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Building Community: Part Two – Community of Purpose

Not a network 

Community doesn’t just happen; it’s not the same as a network.  Nurturing a community requires intentionally finding opportunities for groups to come together.  Whether online, through specific social media platforms, or in person, the value of one-to-one contact cannot be overstated.  Your interactions make the community around you supportive in both good and bad times.  So, find opportunities to simply hang out with the people you want to nurture in your community.  Go beyond just business.  See if there are opportunities to bring them into your own home.  In our culture, people often prefer to meet others away from home, so getting someone into your home to build a relationship with them is seen and valued differently.   

Group Work 

Also, think about how you can bring a group of people together.  The dinner party, once a fashionable and structured social encounter, is becoming rarer and rarer.  The etiquette and level of preparation expected for a formal dinner party are not consistently recognised.  However, the great strength of the dinner party was its ability to bring multiple people together to help nurture the community.  The formality of sitting down allows for different kinds of conversations.  The fact that it’s done in your home is a powerful way of expressing hospitality and building relationships.  Perhaps there are other ways to gather people together without the formality of a dinner party.   Consider hosting a pizza night, a football night, or a barbecue—there are many ways to unite people.   

Are you Missed? 

But what does it mean to be part of a community when nurturing it?  One test is whether you’re missed when you don’t engage.  When you don’t turn up, do people notice your absence?  Another indicator is when you return to the group, is it like you never left?  Do you, as a community, have rituals, regular celebrations, or something that consistently happens annually?  All these things help to nurture a community and build a sense that you are a group of people in a relationship with one another.   

Shared Experiences 

One of the most powerful experiences of a lasting community I’ve been part of is the group of people I worked with at Andersen.  Even 20 years later, those times together are still remembered.  A single email can prompt an opportunity for a meeting.  The shared experiences we had, the challenges we overcame, and the victories we celebrated together have had a lasting impact, reinforcing the importance of shared experiences in community building.   

Conclusions 

In my experience, nurturing a community is the only way to make it more than a network.   

Building Community: Part Four – Starting Community

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.