Creating Community: Final Thoughts

Creating community is a difficult task, but it is rewarding beyond measure.  To feel included and be connected to others can provide us with our most fulfilling moments.  If you have decided you are willing to create community within your organization, here are the beliefs and tools that might be most helpful to you, in no particular order:

*         Involve your employees.  Don't make assumptions about when you need their help, whether they're interested, how chaotic the process might be if you get their input, or any other excuse.  Watch your own need to be in control flare up when you get beyond the hypothetical aspects of involving others.  And engage them anyway.  The more transparent and open the process is, the more trust and investment people will experience and the more support you will receive.

*         Allow for and encourage empathy.  Too much of our daily life revolves around satisfying ourselves rather than serving others.  If you talk about the value of empathy, you will want to be the model of that for others.  So allow yourself to empathize with others' fears, resistance, and confusion, as unpleasant as that might be.  When you engage in empathy and all the emotions connected with it, you will find that it arrives and dissolves like most of the other emotions in our lives.  Express your empathy for others and let them know you identify with their emotions (even if you aren't personally experiencing their fear and confusion).   Letting each person know that he or she is not alone is a powerful message.

*         Celebrate commitment to and collaboration in the process.  It's all about working together, and not seeing yourself as pursuing this path alone.  Get lots of people involved.    Encourage them not only to help you, but to help each other.   Building community is not just about what you end up with, but the process with which you create it.

*         Face resistance and fear.  Rather than lamenting and blaming others for their resistance, allow yourself to experience and acknowledge your own.  Expect that there will be roadblocks and you will work through them as they appear.  Remember that fear and resistance are natural, neither good nor bad, and that over time they will transform as you pursue the path of community.  Paradoxically, the more you embrace your own fear and resistance (which is allowing yourself to experience the emotions around it, not just obsess about it), the less difficult it becomes to work with it.

*         Be flexible and persistent.  People sometimes confuse persistence with staying the course without altering the strategy.  That's a mistake.  Persistence and flexibility are the keys to your success.  Circumstances may reflect that a certain strategy isn't working; be flexible and honest enough to note when a particular approach isn't working and change it, while keeping your overall community vision at the forefront.

*         Communicate constantly.  Over-communicate.  Let people know what is going on frequently.  Set up mechanisms for people frequently to share progress reports, both difficulties and victories.  Reporting "failures" can be powerful when you explain how you plan to deal with them.  That allows failure to be enfolded into the community values as a learning process and demonstrates the commitment to transcend failure by trying something else or changing direction.

*         Demonstrate patience and leadership.  This point doesn't make impatience "bad."  It acknowledges that you can experience impatience and follow up with a renewed patience.  Let people see that shift in you, as you acknowledge your frustration and determination to open to possibilities.  Demonstrate that whatever you experience is also part of creating, and participating in community.

Oddly enough, I am in the midst of being part of an organization that wants to shift its focus from being an organization to becoming a community.  It is an exciting and challenging process, where we can all grow the organization and move it into new kinds of meaning and relationships.  And through the process we'll continue to grow individually, and with each other, as a community.