6

GROWTH PRINCIPLES

Many leaders expect too much too fast. This unrealistic expectation is partly fueled by reports from mirage communities who claim extraordinary growth and effectiveness. Remember that forging a single real, durable relationship takes time. Hundreds of relationships take more time than a dozen.

We have heard reports of communities that came together in one week, one weekend, or as a result of one concert, festival, conference, or the like. The braggart always discounts the months (more often years) that some formal or informal leadership invested beforehand to connect with, build trust with, invite, and arrange an experience for a group that shares camaraderie and an openness for vulnerability.

From a participant’s perspective, the relationship can form (or start forming) quite quickly. Durable communities always take more groundwork. There is no shortcut.

Growth Expectations

The dream of achieving worldwide reach through laissez-faire community growth is a fantasy. The reality is that you and your eventual team will need to commit lots of time for the following:

• You will personally ask for lots of stuff. To be effective, you will personally ask for far more stuff than you ever thought. Many aspiring community builders imagine that announcing a new community leads to resources being sent over as needed. We’ve never seen this happen anywhere. So get good at asking for stuff. Or more accurately, ask poorly until you get good at it. You’ll ask for stuff like this:

Time

Access

Consumables

Space

Advice

Help in tracking participation and performance

• You’ll almost certainly have to reach out and promote to find appropriate members. The myth says that a good community is so exciting in the beginning that viral enthusiasm will naturally grow it. This won’t happen. The people who say they’ve seen it have left out a lot in the telling.

If people haven’t heard of you, don’t know what you’re about, and/or don’t understand the value available, they won’t invest their time or anything else.

Even if you choose to keep your invitations and membership secret and so avoid traditional promotion, you’ll still need to tell nonmembers who you are in compelling ways. You’ll have to invest so that they can learn all they need to know. If you’re not investing the appropriate time, work, or money, you’ll see stagnation (at best).

• You will make many direct invitations and receive few responses or participants. Think about the communities in which you participate and to which you feel connected. How many of those did you discover via a social media post, a mass text message, or a marketing email? We’ll guess that the number hovers near zero. This is true for everyone else as well. Don’t expect others to connect to your community that way either. To get a better yield for your fledgling community, you must make many (many) direct invitations. Most of these will never get a response. We know that. Keep offering, and some of your invitations will draw the right participants.

• You will host many events and experiences that few people will attend. There’s a myth that if you can include the “right people” (influencers) in the beginning, the community will start strong on day one. This is never true. It may appear true because a community leader (elder) has brought along an existing community to fold into the new one, but the hard work still had to be done somewhere sometime.

The myth also may appear true when someone mistakes a mirage community for actual community and declares instant success. Declaring instant success is not the same thing as achieving real success or a real community. Communities take time to build because they are not groups or tribes that share value but no connection. They are far more than convenient gatherings. They’re made up of people first finding each other and then caring for one another. When starting a community in the real world, if you’re normal, you’ll wonder at least a few times whether you’re wasting your life, because it will look as though no one cares.

• You do not have to lie about how big, fast, or diverse your community is growing. When you hear about overnight communities or global expansion in a mere year, someone is measuring something other than community. We discussed false metrics in part 1.

Participants go to a community to connect with people in that community. Finding something other than a community there (like a mirage) makes it no fun. There is no good reason to lie about what you don’t have yet while building the real thing.

• You will always put mission (purpose) first, growth second. Whenever we’ve seen growth prioritized as number one, it erodes the community value for those seeking connection and engagement with others who share their values. A community will deliver value because it serves members in a way that warrants their time and attention. Growth for growth’s sake helps no one in the community.

To build a community, we build trusting relationships. This is why communities are so much richer for both members and organizations compared to lists, groups, or mirage communities. Real communities are durable and fun.

Creating these trusting relationships takes much more time than simply sharing information or offering a transaction. Yes, groups can be both fantastic and effective, but they are not the aspirational outcome of the leadership we’re teaching in this book.

