Coaching leaders of Communities of Practice

A recent summary of our study has provoked some very insightful feedback from: martin.roulleaux-dugage@schneider-electric.com

“People don’t accept to be coached unless they are convinced that they need a coach, which suggests a strong desire to be a better collaborative leader. The problem is that CoP leaders – at least in my company – do not feel they actually need one. They either think that they have their community “under control”, or they believe that others -typically the managers- are responsible for the mishaps of their community. Community-building is not really considered as a professional practice that would require ongoing coaching or mentoring. And to be honest, I have doubts myself.”

“However, there are some key moments in the life of a community of practice when the core group is very likely to interact with some outside expert before making decisions. For example:

• Designing the community
• Choosing a collaborative tool
• Organizing a community seminar
• Designing the community taxonomy
• …

To me, these are critical “moments of truth” where real collaborative expertise is needed and outside help is asked for. But if the organization’s management does not acknowledge this, community leaders will typically consider the advantage of obtaining good advice against the drawback of becoming too visible as a community within the organization. Most often, they will not ask for help.

Some day, top managers will expect so much from their communities that they will crave for specialized coaches and consultants to help them. This is already taking place in some great global communities of practice. The Autodesk User Group ( http://www.augi.com/home/ ) for example regularly uses the coaching services (among other consulting services) of Solidvapor ( http://www.solidvapor.com/ ). But it seems to me that we still have a few years to go before this practice becomes mainstream. In the meantime, we are still merely evangelizing managers on the basics of CoPs.

I have been struggling with the issue of how to market those “community leadership” services for the last four years. To be honest, I still haven’t found a viable business model either. But I am quite certain that it will require three fundamental domains of expertise:

1. Collaborative working methods (conferencing, web conferencing, moderation, facilitation, peer assists, open space, marketplaces, brainstorming etc. etc.) – both F2F and virtual.
2. Collaboration technologies (blogs, wikis, social networking, etc…. but perhaps more importantly interop standards and APIs: tagging, taxonomies, metadata, XML, ….)
3. Communication (Attention-grabing techniques of the media and entertainment industries)

The problem is that you need high talent to master those three domains and very few companies do (e.g. http://www.headshift.com ), whereas very few communities of practice can afford the luxury of outside consultants. One way out of this dilemma is to adopt the business model of media industries, and manage intellectual property rights instead of coaching fees. This is the current path I am exploring.”