consistently perform above and beyond expectations. What that team and your community have in common is that they are both highly capable of completing their task, and they are both highly invested in doing it well. The very best thing you can do as a manager or as a community leader is to give them the space they need to succeed, and take comfort that this is a sign that you are contributing to the success of the team or community by giving them what they need the most – space and safety.
I’ve tried to think of some common behaviours that community leaders in this scenario can focus on to ensure they are adding value.
You should be goal focussed, and keep the community focussed on milestones – the community knows why it wants to go and has articulated how it wants to get there, your role is to hold them to account and keep them focussed on the milestones they have marked out for themselves.
You should get good at facilitating – and I mean properly good. I once sat in another team’s meeting and the facilitator (one of my favourite Scrum Master friends) took notes as the conversation flowed and drew focus when important decisions went unmade, and didn’t say a single word for the entire 45 minutes. It was one of the most impressive and productive meetings I’ve ever been involved in. Even now I wish I could facilitate that well!
Be proud of what is being achieved – just because your hand isn’t on the wheel doesn’t mean you’re not there, and you should be as proud of what the community that you are part of are achieving as you ever were. Remind people to be proud of themselves, and remind others to be proud of them too!
It’s hard to lead the life you choose, and its important to remember that you have been and remain a really important part of the community and its successes. The demands on you may differ and the type of value you bring may change, but don’t forget that you still continue to bring that value to the community.