Because growing the fundamental relationships in real community takes time, you can never expect a quick investment to deliver terrific returns in the short term. Don’t use marketing campaign measures to identify or justify an ROI for community investments (because these measures are used in, well, marketing). Marketing may sell stuff, but it won’t deliver the same brand enhancement as an authentically connected community. Yelp’s Nish Nadaraja noted that of course everyone wants to create a community quickly. He knew it would never work that way. His team respected the pace of relationships to build a real community that proved both effective and durable.

In our experience, expect to invest at least eighteen months of work before the possibility of really powerful and clear outcomes show up for your organization. The success you seek may take longer. That’s still healthy.

With that said, in the first eighteen months, deep individual relationships can develop, friendships will form, good times will get recounted, and funny stories will be shared. We’ll discuss helpful metrics in part 3. Like an apple tree without fruit yet, important growth will happen.

Growth Plan

Communities act and feel very different, and are managed differently, when there are three members versus when there are one million. You should anticipate that your community will change radically as you grow even if the core values, purpose, and member types remain the same.

A bigger group needs different management. The mistakes made by mismanaging will harm when the management doesn’t recognize appropriate style for the group at hand. Many leaders don’t level up communication and organization when the numbers grow. Others enforce policies as if thousands are involved when informal agreements over a phone call would suffice.

As a general rule, the more trust and mutual understanding that are in place, the less communication that is needed. Conversely, with less trust and mutual understanding, there needs to be more communication.

When five friends meet for a picnic, they don’t have to explain why they’re meeting, what they’ll do, or that fingerand chopsticks-ready food is best. If they invite five hundred others, then more explanations, instructions, and RSVP confirmations will become necessary to avoid disasters in parking, food setup, and trash disposal.

Whether you’re starting a new community or guiding your current one into growth, you as manager and leader are responsible for planning the growth. What the appropriate structure will look like and how you will change will vary as radically as communities vary. If you’re hosting a picnic for a hundred cat-adopting families, then you’ll need less communication and training than if you are hosting a twenty-person climb up Mount Kilimanjaro.

The areas you’ll focus on for growth will differ depending on the community’s maturity stage.

INCEPTION STAGE GROWTH

• The founder develops direct personal relationships with founding individuals.
• The founder invites involvement in a single bounded inner ring.
• The originating leader or leaders create the majority of content and events.

ESTABLISHMENT STAGE GROWTH

• Leaders encourage and support members to invite others to visit and join.
• Leaders encourage and support members to create content and events for the community. This includes giving them permission, tools, and invitations.
• Management establishes rules that members can enforce without involving the founding members. The rules protect the community tone, purpose, and safety.

CRITICAL MASS AND SEGMENTATION STAGE GROWTH

• Established leaders train new leaders to grow and manage.
• Experienced leadership trains leaders to train the next leaders.
• Established leaders create moderation, behavior standards, and escalation policy guides for consistency across segments.
• Established leaders create systems for platform growth and event planning.

Making Subgroups (Inner Rings)

Because challenges grow as we manage a growing community, subcommunities (calling these subgroups is OK) offer an easy and effective way to manage experiences for members without the distracting politics, communication confusions, and conflicts that inevitably arise in larger groups and teams.

Subgroups provide additional support for several community-enriching features, described in the next sections.

MORE PARTICIPATION

Subgroups support connection in part by simple time math. The amount of time any one person can reasonably speak and share in an hour goes down as the group expands. This is one reason we like to break up large groups into pods of five or fewer as soon as possible at an event. (Three is even better.) Five people can each equitably share with the group for twelve minutes in the course of an hour. It’s hard to feel connected to others when sharing about yourself for just a minute or two. Time math is one reason that event leaders get disappointed and confused when they put many people in a room and see little connection develop. Often, participants simply don’t get enough time to feel connected even if they participate fully. Time math is one reason that “campfire events,” discussed in part 3, are so important.

