Leadership Lessons from a Team of Community Builders

In Alfredo Morresi’s session at the 2023 Community Rebellion Conference, he discusses leadership lessons from a team of community builders. 

If there is one takeaway, the most important factor as a leader of a community team is to architect the long term success of your community program. Although you may not do this alone, you are the one who is responsible for this. 

Alfredo has four main points to building the long term success of your community program, which we’ll go into detail here. 

📽️ Watch the recording of Alfredo's session here.

1) Build an indispensable community program

Firstly, think about what the business value of your community is. Even if today your founder blindly believes in the power of community and you’re not being asked for this, it’s important to know the right reply to this question. You want to connect the community to the other teams in the organization, like marketing, support, product, etc. 

Having these numbers on hand will allow you to be ready for any questions regarding resources for the community, or being prepared for a deeper assessment of the community and the value that it’s bringing to the company. Having this direction will help you to have a compass, or a north star. 

Luckily, there are frameworks that you can use to help you with these goals. For example, there is the SPACES model, as Alfredo outlined below: 

• Support: organizes members to answer questions for the others to improve customer satisfaction and save costs 
• Product: gathers feedback and insight from members to improve products and offerings
• Acquisition: drives new customers, leads, and/or users through community experiences or brand advocates
• Contribution: increases successful contributions of content, code, actions or resources to a collaborative platform, project, or initiative 
• Engagement: improves loyalty and retention through a community of common interest. May be external (customers) or internal (employees, alumni, vendors, etc.) 
• Success: connects customers to share best practices to drive product adoption or customer satisfaction

It’s important to try and do this as early on as possible. Additionally, you want to assess the members’ value. If they don’t see value to the community, they won’t stay, so it’s very important to understand what they find valuable about the community. 

Connecting the business value and the members’ value, you build the indispensable community. 

2) Design the community

Starting off with the question, “what is community?” you as a leader need to lead your community by thinking, “what is your community?”. What are the core elements that compose your community, and why are your members sticking with your community and not going to a different community? 

As you’re designing and thinking about what your community is, you can again use a framework to help with this exercise. Alfredo mentions the 7P’s of Community: 

• People
• Purpose
• Place
• Participation
• Policy
• Promotion
• Performance

With the answers to these questions, you should be able to create the baseline of what your community is and better define and identify your community. 

As you’re designing your community, you can also incorporate the following throughout the process: 

• Enable a scientific approach to community management.
• Make an iterative approach possible.
• Make success repeatable. Or reduce the mistakes. 
• Better exchange of experience inside/outside of the team. 

3) Enable your team to perform at their best 

Of course, this seems obvious. Every team leader wants a high performing team, but how do you enable this? 

• Usual team management and leadership wisdom applies. Of course, there are tons of resources of leadership out there, but think about your specific management and leadership style. Study, understand, and iterate.
• Be the shield and the compass of the team. As a compass, you have the honor to show your team the big picture and the connections to the work. As a shield, you protect them from complexities that may come, allowing them to better focus. 
• Growth requires specialization. Oftentimes, community teams are one-person bands, so we are very generalist at the onset of our communities. As you grow, however, it’s important to start specializing your team. The way you specialize is very contextual, depending on the skill set of your team members and the needs of the community. 
• Find a balance between the bigger picture and short-term goals. Even the longest journey is comprised of small steps, so keeping your team aligned for the long-term is important as they are also achieving daily accomplishments. 
• Empower the team to find the right tools to organize itself. You can’t run a proper community with spreadsheets, so it’s important to take the time to assess and use the tools that work the best for your community and its business needs. 

Alfredo uses the following framework to develop strategic plans for his community: 

Goals → Objectives → Strategy → Tactics → Plan → Improve 

4) Own your metrics 

Metrics are important because it’s the way we read the world. It’s the way your team, your leadership, and your stakeholders will remember the community. You as the leader get to designate what the metrics are for your community, and it’s important not to let other people choose the metrics for your community. 

A few suggestions on how to do this: 

• Be insights-driven, and don’t just rely on figures and dashboards. Think about what you want the reports to tell you and then create the dashboards and tools. Search for questions and knowledge rather than just numbers. 
• Different sets of metrics for different stakeholders. It’s important to give each stakeholder personalized knowledge about the community depending on what their priorities are. Also, don’t forget the importance of storytelling to support the metrics.