Originally posted by me @ OnCollabNet as Hold On.

The amount of control a community has over process and direction within a project has recently come up in a situation I’ve been involved with and I think it’s a great topic for a post since it strikes at the heart of many company’s trials and tribulations in creating vibrant communities.  The real question in these situations is not one of control but of trust.  Can you just be along for the ride and let someone else influence your project even if you don’t agree with everything they do?

Many organizations and people find it difficult to let go and allow their communities to shape the overall direction and goals of their projects.  They fear that by allowing users to get involved at a deeper level chaos will ensue and they’ll be mired in endless debate over what they perceive as insignificant issues.  However, the opposite of control is not chaos, the opposite of control is trust. Trust that you’re not the only one who has good ideas.  Trust that even if it doesn’t follow your established processes it might be okay.  Trust that you don’t know everything!

This lack of trust is one of the biggest reasons your community is not growing and it’s not a lack of trust in your project (well maybe it is , it’s that you don’t trust your community!  This is especially common in enterprises that have well established processes or in any company that has a title of Senior Vice President . In larger organizations that have worked to develop processes for product development, marketing, and sales, it’s hard to find someone in command willing to allow control to slip through their fingertips and into the community and shape their baby in some way they don’t agree with or that their processes can’t handle. But that’s what it takes to grow your brand and community, hopping on and letting your community take you where it wants to go.

One of the best books I read in all of 2009 was Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth.  In it he details the making of many brands that allowed themselves to be hijacked by their communities to become successes: Dr Marten, PBS (Pabst Blue Ribbon not the broadcasting service:), Red Bull, and others.  All of these brands did something unique, instead of trying to define themselves in a traditional marketing sense, they let their fans influence and define the brand, and that’s what you need to do in order to grow your fan base… let go.

Don’t confuse letting go with abandoning all your processes, my point is not to let your community suddenly start running everything without any leadership from you.  The point I’m trying to make is you need to stop trying to control EVERYTHING.  Pick your battles and arm yourself with good arguments.  Don’t use coercion due to your position or ignore your communities input, use your communication channels to guide your community during those times when you see it straying from the path.  Having this blend of give and take will allow your community to feel a sense of ownership and grow your community and brand.

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln may have understood trust and community better than anyone in the history of the United States.   He knew that maintaining trust meant having the people’s confidence… and with confidence you can lead.   I can’t imagine having to make the kind of  decisions that he did, but I can imagine how important maintaining the people’s trust must have been to him through that period in history.  Every leader must have his community’s trust to be effective.

Building and maintaining trust stems from two elements, transparency and action, one without the other will not work, but together they have proven to be a winning combination for instilling the necessary confidence to effectively lead.

Transparency

“Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe”

–Abraham Lincoln

Leadership means making decisions that aren’t always popular, and sometimes making mistakes, but always being honest about the facts.  All great leaders seem to understand this and go out of their way to provide as much information to their communities as possible.

Decision-making cannot happen in a bubble.  Leaders have to have the vision and confidence to share information,  both good and bad, and present it in a way that followers appreciate.  Making changes and enacting policy just because you can often leaves you leading a lifeless community and looking for a new job.

“I determined to be so clear that no honest man could misunderstand me and no dishonest one could successfully misrepresent me.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Delivering on Promises

Spend time letting your followers learn that you are firm, resolute, and committed in the daily performance of your duty. Doing so will gain their respect and trust.

–Abraham Lincoln

The other component necessary in building trust is delivering on what you say you’re going to.  We all have a tendency to talk about a better tomorrow and some even have compelling ideas that excite others, however to build trust and respect within a community requires ACTION.  Over time simple progress towards a goal creates trust and respect from your community.  Saying you’re going to do something and never quite following through eventually leads to a loss of momentum in your community and your project.  By making steady progress towards a goal and communicating your intentions, you invite constant feedback and analysis of your plan.  In a world that changes as fast as this one steady action combined with community input leads to great things.

Originally published in Open Source Business Resource January 2010

“…success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.”

Leading Lean Software Development

Recently, that quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about “results are not the point” was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren’t results always the point? Well, as with most things, “It depends”. The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place.