CONVENIENT INTIMATE SPACE

Beyond the time math, smaller groups make it much easier to create an intimate (safe) space where members can share vulnerability. Creating such a space for fifty is not impossible, but is a far more delicate and demanding task than is making an intimate space for six. When we break up a group of fifty into ten pods of five, we create campfire experiences that can’t happen with all fifty people participating.

INCREASED GATHERING FREQUENCY

Smaller subgroups also improve the frequency with which participants can gather. Even if venue options aren’t a challenge, scheduling return times for more people is more challenging. Community strength comes from relationships growing over repeated meetings. If the meetings don’t happen because they’re difficult or expensive to host, then you lose potential deepening.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Smaller groups support accountability. With a small group, obviously, it’s easier to notice when members don’t or aren’t able to fully participate in conversation, collaboration, or anything else. In some cases, you will want to call participants back to expected tasks; in others, you’ll want to encourage them to participate where you notice they may not yet feel welcome or supported. A single call asking if a member is OK when others noticed they were missing can radically improve the feeling of connection.

MORE VISIBLE OPPORTUNITIES

Smaller groups help members notice and recognize opportunities where they can contribute and make a meaningful difference. For example, it is far easier to volunteer to make a meal for five friends than to commit to prepare a meal for fifty to one hundred. Also, when members extend themselves beyond their comfort zone, it’s way easier to maybe fail for five friends than for a crowd of fifty.

UNIQUE CHARACTER

Each subgroup will develop its own character, which, in aggregate, will offer a broader range of ways for participants to find a place where they’ll recognize that they fit in.

• • •

We’ve seen leaders ignore the importance of subgroups so many times it’s painful. The most common mistake we see leaders make is starting an event by asking all the participants to introduce themselves, including some (random) information, one at a time. With any group of more than fifteen, this activity should be done in subgroups of no bigger than ten (we prefer eight). In a big group, no one remembers names, learns something relevant, or shares anything private. Given that participants entrust their time and attention to us, we can at least arrange for them to connect within a campfire experience (subgroup) intimate enough for the possibility of real connection.

Both Airbnb and Twitch invite local subgroups to experience shared events. Both brands do create large events (Airbnb Summits and TwitchCon), and members find their own subgroup and the brand staff relevant to their participation within the events.

Developing Leaders

Successful growth can only happen with new leadership maturing to lead a bigger community with more activity. A bigger and more segmented community offers more opportunity for leadership to contribute.

We think of leadership development as consisting of two parts:

1. Identifying future leadership
2. Training leaders to support the community

IDENTIFYING LEADERS

Picking the right people for any team is notoriously difficult. The biggest and most famous brands in the world struggle with this.

You’re looking for leaders who want to enrich the community (not just themselves) and relate to the role as a responsibility, not a reward. Their actions reflect the group’s values (whatever they are). Because visitors will only meet a few people, they will judge the community based on local leadership. So make sure your new leaders express the community values in word and (more important) action. Selfish and arrogant leaders will, unsurprisingly, characterize the community as arrogant and selfish. Picking people at random is, therefore, a bad idea.

Create some kind of application process. It does not have to be formal or complicated. Focus on finding people in whom the core values show up in their lives outside the community. Assess whether they can meet the expectations for leadership.

Interviews are a terrible tool for picking the right people. There are many reasons for this, of which two are key:

1. Interviews show us how people talk about themselves in a wholly artificial sit-down conversation. This is not what we want leaders to do in their role, and we won’t be able to determine how they’ll handle the real community leadership stuff.
2. Despite what might be our best intentions to welcome diversity, we overwhelmingly tend to pick people like us, in terms of class, accent, style, gender, smell, background, whatever. We think we make rational choices. We don’t.¹

The problem is that no growing organization succeeds when the entire leadership shares the same strengths (people person, technically adept, detail oriented, etc.). Such patterns mean there will be missing strengths. You’ve probably seen an organization where everyone could think big . . . and nobody could execute the necessary details. Or leadership that was technically adept . . . but couldn’t inspire connection and commitment. To avoid these pitfalls, look beyond interviews.

