Option One: Share one or two Communities of Practice and/or Social Media Fueled Communities of Practice you are a member of or you have plan to become a member of. Briefly describe why you have chosen them. If you are already a member, have you benefited from them? If so how and if not why? What do you think they need to do to further benefit you as a digital leader?
When I saw the topics outlined in this module I was very excited about reading the articles and responding in this discussion group… I have some experience in setting up online community of practice sites, and I'm always looking for lessons learned and advice. As Gruber et al. (2014) state "social media has accelerated the speed at which information is shared, amplified the reach of messages, and solidified the ability of disparate individuals to organize (p. 164).
When I was working as a contractor organization, part of my mandate was to improve the leadership training for our field crew supervisors and managers.
One of the ways we did this was through short microlearning courses that we delivered to our leaders' smartphones. This helped with some of the theoretical underpinnings of leadership development. I knew that we needed more so another thing that we did was create a community of leaders. This came to a head one day when I heard from field leaders about an incident he had been told about. He said he heard about a guy losing a leg in a vacuum truck incident in Kansas. When I looked into it what I found was that the story had been conflated from two separate incidents. I felt that our leaders needed a more direct line of communication and stewardship from our corporate leadership that got rid of the telephone game they were currently relying on. That was the impetus behind creating a leader's community of practice.
This community of practice for leaders was created in Facebook and we invited any and all leaders within the organization to join. I leverage Facebook because I was inspired by my neighborhood's efforts during the Hurricane Harvey floods in Houston. During that time my family and I found out most of the news about our neighborhood from our community Facebook group not from television or radio newscasts. I was impressed by how quickly relevant information was spread in this community page on Facebook and wanted to do the same for our leaders at my organization.
One of the things I found was that you need a very responsive and dedicated moderator to help move the community along. The community never became self withstanding and I think it has become defunct since I left. I found out the same thing again when trying to start a new community of practice on LinkedIn to support my new organization's leadership training. In this case, we used LinkedIn. Many of our learners take our leadership training in order to progress in their careers. LinkedIn has a focus on careers that isn't found on Twitter or Facebook in quite the same way. As stated in Donelan (2016), "of particular interest is how specific social media tools are being used to enhance networking and contribute to career progression (p. 1). This was the very thing we were interested in finding out too. We were hoping to allow our learners to maintain and grow networks, and Donelan's study (2016) finds evidence that that does happen.
We have been struggling. I knew from previous experience that the community of practice would need more help to get moving. I needed to moderate more aggressively and have more content that would drive the user to the site. We developed many articles and other information before we released the site. We even created a development team of other facilitators and managers at the organization to help produce content after we released the site. Despite this, the community of practice has not taken off at all. What I have found is that moderation is a full-time affair. Just like with a television broadcast, there needs to be a full-time producer doing nothing but promoting, creating, developing and growing the community of practice. For Facebook it was all me and three hundred different leaders and I couldn't keep things relevant and moving. Now it's about a half dozen content creators, all working part-time, and we can't keep it going. The next interaction will have a dedicated resource.
Has anyone else had any experiences similar to this? What would you recommend we try?
References
Gruber, D. A., Smerek, R. E., Thomas-Hunt, M. C., & James, E. H. (2015). The real-time power of Twitter: Crisis management and leadership in an age of social media. Business Horizons, 58(2), 163-172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2014.10.006 (Links to an external site.)
Donelan, H. (2016). Social media for professional development and networking opportunities in academia. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 40(5),706–729.
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