Stage Four - Down to the Crossroads
Today we look at a Community of Practice which finds itself with a decision to make - having seemingly realised all its potential, the leader needs to find a way to revitalise the community...
This week we meet Jenny. Jenny leads an company-internal Community of Practice made up twelve people – the members are a combination of Engineering Managers and Senior team members, with a community focus on line management. This community sprang into existence around 18 months ago when Jenny realised that, although she had been promoted into a position where she was responsible for the wellbeing and pastoral care of others, there wasn’t really any training or support available on how to do what is actually a really tough job. There were guidelines on how often to hold 1-2-1s, but not what to talk about to make them effective. They were told they must ensure that the people they manage are working towards their goals, but had no help on what to do when it came to successfully tackling poor performance. And then Jenny realised that she wasn’t alone in feeling alone, and the Line Manager’s Guild was born. The community spends time together once or twice a month, and considers itself to be fairly successful. They set themselves a goal of providing support for Line Managers around the business and a better standard of leadership to those they look after, and over the course of about a year they have held some really useful sessions together.
Recently though, things have taken a bit of a turn. Actually no, taking a turn is the wrong way of describing it – its more like things have plateaued and become a little bit stale. The community is still meeting regularly, there hasn’t been a drop off in attendance or anything like that and engagement is still pretty good…….its just that there’s this feeling just under the surface that the group isn’t providing the value and gratification that it was even three or four months ago. Its hard to put your finger on it, but it feels like its gone a little bit stale.
Left unchecked, this could end up being hugely damaging to a Community of Practice and many successful groups come to an end at this stage. There is a feeling that it was fun while it lasted, but it would be wrong to keep flogging a dead or dying horse and members should invest their time in something more valuable. While this can occasionally be the right decision, many times we are pulling the plug on something that is still only at the very beginning of its journey.
Fortunately, Jenny has a plan.
Many years ago I used to work for a company where every year they held a Senior Managers Offsite. They would take 100-150 Senior Managers from around the business away together to somewhere like Venice, Cairo, New York or wherever the mood took them that year, and they would spend the week doing strategic work, site seeing and on one occasion collectively suffering from violent diarrhoea. I suppose the point was twofold – to provide some sort of collective and unifying experience (especially the year of the violent diarrhoea) to build networks with people around the business, and to create collective alignment across the entire Senior Manager layer. From the outside looking in the view from the room was split – some viewed it as aspirational and that they would redouble their efforts to get promoted into a position where they would get invited to attend, whereas others noticed the elephant very much not in the room that they could take the entire Senior Management tier out of the business for a week with literally no impact whatsoever.
Enough about me though – back to Jenny. Jenny has realised that its time for the community to take a look at itself and decide what it wants to be. Does it want to continue as it is, does it decide that its run its course, or does it decide to pivot and re-energise? So she organises the first Line Manager’s Guild Offsite with a clear call to arms – come and help determine the future of our community.
A month of planning flashes by. Volunteers are sought and found. Workshops are proposed designed and refined. And all the while Jenny is privately fretting that she might have made a mistake in committing to such a significant and decisive moment in the life of the community. What if its clear after five minutes that this is a waste of time and the members of the community decide to go their separate ways? What if she’s managed to break something that doesn’t need fixing? The sleepless night before fades slowly into the earliest of starts on the morning of the big day, and Jenny and the rest of the community gather in the back room of the local coffee shop. The familiarity of the faces asking and the promise of a day long captive audience buying coffee and cakes had persuaded the coffee shop to let them have the space to themselves for the whole day, and an array of flipcharts marker pens and Post-Its helped set the scene. Jenny took a deep breath, got to her feet and welcomed everyone to the day.
“We’ve got one important goal for the day” she reminded them “today we’re going to decide who we want to be going forward”.
Even by the standards of this conveniently contrived made up scenario, things went really well. The group were more energised than they had been in months. Ice-breaker activities that may not long ago have died on their cringeworthy arse were fun and full of laughter. Presentations that had been volunteered were met with applause and a vibrant selection of questions. It was mid-morning when it was finally Jenny’s turn to get up and run a session with the group.
