7

LEADERS’ AND MANAGERS’ ROLES

Now that you know how to recognize a brand community, how they often support organizational goals, and the principles for growing them, we can go deeper into ideas you’ll need to understand in order to create communities that serve both members and organizations. No matter what your community growth stage or what outcome you seek, these topics will remain critical. Many leaders misunderstand each area, and the misunderstandings often create something toxic. The chapters of part 3 will discuss these five critical areas.

• • •

All healthy and mature communities have people who lead them with some kind of formal or informal authority. Because we’re discussing brand communities, the authority will almost always operate formally. Authority typically rests with elders. In fact, members often grow into elders when they gain authority. The elders with authority constitute the diaconate. (The Art of Community discusses the roles of elders, the diaconate, and authority in more depth.) In this context, authority figures are often designated by the title manager.

In brand communities, managers must attend to five basic responsibilities:

• Serving as (or finding/hiring) gatekeepers
• Keeping the inside safe enough
• Welcoming members
• Delivering promised value
• Advocating for the community

Serving as Gatekeepers

For the community to work, it’s critical that not everyone in the world be considered an appropriate member. (The Art of Community discusses this in depth in the chapter on the boundary principle.) For a strong and tight-knit community, you want only those people who embrace your specific values and purpose (i.e., those with whom you share camaraderie). As Priya Parker writes in The Art of Gathering, “You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose.” In fact, she argues, “over-inclusion is a symptom of deeper problems—above all, a confusion about why you are gathering and a lack of commitment to your purpose.”¹

Gatekeepers are responsible for helping the right people get inside and keeping the wrong people out. This is a terribly important responsibility. Many wrongheaded leaders don’t do this job responsibly or, even worse, never acknowledge this role.

If you’re building a Harley-Davidson riders’ community and you let in Charles and his Miata-driving friends who want to discuss Japanese roadster design at every event, you’re doing a bad job. This is why riding a Harley is key to joining a HOG chapter.

You can of course discuss Japanese roadster design at a Harley riders event. Transportation, safety, and mechanical design are often interconnected. But as a Harley owner, you’ll do that with people who remain excited about how that relates to the Harley experience, lifestyle, and identity.

Self-selection is not the same as “everyone belongs.” Leaders may be confused, thinking that avoiding discrimination means allowing everyone in all the time. This is a recipe for shallow experiences and unsafe gathering spaces. You must choose whom and why you let inside the boundary to ensure that the values and purpose are honored.

If you consider everyone an insider, then there are no outsiders. This is the same as no community, because no one can tell who’s inside the community.

You may invite everyone to visit certain events and discover whether they share camaraderie. The gatekeepers only allow the right people into novice and membership inner rings. This can happen either informally or formally. You may need to systematize the journey from visitor to novice and then to full member. (Research the Commitment Curve for how to map that journey.²) Recognize that each level is exclusive to some degree.

Making the Inside Safe Enough

Because of its importance, we’ve already mentioned several times that to make sharing vulnerability possible, leaders (elders) must protect the community’s inside as a container for respectful conversations and conflict that avoid abuse and disaster. Disaster often results in shunning, abandonment, and community breakdown. Conflict is inevitable, but abuse and harm are not. City University of New York professor Sarah Schulman clearly articulated the relationship between (inevitable) conflict and the harm that makes communities unworkable:

[Harm] begins in its earlier stage as Conflict, before it escalates and explodes into tragedy. Disaster originates in an initial overreaction to Conflict and then escalates to the level of gross Abuse. It is at the Conflict stage that the hideous future is still not inevitable and can be resolved. Once the cruelty and perhaps violence erupts, it is too late. Or at least requires a level of repair outside of the range of what many of us will do without encouragement and support. Conflict, after all, is rooted in difference and people are and always will be different.³

We call it fronting or avataring when participants only show us the parts of themselves they are comfortable revealing to strangers. We front when we want to play it safe. There’s nothing wrong with this: No one is going to share their deep vulnerabilities every time they get on a commuter train. But fronting impedes connection.

Participants go beyond fronting only when they feel safe enough to do so. The more that participants go beyond fronting (because they feel safe), the more connected they’ll feel, and community strength grows.

There is no such thing as “completely safe” for everyone all the time. Counterproductive coddling threatens to squash any risk or uncomfortable growth experiences.⁴ Difficult, confronting, and growth-inspiring conversations should and will happen.

