Coaching leaders of Communities of Practice

Lauren Klein and John Smith joined forces to present a workshop on the subject and on our research about coaching community leaders. We’ve both been in the role of coaches as well as of community leaders, so we were interested in how other people help community leaders get going, get oriented, and get good at leading their communities.

Once our proposal was accepted at the Communities and Technologies conference in June, 2007, we decided to use this blog for several overlapping purposes:

• Report on the progress of interviews, analysis, results formulation and report writing. At this point we have almost enough respondents for our study, but if you know someone who coaches several leaders of different communities of practice, let us know. Although the Technology for Communities of Practice project is not over and still has to claim most of my non-billable time, I couldn’t help but start getting this one going.
• Announce and organize the half-day workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. Everyone who registers for the workshop will be able to post on this blog, so that we can accumulate ideas, references, resources and suggestions beforehand. (This is building on ideas that Beverly Trayner and I describe in E-Learning Magazine and builds on the practice we began to develop in the Prato Dialog.) We’ll aim to report on what we learned together in the workshop.
• Point to other outcomes, including publications, workshops, or resources.
• Most likely we’ll be presenting some of our work within the CPsquare community at some point.