“Right” she said. “We’re going to hold a retrospective on ourselves as a Community of Practice, and how effective we think we are”
Whilst we wont dwell on the How (there are some really brilliant resources on running effective retrospectives, much like this one), the What that came out of the session were really interesting. The community felt that they were still enjoying being part of the group, that it was now established, and around the business they didn’t need to argue or fight for time to attend. The business knew about it and appreciated they got value from it, so didn’t question the fact that they were spending time together on it. It also turned out that jenny was not alone in feeling that the community was growing stale – members felt that they were beginning to find themselves just going through the motions and no longer felt the excitement they got simply by belonging to a group of similarly likeminded people. Someone had even written a note saying ‘is this it? Is this really all we can achieve?’
Then they got to the really good stuff. When asked ‘if you ruled the world, what would you decide for us to do?’ there were so many suggestions. One note said they wanted to create a training programme for new line managers to help on board and upskill them as they took on the role. Another went even further and said they wanted there to effectively be a line manager’s charter – a commitment for line managers across the business to meet a certain standard of quality for the people they were responsible for. The consensus in the room was that, having realised their first level of collective potential together, the group craved something more – they wanted make more of a difference than they felt they currently had the scope to do.
The afternoon was a flurry of activity. A two hour workshop flashed by while the community spent time having powerful and meaningful conversations together – just who do we want to be? Hardly anyone even noticed when at one point the Director of Product, out for their mid-afternoon caffeine fix, stuck their head in to see how everyone was getting on. By the end of the session the group stepped back to admire their creation – in front of them stood their new mission statement, a much loftier and ambitious goal than before. Between them the group had decided that it wanted to make their company a place where people could excel – a place where people could go beyond what they had done anywhere else in the careers and deliver amazing things at a company that people loved to work for. And that they, as Line Managers, were the crucial step in making that happen. They would be brave and speak truth to power if they felt they were compromising their values and ethics. They would treat line management as fundamental to the success of people and teams, not something you had to do when you reached a particular level of seniority. They would be the key difference makers for both the business and the people that worked there.
The had even gone as far as to set the metrics for how they wanted to measure their own success. Jenny had taken an action to meet with the Director of HR to share this vision and to keep them included in their plans upon their return to work, others had taken different ones of varying degrees of time and effort, but everyone took away one overarching action – that they were going to engage with their new mission and they were going to commit to working towards making their world a better place to work.
After the community decided on an impromptu trip to grab a burger before heading home, Jenny reflected on the day and smiled – she felt more excited about being part of this community than she had in months and, strange but true – she couldn’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.
Whilst everything I’ve written about here is crucial to the ongoing success of a community, there is something very very important going on under the surface. There is a reason the community spent the day away from the office, when it would no doubt have been easier to book out a meeting room for the day. It would arguably have been easier for them to fold these activities into the month to month flow of CoP sessions; at least that way they’d probably have had five or six month’s worth of session content. But they didn’t. For one day, they all took themselves away from the day to day distractions of their work, they closed their laptops and their emails, and they made a commitment to both themselves and their Community of Practice. On the outside this looks like investment and engagement in the Community of Practice, but on the inside what’s also happening in this scenario is that the individual members of the group are sharing and experience together that helps build and reinforce their relationships with each other. They will all remember how taking part in this offsite made them feel and what impact it had on them in the future. By investing their time and energy in the community at events like these and going through shared experiences together, community members build a sense of belonging to the group. Something that binds them, the others and anyone who joins in the future together. Community leaders should seek these opportunities and not be afraid to reference and rely on them – they are meaningful to those who take part in them and we shouldn’t be afraid to recognise that.
Next time out we’re going to look at what a self-sustaining Community of Practice might look like for both its members and the changing demands that this places on its leaders. Many communities don’t manage or need to get to this stage so it’s a less frequently told story – hopefully it’ll still be interesting!