The best indicator of an appropriate choice is evidence that the person already can do and does what is needed. This includes specific skills (hosting events, writing, teaching, etc.). You want to see that this individual already serves community members (formally or informally) to help members succeed in something. An experienced labor organizer we know notices first who among participants is a “hand raiser”—someone who volunteers to help others with the challenges, risks, and emotional fatigue of confronting a bad employer. She then invites the hand raisers into community organizing leadership.

Erin Wayne at Twitch oversees the team that supports more than forty Twitch groups around the world. She’ll only consider working with new leaders in an area and make their group official after they’ve met three requirements:

1. They host two events with at least twenty participants.
2. They actively post about their group on social media.
3. They use a live online discussion platform to connect members.

Meeting the minimum requirements tells Erin that the new community leaders are highly motivated and willing to do the actual work to bring people together. She also says that these baseline requirements knock out at least 90 percent of the people who want to serve as Twitch group leaders (personal communication with Erin Wayne, June 2019).

When you recognize someone with the internal motivation to serve, the ability to do the specific job, and the willingness to take on the responsibility, then training makes success more likely. (Training can include sharing this book and The Art of Community for foundational understanding.)

TRAINING LEADERS

Obviously there are more roles requiring appropriate training than we can list here. The following are some foundational principles to support your training approach.

Create a list of skills your leaders will learn. People participate in community to grow in some way. This list will help leaders understand how they’ll grow and clarify to you how you’ll help them grow. For climbers, it may be important that they teach safety systems; for online gamers, how to moderate a chat forum; for Airbnb hosts, producing a fun event. If they don’t like or don’t care about the list in the beginning, you both want to know this. Change your expectations before the relationship isn’t fun or rewarding for either of you.

Provide resources that help them learn the skills you’ve listed. It truly amazes us how many organizations skip this part. This might include access to media, books, or websites—better yet, access to others who have already mastered the skills. Offer new leaders introductions to people inside the organization and groups outside with more experience and a willingness to support. Further, introductions are usually never enough for real mentorship to develop. It’s far better to also create an agreement between a mentor and trainee on how, how much, and how often they will connect so that growth can develop.

Connect leaders with other leaders and senior managers so that internal mentorship can grow, and wisdom and learned lessons get shared. This means actually introducing them. Explicitly tell each person on both sides of the introduction why you’re connecting them and what you hope may come of a new relationship between them. Not all introductions will develop into something profound. But when this step is omitted, it shows that managers don’t know how to develop their new leaders. They’re leaving new talent in the cold. It’s both lazy and bad management.

New leaders will need time to learn their role. This is especially true if they’re setting precedent, making changes in a new time, or addressing a system that isn’t working. Almost none of us get things right the first day out. Remember that you’re picking people who want to learn and serve—this must remain in the forefront of your relationship every time you work with leaders.

Retaining Membership Expectations

To limit unnecessary or unhealthy turnover, managers must acknowledge and thank the participants on the journey. This is especially true for those who supported the work from inception to something significant. No one sticks around with people who skip the appreciation. We will discuss principles for acknowledgment in part 3. Here note that special events, tokens, and special access go a long way toward letting your core membership know that you appreciate their contributions.

With that said, membership turnover is normal. Life circumstances change. Babies get born, parents get sick, jobs move. Don’t waste emotional energy fretting over changes in your community that reflect dynamic changes in the world.

In fact, it is very important that members can leave. If they can’t leave, you will get stuck with people who don’t want to be there. If members stick around because they’re coerced or shamed, they become dead weight or, even worse, toxic. They’ll take time from leaders, and they’ll prove to new members that the enriching connections participants seek can’t be found in the community. The exit door must always remain open. This can mean fewer participants and a more fun, effective, and resilient community.