The safety standards for a Berkeley prayer community and for an Oakland mixed martial arts community are, and should be, very different. No matter: To flourish, each must promote basic inclusion and respect that enables participants to learn and grow—to consider new perspectives and ideas so that they learn from differences they discover. This is “safe enough.”⁵

Whether you call them guidelines, rules, standards, or something else, develop clear guidelines that prohibit

• Harassment
• Abuse
• Bullying
• Hate speech
• Name-calling

Carrie has drafted dozens of guidelines. Through her research and experience, she has identified the most common activities regulated within online communities:

• Copyright or intellectual property violations (most common of all)
• Illegal activity
• Any harassment or hateful conduct, including discrimination, hate speech, bullying, or targeted attacks
• Impersonating other users
• Spam and scams
• Sexual content or nudity
• Any violent conduct: extreme violence, graphic violence, threats, gore, obscenities
• Harming others or acting maliciously
• Unwanted sharing of private information (aka doxing)

We offer this list as a starting point. Your community will discover its own specific needs and challenges. Copying this list and declaring your guidelines done is not enough. Look for guidelines for brands you admire and use them to inform what’s appropriate for you.

Invite feedback for your guidelines regularly, and really listen. Guidelines must remain dynamic as people, times, and contexts change. Enforce them consistently. Train and even remove leaders who don’t role-model keeping others feeling safe.

At some point, your community’s standards will be tested. When this happens, managers must

1. Address any harm done.
2. Acknowledge the impact.
3. (Re)assert the standards for the community.

Many leaders don’t want to take the time, risk, or responsibility to do this job well. Most of us want great results without work, risk, and responsibility. This doesn’t happen. When you ignore bad (emotional, physical, aggressive, abusive) behavior, whether you like it or not, you’re endorsing it. That’s how participants see it, and that’s what we consider passive consent.

Safe (enough) is especially critical when bringing together participants sharing identities where some stigma, trauma, or shame has existed. For example, within Alcoholics Anonymous, sharing about weaknesses, failures, and struggles is critical for community bonding and mutual support. Without safety established to allow this, the gatherings remain a well-intentioned effort where participants politely front together.

Accessing vulnerability (at some level) and getting past fronting almost always follows the precedent of a leader or elder demonstrating vulnerability first. The precedent cannot be fake, convenient vulnerability, but the real deal. Participants must also feel confident that the leadership can handle the situation if anyone does violate guidelines or the conduct code for the space.

There are several good lessons to recognize in this Twitch example. First, the rule was established and made known to participants before the infraction, so the recognized violation was not a surprise for the member. Second, the intention of the hate speech didn’t matter. Twitch doesn’t want to parse intention and impact for every violation. If it did, then members would play games hiding and reframing hate speech. Third, there were attentive elders (moderators) to enforce the standards. Last, and just as important, the penalty did not eject a member from the community; he experienced a consequence that allowed him to return and even participate more maturely. In fact, the broadcaster hosted a fundraiser for a relevant nonprofit when he returned (personal communication with Bobby Scarnewman, July 2019).

If you ignore taking responsibility for keeping the inside safe, two things will happen.

1. Participants disgusted with the inside behavior will leave.
2. The remaining participants will dial back their participation because risking themselves to share vulnerably is no longer safe.

Both outcomes are terrible for building community.

Welcoming Members

Welcomed, connected, seen, appreciated—these are all feelings. These feelings arise only when we know someone has noticed us and expressed their appreciation for our participation. This is why managers must ensure that all participants are welcomed. The type, length, and form of welcome will change depending on the community and context, but what doesn’t change is that participants must be welcomed by someone, if not by several someones.

By welcome, we mean that participants must understand the following:

1. Someone notices they arrived.
2. They have access to someone to speak to, connect to, and receive guidance from if needed.
3. They experience a facilitated connection to other participants (such as an introduction).
4. They can (or do) receive guidance on how to navigate the experience at hand.

For example, at events,

• Are they allowed to speak or post at any time, or must they sit, watch, or listen?
• Can they come late?
• Do they join a cohort?
• Must they stay for the entire event?
• Is food up for grabs or saved for others?
• Will a planned program stop conversations within the hour, or is the whole event intended for conversations?

The welcome both manages expectations and facilitates growing the feelings of community as much or more than does fulfilling any technical need that attracted the participants.

This year, Charles pursued membership in what we’ve been calling the Oakland Adventure Club. Members may use the club’s forty-bed lodge nestled in the Tahoe woods. They pride themselves on being a community that plays together and grows together as friends. They are, by definition, a brand community.

When Charles arrived for his first overnight visit as a prospective member, he expected to meet Janet, the member who was hosting him for his visit. He had just finished a four-hour snowy drive to the lodge and had taken off his shoes in the vestibule when Janet saw and approached him. The first thing she said was “Hi, I’m Janet . . .

• Don’t put your shoes there; they go down the stairs.
• Don’t put your bags there; they go in the locker room downstairs.
• You’re not supposed to use this door because it lets the heat out.
• You need to sign in on the board which room you’ll stay in.

The instructions and explanations went on for twenty minutes! Although everything she said was relevant for a prospective member who doesn’t yet know the lodge policies or layout, what was missing was a welcome that let Charles know that he was seen and appreciated as another mountain sport enthusiast.

