Coaching leaders of Communities of Practice

Martin, Great comments. I think one needs real political savvy and some coaching skills as well — for the one on one interactions – but maybe that is more my style or my specific communities – interesting to speculate. I too have been trying to build this as a ‘profession.’ I tell people there is a set of skills needed to do this well that can impact the quality of the results you get and I show them through conversations with them that there are other ‘options’ or techniques they had not considered. There are common mistakes and blind spots and maybe we can collectively identify them. E.g. “I can’t get people to use the listserv” or “people are not coming to meetings” that signal deeper fundamental issues in the way they are running the community. Usually they are not building distributed leadership are not using emergent design, are doing “for” instead “with” etc. Sorry I cannot see you in Setbul but let us know what happens.

Naava Naava Frank, Founder, Knowledge Communities

www.knowledgecommunities.org