This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

The Law of Attraction

One of the fundamental principles of nature is that objects tend to attract other like objects. The term homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with others of a similar bent. This same principle of attraction is what pulls communities together and keeps them together. People are attracted to others that have similar interests or problems to overcome. It is that commonality that creates the link, the attraction, that holds communities together.

Unfortunately, many projects and businesses forget this basic principle. They instead believe that communities form around products, brands or buzzwords. They forget that people want to belong to groups that they share some interest with. Providing a shared interest doesn’t necessarily translate into building a vibrant, action oriented community. In order for a community organizer to stimulate results in a community, the following ingredients are needed:

• a mission that will attract others that are passionate because …

• passionate users create excitement for a cause and …

• excitement elicits action and results from the community

The goal is not simply to build software but to attract users that share a passion for a particular subject. It is this belief in the cause that will ultimately determine whether or not a community is successful.

Leadership

Leaders are people who see the world from a different and new perspective. Leaders dream of a future that is different from today. A leader’s vision of tomorrow is inspiring and solves real problems for real people. But leadership goes beyond this by introducing others to a future that they can embrace as their own. The ability to make the vision their own is what draws people to an open source project and moves them to action.

How does a leader craft a message that resonates with the community? Listening is the key that unlocks not only the problems of the users but also their perspective. Leaders must understand where the pain points are and what motivates users. A leader’s goal is to provide just enough of a blueprint for tomorrow so that users are able to finish crafting the story for themselves. This gives them ownership and enthusiasm to solve the problem.

This quote from the French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is especially important for community managers as it relates to creating a vision of the future that people believe in and want to become a part of: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

The other aspect of leadership that is often overlooked is the art of coalition building. As the message begins to resonate within a community and adapts to each user’s needs, leaders need to manage the alternate messages that form within the community. Leaders have to continually revise the vision to include any new or divisive stories that develop. New leaders will emerge within the community that could have agendas that differ significantly from the original vision. These leaders may eventually harm the community if their ideas are not embraced early on and elements of their story are incorporated. Embracing and incorporating input builds a stronger community and additional leaders to help within the project. The community will be stronger with them than without them.

In Community We Trust

Trust influences nearly every interaction we have during any given day. Every communication, every action, every conversation is shaped in some way by the trust and reputation inferred on the interacting party. Trust is the currency that communities, both online and offline, trade in. Without trust, lasting relationships can not be built or maintained. Part of a community leader’s job is to build reputation and trust for the people associated with a community.

Trust is not something you can ask for as it is earned through actions and competence. It defines relationships between people, governments, communities, and businesses. The text book definition of trust is “…reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or entity”. You can rely on someone or something when you have a history of past experiences by which you can infer future experiences. Without these past experiences, people have no way to place you within their trust metric. They resort to lumping you in with “the rest” or basing their trust on any reputation you may have.

As a community leader, you must build trust in you and your project. People trust people who get things done. If you say you’re going to do something and never quite get around to it, your reputation will suffer and hence the community’s trust in you. Remember, actions always speak louder than words.

Any Fool Can Criticize

Benjamin Franklin once said that “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do”. One of the things that keeps people from getting involved in open communities is a fear of criticism. Criticism that they’ll ask the wrong questions and criticism that they’ll do something wrong. There are probably dozens of reasons people are afraid to participate and they almost always relate to being afraid of something. It is a leader’s job to see that the community is a hospitable place for new people to participate.

Many project veterans may not have the patience to allow foolish questions to pepper the project’s mailing lists or forums. They think that everyone should put in the same due diligence they did to understand the project and its code. But, if you want the community to grow, you will need to set the example of always having a cool temperament, even with newcomers who may not have done their homework before asking a question. This is not to suggest that you coddle newcomers, but that you need to ensure that responses to questions are civil.

Recognition

Mary Kay noted that “There are two things that people want more than money and sex…recognition and praise”. Especially early on, you’ll need to work hard to ensure that every little contribution to the project is warmly welcomed. This may mean that you have to work with contributors to rewrite a patch or help them fill out a bug report. The name of the game is getting people to open up and get involved. This typically involves coaxing and lots of encouragement.