Janet isn’t a bad person, but she had no training or guidelines on how to orient prospective members so that they would feel welcome. Imagine how visitors would feel if hosts started with a welcome that reached out with acknowledgment and appreciation first, and only then transitioned into rules provided by a supportive elder:

Hi, Charles. Welcome! I’m Janet. I’m your host. I’m so excited you’re considering the club. We’re looking for new members, and you’ve driven up on a snowy night. I’m hopeful this will be fun and that I’ll get to know more about you. I’ll help you understand the club as I can. First, though, it’s cold and you’ve had a long drive, so how about some tea before we handle the bags and a lodge tour?

It takes less than thirty seconds to offer the welcome suggested here. It can change a whole experience.

Delivering Promised Value

A manager’s first job is to ensure that whatever is promised to participants will be found in the community. This can include information, training, friendship, or even just a good time.

If we expect to find a great Harley mechanic when we visit a Harley riders’ community, then of course it helps if a leader ensures that there’s a way to find one there. If I’m expecting a one-on-one conversation with the Harley-Davidson CEO, when I arrive, I may be surprised when I don’t see an opportunity for this.

In addition to ensuring that the promise is fulfilled, leaders must ensure that participants are clear about what is in fact the minimum promise. There may be an invitation to meet the CEO at some point, but that would be a bonus in most riders’ communities, not a promised offering to everyone, every time.

Leaders need to understand that ensuring there is value to find is not the same as inviting visitors into a group and then hoping they’ll find value. Worse yet, we have seen visitors blamed when they didn’t find the promised value.

Charles was invited to a writers’ retreat billed as an opportunity to connect with more experienced thought leaders and to access their wisdom and support in growing as a thought leader. When he showed up, it became clear that drinking wine was a far more important activity than learning how to more effectively address social problems (as thought leaders). When asked for feedback, Charles and four other new authors shared their disappointment at the lack of attention or investment to help all of them grow more effectively. The new authors were told, “You should join the board to change this.” This was surprising because the new authors were visiting for the first time, not seeking to take over an organization after three days.

One of the failures here is that the elders didn’t understand that to keep the community relevant and attractive to visitors, they needed to support participant growth. In this authors’ group (as with very many groups), the elders ignored this responsibility in favor of social reminiscing. Not surprisingly, every new author left.

When planning any content (blog post, references list, video, gathering), your first question should be, “What will participants get out of this experience that enriches them?”

Whenever we invite members into participation, we ask for some commitment from them, no matter how big or small. They’re committing time, opportunity cost, association, and often money. As a leader, you have a responsibility to ensure that the experience is at least worth their commitment! Said differently, opportunity must consistently provide more value than members’ other options in that moment.

If you don’t know what the value offered is, or if you just hope that “they’ll figure something out,” then you’re in real danger of violating this responsibility. Just inviting strangers to share nachos in a specific room at a specific time doesn’t provide much value: We can all order nachos in our own rooms.

“Making and deepening friendships” might be the value you want to deliver in a particular space. Although this can involve sharing nachos, note that delivering on the “making and deepening friendships” part requires more investment than just ordering dinner. We suggest making introductions, providing a comfortable space, offering name tags, prompting a conversation about shared values and interests, and demonstrating patient listening.

Advocating for the Community

A successful brand community manager will advocate for members’ needs and vision to the ultimate brand leadership.

Leaders who don’t listen or don’t want to listen to their brand community’s needs and vision typically prefer an exploitative and extractive relationship with members. When members recognize this, the community’s power to deliver value both to the brand and to its members will almost certainly erode—in a catastrophic and spectacular way. Remember that influencing the brand is one value that members seek when they get involved at all.

You can think of the community work as building a trust bank. You may build a high balance with years of service and demonstrated commitment. Refusing to listen to members will deplete the bank balance quickly. Constant listening, cocreating, and delivering on promises will increase the balance.

Airbnb has learned this lesson firsthand. Many Airbnb hosts were frustrated with the original method customers used to rate hosts. At an Airbnb-sponsored gathering, a company product manager sought direct feedback in person and discovered previously unheard frustration. One of the lessons he learned was that the then online feedback system didn’t give users adequate tools to provide deep, nuanced, and contextualized feedback. Airbnb now regularly and formally invites product developers to join user events because the brand knows it can discover more hidden opportunities (personal communication, Danielle Maveal, August 2019).

Of course, not all voices in a brand community are either equal or helpful. It’s OK to choose whom you listen to. You can filter using any criteria appropriate for your brand.

Airbnb serves well over two million hosts. Not every one of them sits down with developers. The brand invests a lot to invite the most successful hosts to share how the Airbnb platform can better serve them. The wisdom here is not that you must take time to listen to every member all the time, or design by committee. The lesson is that there must be a way that membership can contact brand management in a meaningful way to build and protect trust.