Curating Communities
Victoria Stoyanova is a “People’s Architect” or a community and ecosystem builder who has been curating communities for coworking spaces, startups, and corporate companies and helping them understand who they need to be talking to and how. She joined our founder, Gillian Davis, in conversation to address the best ways to build community and generate growth within a company.
Victoria’s principle belief is that in talking to people you have to pay attention to what is going on with them and remember the small things. This includes everything from what they need, who they'd like to be introduced to, what their favorite activities are and when their birthday is.
She likes to remind herself to check in with a person and see how a pitch or meeting went. In order to do this, Victoria often sets an alarm to remind herself to check in with that person after their event.
Gillian and Victoria spoke about the importance of community management, specifically that a leader should adopt a facilitative role as they create and hold a space of community. If done properly, the community you create will be able to manage itself. Typically, the community manager has been viewed as a role that is linked to social media, but very quickly, companies have realized that that's not enough to manage an online community. The manager has to implement a strategy on community composition to nurture growth.
Victoria went on to say that leaders are taking action, building on things locally, but to say that they are entirely managing people in these communities is wrong because the people are doing the work and the manager is simply helping them get there. Victoria believes that great management is definitely more of facilitation and support focused rather than directing and enforcing. If people really want to be involved and you are giving them the space to do that, then growth happens. As a leader, you have to let the culture manifest itself and then support it.
Victoria believes that they key to letting go of your control over the culture and bringing it back as a manager is in allowing a sufficient amount of freedom to try things out so that the community can experiment, see the results together, and then collectively make adjustments. When you are clear on the purpose and goal that you have as a community, you can allow for that kind of freedom as a manager.
As a manager, it’s important to practice hearing rather than just listening to your community. If people are aware that you are a leader who hears your team, it encourages a culture where everyone has the freedom and the confidence to suggest something new.
You want to create a culture where everyone feels like they can contribute to the future of the business. If your team cares about the company's success, they will be doing more than expected, and when they have an idea or an opinion they will expect it to be taken seriously. If you enable these kinds of decisions and conversations to flow, you will be allowing collective and healthy conversations about what can be done differently to take place within your community.
Strong cultures and communities are rarely formed overnight, putting in the time and hours, picking up the phone on weekends really pays off. You cannot hack or rush human touch, it all comes with time. Victoria expressed her wish that more people would ask for help instead of claiming that they have the community game all sorted. Everyone brags about having a community, but as a community architect, Victoria knows exactly how long it takes to create a real one. So, Victoria's message is to ask for outside help. You can fill a room with people, but that doesn't mean it's a community. You need to understand what is it that unifies these people, what their shared purpose is, and how you are helping them go at it collectively. That is a much harder problem to solve, it takes effort, time, and patience, but in the end, it is well worth it.
If you’re interested in developing your leadership style in these uncertain times, you might be interested in talking to us about some of our remote offerings.
At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
Sign up for our newsletter for insights, tools, and tips.