Just as no one can predict how their family will grow and change, no one can predict—or control—how a community will change. People are inherently unpredictable. In other words, a time will come when the current brand leadership must give up significant control over what the community does and how members think of themselves. This may seem scary (and there will be scary moments, no doubt), but it’s also what makes communities more exciting, interesting, and fun than, say, a strictly scheduled event series. A strict plan quells helpful creativity.

Consider IkeaHackers, who are enthusiasts of the giant furniture and household goods brand Ikea, but who operate outside Ikea’s control. For eight years, IkeaHackers members convened on a website, sharing ideas and skills for customizing Ikea furniture. Gizmodo described the site as “a place to talk about [Ikea] love and share creative ideas . . . a burgeoning community of fans who are excited about Ikea and the hidden genius of its products.”²

In response to the community, Ikea threatened to sue, citing trademark infringement. Although the legal merits of Ikea’s objections were dubious (no one was confusing IkeaHackers for Ikea), the site was shut down—but only briefly. As you can imagine, the threats and apparent corporate bullying created a lot of anger, so much that Ikea executives eventually learned the lesson of “letting go” and permitted IkeaHackers.net to keep its URL, but only after many fans and journalists expressed bafflement as to why a global brand would threaten its own worldwide fans.

The painful experience apparently taught Ikea leadership about how communities can serve brands. Ikea designers now see the hacks as a learning resource. One design manager is quoted as saying, “We look at them and ask ourselves ‘what are people trying to tell us about our own products.’ . . . It’s a really good way for us to learn.”³

By contrast, Etsy structured its online member platform so that any member could (and did) set up their own subgroup and invite whomever they wanted to have join. Any conversation could take place inside the subgroups as long as members followed the general platform guidelines. Today the platform hosts more than six hundred thousand discussions for over seven million members.⁴

Efforts to keep total control as you grow will erode or destroy your success, so you must let go of what you can live with, as long as the new directions and groups remain true to the community’s core values and purpose. It may feel uncomfortable, or downright scary, but this is what success looks like.

Communicating for Growth

When you want the community to grow, there are at least four types of communication to regularly share. Of course, “regularly” will vary depending on the community and its activity. If important events occur every week, then weekly messages may be good. If there’s only one annual gathering, then weekly communication is overkill. Only you can determine what’s right. No one wants to get inundated with communication, and no one wants to be kept in the dark either.

The following are the key categories for communication that support growth:

1. Things getting done related to the group values

   In the Harley community, meetings, group drives, leadership changes, and special events would all count. Reporting on a member’s new garden layout would serve little or no purpose.

2. How the community is changing and the future vision

   This includes how the organization, its members, and things outside the community are changing. This helps participants understand where the community was (organizationally, emotionally, financially, pragmatically, etc.) and where leadership envisions going. Typically, this is shared as stories.

3. Invitations to members so that they can contribute right away

   Without invitations, communication remains “news updates.” Few of us need or want more news updates. If the only response you receive from members is “good for you,” then your communication doesn’t inspire connection or involvement. In short, you’re not inviting powerfully enough.

   People who feel connected and share values want to contribute. Everywhere we go, we see leadership failing to invite members enough to access the willingness (and excitement) in those members to make a difference. If you’re complaining that members aren’t contributing enough and you aren’t making regular invitations, then at least one element of the problem starts with your inadequate communication.

4. Transparency

   To feel connected, members want to know what, how, and why things get decided. This is particularly critical in for-profit brand communities because members know businesses have a profit motive and that profit motives and community goals may conflict. Carrie has seen that nothing makes members angrier than when they suspect (rightly or wrongly) that a for-profit company is acting unethically or against brand community interests for profit-maximizing reasons.

   It won’t matter what considered intentions lie behind a choice or outcome. If you are not transparent in communicating what, how, and why decisions are made, division and anger will harm all the goodwill built to date.

   Alternatively, when you intentionally offer transparency and actual vulnerability (regarding mistakes), the trust and support extended by a brand community is unmatched anywhere else in business.