Don’t be afraid to recognize new participants and draw attention to their accomplishments. If you are constantly praising your community users and helping them feel good about the work they are doing, you will find that members have a greater sense of responsibility towards your community efforts. Greater responsibility equals more action which results in a productive community. Communities run on recognition. This doesn’t mean that you need a user rating system or a User of the Month classification. You simply need to express honest gratitude publicly for what community members are doing. Try it and you’ll notice a remarkable difference in how the community starts behaving.

Simplify, Simplify

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify”. He was expressing a concern with the complexity of life while encouraging people to strip away the unnecessary and to focus on the important. Communities sometimes forget that they have to present themselves in pure and simple terms in order to grow. The message must be simple. The ability to communicate should be simple. The tools must be simple. This is not because people can’t understand complexity, it is because they don’t have the time to. In order to grow a community, concentrate on the most important elements that have an impact. Simplify as many things as possible to get to what truly makes your community unique and beneficial.

An example of where projects sometimes fail in this area is by creating too many options for member communication. Don’t implement every communication technology you can find as that will only make it harder for your members to find and participate in conversations. Communication tools should help your members to communicate, not distract them with choices. You should ask a single question when analyzing your community’s tool choices: “Will this technology facilitate human interactions?”. Always remember that communities are about people, not technology, and that simpler communication strategies are usually better.

Blog, Baby, Blog

With the move to social networking sites like Facebook.com and Twitter.com, the buzz around maintaining a blog has diminished. However, blogging is still one of the easiest and best ways to reach an audience with a message. Twitter and Facebook are important tools to help connect your project with a larger audience, but blogging is still the best way to create thought leadership around a project’s mission and vision of the future. When blogging, show your passion for your subject.

Blogging about what you are doing is only the first step as you still have to attract people to the blog. Fortunately, blogs rank high in Google’s PageRank algorithm. The key with Google is not to go after the first page of results for a generic term like “collaboration” or even “collaboration software”, but to find a search term that still gets a decent amount of traction. In the case of collaboration software, it is far easier to reach the first page of Google results for “collaboration community of practice” or “collaboration success” than for just “collaboration”. When you title your blog, use the search terms you want to be found under, such as “Creating Communities of Practice Through Collaboration”.

Don’t just focus your outbound marketing on Google. Start investing in Twitter and Facebook to grow an audience for your message. These tools may not be the best for articulating your project’s value proposition and mission, but they are great for helping you find pockets of users who share your passion. Make sure that you are following and joining groups that have users who are attracted to the same problems and passions as your project and make sure you let these groups know when you’ve posted something on your blog. The key to using social networks is that you have to add value to your network by helping them solve their problems without becoming a marketing drone for your project.

Work With Other Projects

Being an active and productive citizen of other projects is a great way to introduce users to your project or solution. If you have a reputation for helping others and contributing to projects, people will be happy to lend a hand when you need it. You may even already have some followers if you are actively participating in other communities. I recently heard the founders of GitHub.com talk about their startup experiences at the Open Source Bridge conference. They specifically mentioned their involvement with the Ruby on Rails community as one of the reasons GitHub had a successful beginning. If that’s not a testament to playing well in the sandbox, nothing is.

Wrap Up

Building a community of passionate users is no small task. If you manage to do it, you will have worked harder than you ever have in your life because community building is a process that never stops. That is why it is so important to tap into a passion–not only the passion of a large set of users, but also your passion. The work is long and hard and often doesn’t seem fruitful, but if you stick with it and let your passion for the project and the problem you are solving shine through, you’ll do just fine.

This video epitomizes the current state of affairs at most companies + its pretty funny.

21st century marketing is about connecting people together around your product and creating Fans.  In this new era of connectedness companies that understand this are going to be successful… very successful.  It’s not about making a company’s products look good in some contrived tv or radio advertisement.  It’s about making your customers look remarkable.  Customers that look remarkable become Fans and fans will carry your message into their networks, not because you’ve made a great product but because you’ve made them successful.  This should be everyone’s goal in today’s connected world.

Today companies and organizations of all types need to ask themselves a simple question…

“How can I make my customers look remarkable?”

