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When you step out as Portfolio Executives, you risk becoming isolated. Often, you are recommended to go out and ‘do networking’. Networking is a valuable business development activity, but I believe there is a much richer way of thinking about what we need.
Think ‘Community’
What is a community of practice? The definition of a community of practice can vary enormously. Perhaps the most formal communities of practice are the chartered institutions in accountancy and management. Slightly less formal is the Project Management Institute, which doesn’t have legislative endorsement. But sometimes, they are very informal. It can be sufficient for you to join a set of practitioners who seek to share what you’re learning with one another. There’s a third way.
The Community of Communities
I’m very impressed by an organisation hosted by the Institute of Psychiatrists called the Community of Communities. The Community of Communities has a framework for how its member communities shape how they run, which they call Values and Standards. These represent a set of principles. However, these principles are not regulations. They’re not things that communities need to demonstrate compliance with; they are aspirations that those communities actively pursue. In pursuing this practice using these principles, you have an exciting peer review process. One community will send two or three members of their community to a second community (by invitation) to review, perhaps, one or two of the principles of the Community of Communities. You can discuss, explore, and examine how you practice these principles. You both challenge their practice, learn from it and bring the experience of the practice you’ve had from the reviewed community to the reviewing community. The reviewed community then considers the findings and commits to moving forward.
Therapeutic Communities
These communities are identified as therapeutic communities, where the underlying assumption is that you all can offer healing to one another, irrespective of your own brokenness and professional standing.
For example, some prisons have therapeutic communities where prison wardens need to participate in community discussions as peers, acknowledging their brokenness and weakness to offer the opportunity for their healing and seeking to draw on the inmates’ experiences to find their healing in a peer-to-peer relationship.
Finding Your Community
What is the natural community of practice for you? It could be cultivated. As a programme project manager, it could be anybody who does programme or project management. Or it might be that the community of practice you want to engage with is much narrower, such as those who engage in cultural transformation, those working within the NHS, or those programme and project managing in the IT, construction, or infrastructure sectors. It could be a particular narrower niche.
What will a community of practice give you? Often, you will share learnings in various ways, whether through workshops, papers, conferences, or local chapter groups, which come together to share experiences and talk to one another. Sometimes, professional organisations will offer other services. Sometimes, they will provide accredited qualifications which endorse you and give you recognition in the community of practice. Sometimes, you have compliance and accreditation requirements to maintain the chartered status that permits you to operate.
Ultimately, I would say the core value of a community of practice is having a set of peers with whom you can connect, have community, build relationships, learn from and support one another over time.
Conclusions
Without community, we can avoid ending up feeling very isolated. If you believe no man is an island, choose which continent you will stand on. If a community of practice is the country you want to engage with, consider whether a particular city in that country, a specialised niche, is suitable for you. Be intentional about pursuing it. Find people like you, find opportunities to meet and talk with them, look at what might be provided by clubs, institutions, conferences, or journals and then start to engage.
A community of practice is a natural home for Portfolio Executives who have a particular set of skills, knowledge, and experience.
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.