Ready to step-up your leaders?
There are two ways you can pump-up your leaders.
Boost them in a rush.
Panic. Spam everyone with emails, lists of tasks to do, and their responsibilities.
Hope and pray that you’ve established the right leaders, generated enough “buzz” to get them to work from day 0, and let them handle everything, on their own, within the community, you’ve spent months building.
Or, you can actually build enough structure to make it possible for them to take up the challenge, so that you can accomplish even more together.
Alright! Let’s start slowly, but comfortably. In today’s story, we’ll talk about figuring out all the ways to supercharge your leaders, that we had identified last week.
You want your community to stand out. You’ve already established the exceptional leaders of your community who have the potential to take your community to the next level. But you haven’t begun to create that solid structure for your leaders, that you’ve been wanting to make.
Don’t stop, you’re almost there!
Every leader needs to be pepped-up in order to succeed in their respective roles. You have to ensure that you’re backing them up, whenever required. Be there to provide the support that your hand-raisers need, when they need it.
Now is the time for you to create ways to help community leaders save time, grow, and achieve their goals. And here’s how you’re going to do it in 3 SIMPLE steps:
#1: Map out your leaders’ journey
If you are new to this or doing it for the first time, it can become quite overwhelming. Fear not! We’ve been there and seen it all. And to be precise, this step is the most important as it will give phenomenal direction and purpose to what you’ve been wanting to do.
Therefore, we recommend to get all the main duties or responsibilities down on paper and see where you can help. The length of the journey you want to optimize is up to you: you can use this approach to map out a leader’s day or their first six months in the role.
Make the flowchart of a leader’s journey by discussing these questions:
What are the first steps that leaders take, after raising their hands to accept a leadership role?
How will they be welcomed? Onboarded? Acknowledged?
What are the key activities in which they will be involved? Make it crystal clear
Do they need any support in those activities? What support do they currently receive?
#2 Identify the activities where your support is most important
Once you’ve mapped the leader’s journey, the next step is to pinpoint those key activities in which your support can help leaders make a bigger impact or save time.
So, while you’re reviewing the journey flowchart, keep these 3 things in mind:
Which activities are valuable to your community members?
Which activities are not as valuable, but are still necessary?
Which activities are not required at all?
Furthermore, it’s necessary to re-visit the community’s purpose during this process. Because people may have their own sense of what valuable means - it can be money, growth, impact, etc. So, ultimately it boils down to this one thing - why your community is coming together in the first place, and then prioritize your support aligned with that purpose.
Glynk’s tip 💡
While getting indulged in these processes, don’t forget to embrace them. Start embracing the process to support your leaders. Make sure you are doing/building something, your members want. Otherwise, all of this effort is for nothing. It doesn’t really matter if your leaders are a little rough around the edges. Understand, it’s early for them as well. Remember the time when you started out. In the early days, no one expects flawless videos, carefully thought-out blogs, or unique GIFS that go viral. Just start talking. Understand what they want, what your community wants. Be as patient with them, as you were with yourself.
#3 Uncover different opportunities to support your leaders
There are many ways to support your leaders. After prioritizing which activities you want to supercharge, minimize, or eliminate, you should uncover opportunities to support your leaders, as well as generate new ideas to help.
Start off by understanding where your leaders need support. You should know what is the most impactful bits of your leader’s work, that require your help the most. Answer these questions to discover different means of supporting your leaders. For example:
Are leaders apprehensive about hosting the first meeting?
Organize formal training for them
Are leaders expending hours preparing design presentations?
Prepare a set of templates. It will be really useful
Do leaders waste time searching for important files and other community aspects?
Prepare a portal with links to everything, to make your leaders efficient
Bottom line - there are indefinite ways in which you can lend your support. You can host training, create templates, develop checklists, start a newsletter, make an FAQ, and what not! The list is endless. Figure out which form of support adds the most value. The beauty of this step is to continue evolving yourselves in alignment with your leaders’ needs.
Also, in our previous edition, we introduced The Community Makers Club - a global network of community professionals, where we share incredible networking opportunities, meaningful conversations & mentorship sessions by community veterans.
Your response overwhelmed us beyond measure & gave us an insight into how driven you all are, to create an unprecedented impact!
For those of you, who missed out on the opportunity to be a part of The Community Makers Club and look forward to joining the same, reply back to this email with “Interested” and we shall get back to you shortly.