The customer role can take many forms based on the type of organization you’re in but the essence of the question is the same regardless.  What are you going to do today to help someone else be successful?  The only way to effectively answer this question is by opening up an ongoing dialog with your organization’s users and constantly asking for input.  This is where organizations that understand community and  social media will have a HUGE advantage over even the largest of companies.  Now go find someone to talk to

Trust

Trust is not something you can ask for; it’s earned through actions and competence and it defines relationships between people, governments, communities, and businesses.  The text book definition of trust is “…reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or entity”.  The key word being “reliance”.  You rely on someone or something because you have a history of past experiences by which you can infer future experiences.  Without these past experiences, people have no way to place you within their trust metric. They resort to lumping you in with “the rest” or basing it on any reputation you may have.

So trust and reputation are important – you get that.  But what can you do to enhance your reputation and gain a community’s trust?  I’m glad you asked.  Here are several things to consider in your next exchange with your community.

Stand and Deliver

This may be the most important thing of all to keep in mind when building trust, and here’s why … “people trust people who get things done”. Actions always speak louder than words.  If you say you’re going to do something and never quite get around to it, your reputation will suffer and hence the community’s trust in you.  You don’t typically see the choice projects going to under-performers at work, of course not.  That’s because their managers don’t trust them to create results.  They go to the people who can “stand and deliver” results.  That needs to be you!

This is actually a “two-parter”.  Not only should you deliver results, but you need to deliver the right results and update others on your progress. This requires learning to prioritize the most important tasks in your community and making sure that action and results are being produced.  Not only will the community see that you’re working on important tasks but you’ll also gain reputation because you’re delivering on what you said you’d do.

Get Real

Don’t let your community become a billboard of marketing messages from your sponsors.  These types of one-way communications send users running for the hills.  Being genuine, open and authentic in all community dealings is what you should strive for and what you should expect from others.  Being open and honest about why decisions are made, who influences those decisions and why, and apologizing unequivocally when things go wrong will take you far in life and in community relations.

One thing that is becoming clear as we explore the uncharted waters of the Social Web is that open and honest dialogs build trust.  As I’ve mentioned before, community members want to be a part of something – let them.  Don’t expect to build a vibrant community if all you’re doing is attracting “fans” to your site.  Fans are just that – fans.  You should be thinking about how you can convert fans to contributors and you do that through openness, authenticity, and dialogue.  Embrace conversation and discussion in your community and let the community’s input guide you.  Make it clear that contribution from everyone is heard, valued and respected.  Which leads to the next thing to remember which is …

R-E-S-P-E-C-T (just a little bit)

Do you remember that song sung by Aretha Franklin (maybe I just dated myself:( )?  Well, all she wanted was a little respect and when she didn’t get it … guess what … she left.  Treat your community members with the same regard and esteem you’d like them to show you and others in your community.  Set the example.  One simple rule we all learned as kids says it all… “Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself”.  Build your community’s principals around that simple concept and you’ll do just fine.  Remember that each interaction with your community is from a human being who wants and deserves to be treated fairly and with civility (until proven otherwise ).

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

This one can sometimes get overlooked in all the hustle and bustle of today when we’re trying to keep up with email, forums, posts, action items, and meetings.  Sometimes we forget that we’re not the only ones who are working our butts off to get things done.  Make sure you take a minute everyday to give credit where it is due.  In Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps, I discussed how a fear of criticism effects collaboration project participants adversely.  The opposite also holds true.  When people are praised for their efforts and contributions, it becomes addictive.  They begin to crave it and will act accordingly to get it.  Think about it like this.  When was the last time someone gave you a genuine and authentic compliment and you didn’t want to try to please them even more.  You can’t, because its never happened.  Subconsciously we all crave praise and reward; that’s what make it such an effective tool for building trust.  If your community is quick to praise and slow to criticize, others will find it welcoming and enjoy spending time there.

These are just some of the actions you can take to build trust and reputation for your community efforts.  I’m sure there are many others.  One book I highly recommend on the subject is The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey.  It’s a remarkable book that goes into great detail about the why, when, where, and how of trust in everything we do.  Read it.

Related Reading

Community Building Success Factors
What They Don’t Teach Community Managers
What Really Matters?
Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps

Books

The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott
The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning