Using Community to Boost Your Business' Performance

To achieve this type of learning, one popular strategy that companies have focused on is building communities of practice (COPs). Some assume COPs are the golden ticket to a learning organization. However, there is a lot of confusion around what they are and how they work.

What is a Community of Practice?

Some people refer to any group that works together as a community of practice. This is far too general to be useful. While we all like the comfort of the word "community," we should not attach it to teams and work groups.

Let's compare a team and a community. A team is usually cross-functional, assigned by the company, given a specific goal, managed by the corporate management system, and either disbanded once the goal is accomplished or dropped.

Conversely, communities are devoted to a single practice, voluntary, driven by multiple and continuous goals, run democratically through distributed management, and designed to last forever (or at least as long as the practice exists).

Practice should be thought of as "social practice," a context in which people learn, work, and develop an identity together. They are characterized by high levels of what I call the three B's:

• Believing: The cognitive component of a shared vision, philosophy, theoretical and practical framework, etc.
  
  
• Behaving: The acting component of social norms, tools, and language.
  
  
• Belonging: The feeling components of shared trust, responsibility, and caring.

Benefits of a Community of Practice

Many people think that communities are good for centralizing and sharing knowledge and many have written about it. I will focus on other rarely addressed benefits:

• Stability and identity: As the business environment changes, so too must organizations to stay successful. For businesses, this commonly involves corporate restructuring and re-engineering. These types of changes can disturb employees' sense of stability and identity within a company. Communities built around practices anchor employees and help them to work through significant changes.
  
  
• True empowerment: Talk of empowerment often makes false promises. Employees are empowered, so long as they toe the company line. This false empowerment partially accounts for a lack of risk-taking and innovation within many companies.
  
  Communities can often serve as "safe-zones" for testing new ideas and sharing concerns. In addition, if a company loosens its strictures, communities can become provocateurs--challengers of the status quo and engines of change.
  
  
• Retention: Businesses have found it harder and harder to retain employees. A recent survey found that most people do not like their jobs. At the same time, most surveys point to the work environment and human relationships as the key reason for people staying.
  
  COPs, if nurtured correctly, can engender deep and committed bonds between employees, thereby providing employees with the relationships and, for lack of a better term, "spiritual" needs that they want at work.
  
  People find meaning in creative activity with others and in mutual recognition (not monetary recognition, but recognition of value). By creating this oasis of relationship and connection, companies can stave off turnover in many cases because of the greater fulfillment they provide.

COPs offer many more benefits, some of which are specific to a company's needs. But, in addition to the conventional intellectual capital considerations, one should also consider these less conventional actions.

Nurturing Communities of Practice

Many companies do not optimize their communities because they form them and manage them in the same way that they form and manage other groups within their company. Instead, a community must (to use Wenger, Snyder, and McDermott's term) be nurtured--allowed to emerge, grow, and reach their potential. Often, the existing corporate systems get in the way of this. Here are some quick tips on nurturing communities:

• Nurture, don't create: One does not create communities of practice. They already exist or, at least, potential for them already exists. The key is to identify and provide them with the environment and the support they need to grow and thrive.
  
  Sometimes this support simply consists of giving them permission to do what they do. Sometimes it is helping them see the potential of working more at their relationships. It will vary from group to group.
  
  
• Be patient: Some companies pride themselves on creating (there's that word again!) large communities of hundreds of people in six month's time. This is not how communities work. Think about a new church or club starting out.
  
  It starts with ten people who find a common interest or concern. It then grows as the relationship and identity grows. Most companies are not nurturing communities--they are creating mini-organizations that are devoid of the true relationships that COPs require.
  
  
• Beware of organization: On the same note, many try to incorporate the COPs into the larger organization by attaching participation to performance management systems--by providing formal leadership, by renaming traditional organizations "communities"--with the hopes that it will change the work environment, and the like.
  
  These are the strictures that first contributed to companies' inability to innovate, share knowledge, take risks, etc. Communities should be as free as possible from these organizational trappings. Only then will they be empowered to truly grow. Beware of creating "Mini-Me's," the same organization just one-eighth the size (with apologies to Austin Powers).
  
  
• Facilitate responsibility not accountability: Responsibility is driven from within because of care and concern; accountability is driven from without by coercion and fear. The community engine is commitment and responsibility to other members and to the practice. By fostering this relationship, members are more likely to participate, gain satisfaction and grow in the community context.

If a company truly commits to nurturing communities, the communities can have a truly revolutionary impact, not only in terms of sharing knowledge, but also in terms of organizational change, strategy, employee satisfaction, and an even greater social conscience. The key to their success is to focus not on what business traditionally focuses on, but the true nature of human relationships. The business results will undoubtedly follow.

Josh Plaskoff is the Director of Learning at EMMIS Communications in Indianapolis, Indiana and a member of LENS©. He is a PH.D. Candidate at Indiana University and has extensive experience in leadership development and organizational learning.