A Community for Leadership

What do you think of when you hear the word community? Maybe it conjures up thoughts of your neighborhood or volunteering through service with others for a cause. At work, you may be involved in a community of practice or perhaps you’re a member of an affinity group aligned around shared experiences and/or desired outcomes. 

In the context of leadership, a community is critical for making a vision reality. People—beyond the initial “dreamer”—must be inspired into action. The greater the vision, the greater the community needed. Uniting people around a shared vision energizes them to become a community of action with you. 

Specifically, Transforming Your Horizons requires people to rally around a vision by doing three things well: 1) supporting it, 2) getting involved in it, and 3) creating synergy to advance it. In our experience with clients, what people are being is equally important as what they are doing as part of a community. Support, involvement, and synergy have both being and doing components to them – here are a few things to consider: 

• SUPPORT – Once people commit, check the level of commitment. Assume nothing, as there are varying levels of commitment. Being ‘signed up’ to support (enrollment) is a great start and then ‘showing up’ through action means may also mean people do whatever it takes, even when they are not currently assigned a specific task. 
• INVOLVEMENT – Sometimes people get involved in furthering a vision but are not deeply interested in it; this can erode a community’s impact. Powerful involvement means being interested in a way that sustains curiosity and may even expand what is possible. And, of course, rolling up sleeves to do required tasks provides ‘fuel’ for the vision than simply task completion itself, as it’s a way for people to get to know one another better. 
• SYNERGY – Once people know one another better, they increase their potential synergy. For example, one of our clients decided to tackle their customer relationship challenge by having two departments learn to collaborate with each other over a five-month period. This facilitated experience helped them create a leadership system – a ‘community’ – that allowed them to be a force to be reckoned and to do work in a way that produced a combined effect that was greater than the sum of their separate department effects. They were able to catapult their organization more confidently into the future they were crafting with their customers. 

This Week: Think about where you feel isolated in your life (work and non-work), where you carry a responsibility alone. Know you aren’t the only one who feels that way. Now do a quick scan—write a list, if it helps—of people in your life and choose someone who can help you brainstorm possibilities for how to make that responsibility seem less isolating.