Leadership in CoP -- More

Today I read a piece "Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders: Changes at Ford, the Coke-Pepsi Fiasco, and Other Management Moments" on Knowledge@Wharton newsletter.

It looks a little bit like a matrioska... however, George Day and Paul Schoemaker built on top of their research (not "expert opinions"!!!) and analyzed the four traits of leadership:

(a) external focus
(b) conceptual ability
(c) organizational role and
(d) time horizon.

Now, does it apply to CoPs and if so, how?

External Focus.
"Vigilant leaders" - they say - "are more externally oriented: They are open to new ideas, seek diverse perspectives, listen to a wide array of sources and foster broad social and professional networks."

Reading this description, one immediately thinks of Kolb's learning styles and of the diverging learning style in particular:
"Diverging (feeling and watching - CE/RO) - These people are able to look at things from different perspectives. They are sensitive. They prefer to watch rather than do, tending to gather information and use imagination to solve problems. They are best at viewing concrete situations several different viewpoints. Kolb called this style 'Diverging' because these people perform better in situations that require ideas-generation, for example, brainstorming. People with a Diverging learning style have broad cultural interests and like to gather information. They are interested in people, tend to be imaginative and emotional, and tend to be strong in the arts. People with the Diverging style prefer to work in groups, to listen with an open mind and to receive personal feedback."

Now I ask: is there any doubt about the fact that, in a CoP, problems and ideas are concrete and have to be looked at from different perspectives, idea are generated mainly through group brainstorming, and the capability of giving and receiving strong and open personal feedback is an asset, especially for the resident facilitator(s)?

Also note how Day and Schoemaker define operational leaders: "more narrowly focused, have less interest in outside opinions and confine their networking to familiar settings". That is, they are concerned with one or few topics, don't like apparently "off-topic" threads and don't like unfamiliar territory, often resorting to ipse dixit (like many people in the CoP field do anytime Wenger is contested, as if his works were an infallible religious book which doesn't even need interpretation).


Conceptual Ability.
Vigilant leaders also "probe deeply for second order effects", that is, they do not stay content with analyzing their experiences through the lenses of process management, ROI or McElroy's first generation KM. In other words, they aren't ISO 9000 compliant.

Their counterparts, operational leaders, are those first generation KM dinosaurs one can stumble when joining KM groups. They are predictable and focused mainly on the task at hand, they rely on past experience and try to avoid mistakes like the plague. In their brain, Popper's philosophy hasn't sunk yet and they think that for their knowledge to be valid all they need is to try to verify it over and over again, often resorting to qualitative descriptions without any rigor whatsover. They still regard induction as the main pillar of science and behave like Russell's inductivist turkey (slide #14), they call deduction a "theoretical approach", a "generalization" and/or a "lack of context". They have what Piaget would define pre-operational thinking.

CoPs strongly need a leader whose culture and interests go beyond first order effects. The ideal CoP leader would look at the CoP s/he leads in terms of Value Networks rather than first order outcomes.


Organizational Role.
But vigilant leaders also enable people in their company by allowing them to explore areas outside their main focus. The dinosaurs I described above are controlling, focused on efficiency and cost cutting and don't explore outside potential. This is particularly unfortunate when leading a CoP which is all geared onto idea generation and sharing.

Even though methods to measure and test a CoP's effect, impact and outcome, existed and there were consensus among scholars and/or practitioners on which one to use first and why, there would still be a lot of problems related to these measurements.

For one the effects, impacts, outcomes of a CoP cannot be measured for months or even years after its institution. For two, some of those outcomes and impacts do not impact finances, so it might happen that financially there is no ROI (or even a loss) but the return on investment happens through the enhancement of a non-monetary value (say I set up a CoP and its members feel better about working, and are more relaxed and available in the workplace). Furthermore, cost effectiveness is reflective of another unfortunate paradigm called the scarcity model). This does not:
1) take into account that some tangibles are, indeed, limited (not scarce!), and yet some intangibles are abundant (not unlimited!), It just assumes that everything is always scarce, which introduces a theoretical bias in the very system that should be objective enough to represent and quantify a pros/cons analysis;
2) realize that not every outcome can be measured in monetary terms and that doing so is yet another source of lack of science in this practice.
It basically measures abundant intangibles as if they were limited tangibles and as if all tangibles and intangibles were to have the same unit measure (it's like measuring liquids in meters.... plain old stupid).

