Communication Skills for Building Community in Business

This post is about community building in the workplace. It?s a critical ingredient in rising up and moving forward. It?s important in increasing your ability to impact the organization you work within.

The idea to write about business community?came to me after a personal experience with a different kind of community, namely the community I live in.

The goal of community is to create a certain sense of predictability and consistency of values, so you can feel confident and comfortable, so that the entity functions well, and so that you know what to expect.

To create community, you network, build relationships, and try to erase any lines between you and others in a community that get drawn by personality, events, circumstances, behaviors, and actions. These things can polarize groups of people, and create factions.

Community builders want inclusion and collaboration, and at the very least some sort of standard for coexistence. Without it, you have infighting and power struggles. That?s cancer in the human body ? a community of organs and cells are healthy when working together, and deadly when working against each other.

In your family, community, and work community, you want the diversity of cells (people) and organs (functional departments) to work together in support of the body (the organization).

In the community I live in, there was a bully, who was creating some real problems with our neighborhood kids. He was fighting with other kids, and he actually organized a ?fight club? kids were coerced into fighting each other for his entertainment.

This was a big problem, and breaking it up didn?t stop it from restarting, and the police were not able to bring it to an end either. So I built community with those kids, both the victims of the fights (5 ? 14 year olds who didn?t want to fight but did so out of fear) and mostly with the bully himself, who was a bright kid misusing his talents.

I despised the kid (a sign of my own negative tendency toward vilification), but I talked with him, showed respect and empathy, and (against my own wiring) actually found good in him. I worked hard to nurture more of it out of him to encourage a change.

I formed a relationship with the bully as a community member. I got to know him, built a rapport, showed respect and empathy, and gradually nurtured a better side I saw in him. Winning him over was easier than policing him. I assumed I was probably wasting my time, but one day he came to me and told me the fighting was over and he?d identified an anger in him that was keeping him from being ?strong on the inside.? (Full Story in Podcast)

I had a role in his realization. I had been affirming his self awareness (a trait I could see he genuinely had). I knew he craved strength and power, and I told him that physical strength was only the external half of the equation of power. The rest was on the inside. I think I started him looking inward at his feelings and what was driving him.

Two months or so later, when my kids told me that this bully was nice now, I realized what a surprise influence I had without devoting much time beyond a few casual and even distant conversations. I kept ?public enemy #1? close, and?made him a part of a community with elders who care about him.

This principle is just as true in the workplace. As a coach and consultant, I?m always hearing about the enemy around the corner, and the villain in the cube across the hall. Since Pete and I coach executives, directors, managers, and workers, we hear there can be a ?foe? for every tier of an organization.

I recommend viewing the people in your company as citizens in your career or work community. You don?t want a bully on your block and you don?t want to have to police people to enforce good behavior. You want to erase the lines and pull everyone into a community.

This is where the misguided but still useful phrase, ?Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,? comes into play. But you have to look at that phrase the way a former business partner of mine, Mike Koenigs of Traffic Geyser, used it ? make friends with the enemy.

To grasp what Mike was doing to keep competitors, adversaries, and other dangerous forces at bay, you need only revisit one of many?Abraham Lincoln quotes: ?Have I not destroyed my enemy by making a friend of him??

I?d like to recommend that you consider working closer with people who intimidate you or cross you. Dialogue with appreciation. Focus on them. Network with them. Find out what they want, need, fear, face, and struggle with. Be there to help.

Much of this philosophy can be learned in our pending event:?Be Connected to Effective Networking. It helps you nurture relationships in a way that positions you as a source of value to the people you meet. Networking principles nurture your relationships within your internal network the same way they do in the outside world to expand your network.

Nurturing other people as a means to help the team, and yourself, move yourself forward is a key concept as well. Mentoring positions you powerfully, and many people do not seize the opportunity that mentorship provides both the mentor and the mentee. This is a particular note for professional women, who are dramatically less mentored than men in the workplace. Statistically, women are also less likely to mentor other women below them. (Podcast: Mentoring and the Glass Ceiling.)

?We?re all in this together!?
? Harry Tuttle

My recommendation is to reach across whatever lines in the sand you perceive and pull more people into the community you envision. The activity that positions you is focusing on what positions them? reach out to help them with what they need and care about.

You?can help your way onto the community radar, just like the leaders of local politics do to rise to power. They rise in their communities by giving and serving others.

Help others, and network inside and outside your company. Seek mentors and be a mentor to others who need one. These activities can bring more community to your workplace, create an all for one, one for all mindset, and in the words of Harry Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro in the movie Brazil): ?We?re all in this together!?

Source: http://www.sagepresence.com/are-you-keeping-your-enemies-close-enough-communication-skills-for-building-community-building/

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