dangletech

Formal Groups such as professional associations (“Strategic Capability Network” or “Human Resources Professionals Association” for HR types) exist already and provide a forum for fellow HR practitioners to learn, and share in methodologies. Such associations serve an important and valuable purpose and yet, they are akin at times to taking a shot-gun approach to networking, since members may number in the thousands, span multiple industries, and multiple functions and levels within an organization. To address this, some professional associations form sub-groups, broken out by geography and/or job title, and yet the active participation amongst association members on a regular basis is still sub-optimal at best. While there are likely many reasons for non-participation, some which come easily to mind include the fact that people are too busy with work to participate; the timing for association events conflicts with increasingly scarce family and personal time; the association events lack relevance, based on an individual member’s needs; and the make-up of the association’s members does not align with the peer group sought by the individual member. Compare this with a community set-up though, and one begins to see some powerful differences. For starters, a community can be defined as a collective of individuals who are tightly connected in terms of the work they do; the markets and customers they serve; their beliefs; and/or other important defining criteria. The individuals within the community have needs that the community can help to address. These needs may entail advice (from fellow members who’ve experienced what the member asking for the advice is now going through), or access to benchmarking data (where external third-party benchmarks are tough to come by or non-existent), or referrals (from trusted service providers to other members with like needs), or sharing and sharing in learning. Regardless of the need, the power of the community is that what comes back to the member with the need, is specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely. More so than through many a professional association. Too, communities are not limited except for the imagination and intelligence of their members. Communities can span functions; communities can bring together companies, their suppliers, and their customers; and communities can grow and evolve as the members’ businesses evolve, without rigidity in terms of form or function. Key though is that the community exists to serve the needs of the business. So then, given the power of communities, and we all know of ones that we’re a part of or that people we know are a part of, why don’t more such communities, founded and tailored by a Company’s employees to contribute to that Company’s sustained long-term success, spring up throughout the land? I think that the reasons are likely 3-fold: i) People are so busy with their heads down, that there’s little time to think about establishing communities and even less time to invest in developing and nurturing these ii) People have heard horror stories about such groups, which seem to suck up scarce and valuable free time with little payback in exchange and iii) People are afraid to meet with and share knowledge and data with what many organizations view through the narrow lens of “competitors”. The reality is very different however. Visionary and courageous leaders will always trust in their people to appropriately participate in such communities and to seek guidance when in doubt. These same leaders will recognize that far from giving up competitive advantage to competitors, they stand to gain much more in terms of truly relevant benchmarking data and focused advice. And these same leaders will understand that today’s community is potentially tomorrow’s family. At a time when face to face communications seem to be in decline, here’s an opportunity to really differentiate yourself from your competitors. Pick up the phone and talk with potential members of your community about getting together. The community will likely take a while to come together and at the outset may be sub-optimal in terms of its make-up and contributions. As familiarity and trusting relationships build amongst community members however, I guarantee that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, and your Company will stand out from the crowd.