Time Horizon.
Finally, a vigilant leader's time horizon is longer while an operational leader's is shorter.

But in order to be effective at doing so, one needs to come from an abundance perspective. If time is scarce, one has no time to wait for results. If time is limited, one decides which results to wait for. If time is abundant, one participates to the creation of new perspectives, opportunities, concepts without having an agenda on which one to find or explore.

Since CoPs just die if they are managed (or led) toward an agenda, it's particularly evident how one needs to come from abundance in order to get any result out of them, and needs to be patient as well. This also explains why CoPs are so good in getting results about unstructured practices, where nobody has agendas to push.

Online Moderators and Their Communities

Online moderators have to be autoctone leaders, that is, they have to emerge from the community. However, they very often are "staffed" in a way that reminds me of that game "if you were a fruit which fruit would you be?". No screening, no recruitment, minimal training, minimal supervision, few sources of informal learning (usually other moderators mentoring, coaching, counseling new ones). The hidden or open sponsors of such communities are grossly miscalculating the role and the moderator/facilitator community impact.

By "instinct" (I really don't know how "natural" this is, it could be superimposed out of living in a culture that fosters extrinsic rewards), moderators tend to identify themselves with the community they moderate. Therefore, they tend not to allow it the freedom to make mistakes, because they tend to take the community's failure as their own personal failure.

It takes time (lots of time) and experience (lots of experience) to learn to just let go of the community results while preserving accountability for what really depends on us moderators. I saw some apparently skilled moderators backchannelling feverishly in order to pretend that the community has a "spontaneous life", like in the Wizard of Oz: "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", while I saw other seemingly seasoned ones rushing into each and every conflict with the intent of "smoothing it" (to the point that the troll asked her to moderate him!).

The problem is, leadership mandates the capability of taking a stand, whatever it is, and to be able to submit it to logical scrutiny. So, whoever won't be able to take a stand and back it up, will have no real leadership but just the power to click some buttons. Without leadership, there is no authority, and without authority (as in authoritative, not as in authoritarian) people don't respect one another. And communities (especially communities of practice) get subversive when it comes to incompetent leaders (either permissive or controlling).

Allowing a community to make mistakes is therefore a basic competency of a skilled online moderator. The ones that "play nice" (aka smooth conflicts asap, invites to agree to disagree etc) usually are histrionic persons that can survive as long as the "show" is short-lived, such as in face-to-face meetings. They crave and need the public eye in order to perform, they sense it and put themselves in a position to meet their needs.

However, whenever the moderation/facilitation becomes 24/7 (or 2/3 hours every day), the drama queen needs more and more private time in order to keep on herding cats while keeping him/herself together, and the problems start emerging, especially in asynchronous facilitation, notoriously the most reflexive. All of a sudden, it takes more than a good voice, some charming ways, some right move and a pleasant look to "run the show". However, many don't, can't or won't see it ahead of time. It's like the difference between a theatre and a film performance: the former can be instinct-driven, excessive, groovy, but the latter just has to be precise, factual, professional or else you're out. While in the former tantrums can help you run the show momentarily and fake it till you find a way out, in the latter they hinder the development of an optimal performance and faking its simply not a professional option.

But on-fac is far more challenging than f2f facilitation for other reasons as well. You get to "know" your creature, spend more time with it, you loose lucidity, get more involved and.. find out things about you (like your relationship with power, control, anger, other assorted feelings plus your personal pet peeves) that you won't necessarily die for exploring ;)

I try to always let the group bicker, fight, yell and... solve the conflict amongst them as much as possible. Unless I see insults going on, I don't intervene. If I intervene, I intervene as a member, I don't use my power/authority unless I just have to, because I think that a facilitator that isn't a primus inter pares KILLS any CoP, or collaborative community, or even "mere" online group.

Sometimes, members publicly ask for my intervention. There is NOTHING more empowering to the group as a whole than just calling them to a responsible act! So I say "I'm not your babysitter, I won't force [such and such] to do anything." Then I express my opinion whatever it is as an act of group membership (something like "I think [such and such] is wrong because [this and that]") and reiterate that I can't oblige anybody. At this point, either the disruptive person all of a sudden "gets it", or
s/he will feel empowered and get more disruptive. Now, the group will take
ownership on its reactions and assume leadership. In other words:
governance.

However, there are times in which communities get disbanded because
members, not mods/onfacs, behave like kids.

I can't help noticing how some persons can go on and on about inside jokes without having the slightest idea of the potential they have for originating feelings of exclusion in whoever isn't part of the joke.

My experience is, jokes are tolerated better when either they come from a
small group of tight friends, or when they come from many subgroups. In other words, they are felt as ok when they are either perceived as signs of "few people with higher status", or as signs of "many subgroups with similar status". When the jokes or hints are about a large subgroup then ingroup/outgroup dynamics are unavoidable!

Nothing harms a community (online/offline), more than a clique. One would think participants would know and yet there are long-term communities I know and have been part of, that keep on being cliquish because "they like it" and get regularly puzzled about the "perception from the outside" ;)

Again I would say I can't fathom how people that have participated in other
fora for years managed not to look and listen enough to previous and past exchanges and experiences... so much that they behave as if they have missed to observe such group dynamics, which I'm not sure could be blamed on others.

I can't help thinking that as long as we (generic) decide to engage in community exchanges our own identity doesn't all belong to ourselves only any more. It becomes a negotiated concept, therefore it doesn't depend on one subject anymore, it depends on the group as a whole set of subjects. It gets out of the realm of subjectivism, where the individual is king AND referee, and gets into the relativism, interplay of the perception (right/wrong) that one individual has of him/herself and the fact that the rest of the world will ask him/her for a reality check.

So if the group decides it doesn't like your (generic) idea of yourself (generic again), reality (in the sense of "negotiated identity") will bite.

This will especially bite many (supposed, self-defined) fans of Vygotsky, who somehow manage to hint at the fact that "negotiation of meaning" should/would/could/might imply subjectivization of meaning. Those persons just miss the point, in that Vygotsky's negotiation of meaning implies an iterative dialogue among subjects that keeps going till a mutual agreement on its meaning is reached (note: the mutual agreement doesn't have to happen in a particular way, and it's not objective... these are the many differences with Argyris' framework).

However Vygotsky, in no way, shape or form, leaves room for agreement as "casual encounter of two or more subjects that happens to agree on the meaning of their encounter". I do understand that to a person in pre-operational thinking, the two things might seem the same though LOL

CoP Nucleation

There are two ways of forming a CoP (I say two cause I don't believe in the third, the "built" one):

1) "spontaneously":
I don't believe it is really spontaneous, it's more like somebody is doing the work without knowing what s/he is doing... according to the Johari window, it's the state of "unconscious competence". It's is more or like the case in which an "unconscious" nucleator starts aggregating a CoP not knowing what s/he is doing:
2) "nucleated":
you follow me on this, my background is in medicine. Stones get formed in a liquid that is supersaturated with a given solute. However, supersaturation is necessary but not sufficient for a stone to get formed. It takes a little "piece of something", like a cluster of some 5-10 cells, a kidney cylinder, few bacteria. That "piece of something" in a supersaturated solution starts what is known as stone "nucleation". So, what I do in my practice is to search for the supersaturated solution (aka: a 10-20 member network among 3 or 4 departments, like Verna Allee would say) and then I search for the "piece of something" to shove into it. The piece can be my "formal/informal" leadership, but most often it is my detection of a subgroup of people that could be autochthones leaders, a topic that can create debate (and therefore emergence of a leader), sometimes shifting focus/technology attracts the "right" leader. It depends.

What you have to search for, however, is a particular kind of leader, a servant-leader (if you are familiar with Greenleaf.. if not, see here).

On difficulties in recruiting:

That might also mean a good thing, such as you nucleated a CoP with a peculiar identity, that isn't a fit for everybody under the sun. It might also mean the CoP is functional to the point that members are having productive lives without having to always resort to the CoP. However you are right, there is a danger in that and Gongla and Rizzuto in their "Where Did That Community Go? - Communities of Practice that "Disappear" described pretty well.

Volunteer recruitment (and CoP members are *volunteers*, NOT workers!) works in a different way than workforce, so one reason might be it. Have you tried administering the VFI to your CoP members and see what their motivations are? Basing on that, you might want to craft an announcement attracting volunteers with similar motivations. Dig in the work of Clary, starting from
this).

This paper is the one that explains the connection between motivation and kind of advertisement: Clary, E. G., M. Snyder, R. Ridge, P. Miene, & J. Haugen. (1994). Matching messages to motives in persuasion: A functional approach to promoting volunteerism. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24, 1129-1149.

Leadership and Volunteer Management

Sidenote: yes I am still alive, even if this flu has taken a heavy toll on me. Thank you for your emails... now down to business....

I have various kinds of friends, interested in different topics, and I like various topics myself. I had been accumulating links over links till I got an email from Jill, which gave me an idea on how to sew them together, so here I am.

Starting with AVA's motto: "Every volunteer, effectively led".

Few months ago, a discussion about leadership on cyberVPM brought to my attention how there are persons that, surprisingly, oppose the term "leading volunteers". They think it to be somehow offensive to volunteers: "they are not animals, you don't lead them anywhere" they say "they go where they want to go". In fact, I said leader, were they animals I'd use shepherd instead. *grin*

All that fuss over hierarchies and leadership is yet another excess of such politically correct "person-centered" (and brain-alien) language.

The fact we all are usually given the right to choose where to go doesn't mean we need no hint about which direction to take. Even if the whole politically corrected world rushes out (usually, yelling at whom disagrees...) to level differences with some kilos of white let's-all-pretend-to-be-equal paint. And has even the nerve to call it "respect for differences"! I for one am humble enough to admit that yes, there ARE fields in which I DO need directions and no, I am not ashamed of it, nor to admit it, because there is nothing bad about it. I also am not envious of leaders and leadership roles, so I guess it's easier for me to accept the term and concept. Plus, I realize how the world needs hierarchies in order to work (on the danger of upside-down hierarchies, like putting ideals before feelings, I'll write another day....).

Others would prefer the term manager, or adminstrator. I don't like any of them. The former assimilates people to things to move from one place to another, the second to money that runs from pocket to pocket. I stick by Volunteer Leader.

But back to the leadership thingy... what is leadership?

In most countries, as well as in most persons' minds, leadership is something you obtain especially when you don't deserve it, provided you are willing to yell long enough to. The concept is dangerously similar to that of advocacy. Pick up a subject, it's not important whether you are right or wrong, whether your claims make sense or not. It is important that you yell so loud and for so long, possibly throwing all you can find on your path at whoever dare disagreeing with you. That way, they will become afraid of openly going against you, and you'll feel you won your war for celebrity and are the biggest expert in the world. But there is a problem: while you feel all contemptuous, the rest of the world will be laughing at you, your idiosincrasies and your intellectual blindness. If they sound respectful is because they are waiting for an occasion in which they will be granted impunity. At which time, you will see who is the winner and who is the sucker.

So again what is leadership and who is the leader? Leadership is when a consistent portion of a group of people follow the opinions, behaviours and/or ideas of a person that is but expressing him/herself in such process (meaning: no show-offs, no manipulations). They decide who the leader is and the leader can only accept or refuse the role. Get real: you cannot be a leader if nobody but yourself designates you as one. Period. You can't say: "I am the boss therefore I am the leader". PERIOD.

That's why self-proclamed leaders and experts are persons that, at minimum, are being blinded by their own ambitions but, usually, by their own stupidity and limitations.

Being a leader has something "animal" in it. It's a matter of sensing the temperature of persons & groups, of interpreting non-verbal language (and, for God's sake, remember Mehrabian!), of having & displaying feelings, of motivating folks and of knowing how to speak in meaningful spontaneous discourses. It is NOT about sending cold informal "personal" messages and newsletters, interpreting ONLY verbal language, keeping feelings and "important stuff" private, beating people into submission about some "ideal" and giving long technical/numerical/idealistic speeches. A leader is a person that after you listened to, you feel you can do what s/he is doing, with the result that s/he is having, if only you get into his/her attitude.

It's not about what the leader says, or thinks, or is. It is about how s/he makes you feel when s/he speaks to you. Even when you dissent from what s/he says, you feel that S/HE made you think, S/HE inspired you, S/HE fuelled your actions. Even when s/he prompted you to disproof what s/he just wrote! THIS is a leader. A person whose post you never skip, a person you want to listen to, and not just because s/he pesters you if you don't.

And no, being a leader is not a bed of roses, like false leaders think and claim to experience. You have no pauses or few, because their eyes, the eyes of the people that chose you as a leader are on YOU, whether you like it or not, want it or not, feel like it or not. Whether you feel you are enough for the role, the task, the goal or you are not, they chose you. The fact you wouldn't have chosen yourself doesn't change their mind. If you watched the Matrix, it was Morpheus to choose Neo as the leader, regardless of Neo's personal opinion. THAT is what leadership is like, and it's not easy or nice.

So the point is, of course, not all Volunteer Managers (or Adminstrators) can be Volunteer Leaders. Yet, they can still be intelligent enough to understand when volunteers recognise them as leaders and when they don't. And humble enough to detect who is that they recognise as leader and how to cultivate this person into a Volunteer Manager Assistant, or a Supervisor of Volunteers.

Another problem is that, usually, a person that is comfortable being a manager is a pretty anal one as well. Thus, s/he will have issue on letting go of control, watching volunteers too tightly, endlessly writing job descriptions (cuz they think job descriptions can't be misunderstood, you know), supervising "too much", having delusions that "if I am not here, things just don't get done" and so forth. The idea that there is life outside of what they think is just hard to get into those heads.

So, the social life of volunteers? "It's not important, it's important that the job gets done". Appreciating volunteers? "Well, why don't we just thank them as much as possible and that will cover most of the feeling stuff?". Facilitating social exchanges among volunteers? "As I said, it's more important that the work gets done". Well, if these three aspects improved the quality and quantity of work at Xerox, WHO in the #@ç* tells you that it wouldn't work at your organization, Einstein?

It's because those people are mistrustful of all that can't be controlled, rigorously duplicated and measured. If they help humankind out of duty (or loyalty to some ideals), they can't imagine you can perform the same action out of love, gratefulness or any other feeling.

So yes, I basically think that there is another way to manage volunteer, a happy hybrid between the "all fluff" everything-goes and the North American managerial style.

It would help, and a lot, if we recognise that:
1) group of volunteers have social hierarchies, inner leaders, social networks, likes and dislikes that are "reflective" in nature and individual in the way they present themselves. That means, each volunteer carefully select who to buddy up with, for reasons that have to do with their background, values, motivations and upbringing;
2) they way groups of volunteers behave is inherently different from group of workers. Most works on groups of volunteers have been conducted on open source software developers or on communities of practice. In both cases, and in a surprisingly myope way, findings have been analyzed through the lenses of groups of workers. In other words, the fact they weren't being paid hasn't been taken in account OR such volunteers have been considered motivated by having their name inserted in the acknowledgement file (that already happens for workers, but how is that they still want to be paid???? Hmmmmmm.....);
3) belonging to such groups is a big part of why they decide to start volunteering and of why they decide to stay at our organization (or leave).

For all these reasons, the Volunteer Manager can't possibly go on "letting these groups happen" because too much of what gets done (and especially, of what does NOT get done) depends on the mismanagement of this very precious resources.

And remember, when you doubt about your own leadership and don't know what to do, don't search the "expert"... identify the leader in that group and build on top of it.

It works.