Communities of Practice: A Secret Weapon for Building Psychological Safety at Work
My weekly Product Leads Community of Practice is my favourite meeting. And I’ve heard my fellow Product Managers and Product Owners say the same thing. There may be meetings in our calendars we’d love to skip, but we always look forward to gathering together, even if there’s nothing on the agenda. Why? I’d love to tell you.
What’s a Community of Practice (CoP)?
Simply put, a CoP, in the context of agile methodology, is a group of people with similar professional interests who gather to develop skills, solve problems and share experiences. In addition to the Product Leads CoP here at CBC, our department also has CoPs for QA professionals and UX designers.
How we use CoPs in our Department at CBC
Working on cross-functional agile teams can lead to a kind of professional isolation; I’m the only Product Manager on my team. Though my support network is large, there’s something uniquely powerful about connecting and solving problems with people who have the same role as I do, especially when they work on work that’s different from my own. The variety of perspectives and experience is vast and valuable.
Sometimes our weekly CoP is just a space for venting (which is helpful in and of itself), but more often than not, talking through our learnings and our challenges as a collective has led to important changes. For example, we worked together evaluating our departmental planning practice. We’ve had discussions about how to manage our to-do lists. We’ve offered new product leads our best advice. We also established a regular touchpoint with our department’s leadership team to share context and deepen relationships.
Keeping the Momentum
I know — who wants another meeting? It can be hard to carve out time for CoPs, and maintaining them can be even harder; we all have packed calendars and a never-ending list of tasks to manage. Our CoP has certainly ebbed and flowed in terms of participation over the years. But even when there’s nothing on the agenda, having that open forum available is important.
To wit, we had an agenda-less CoP recently, and a handful of us showed up to check in anyway. We talked about wrapping early, but then one person just said one thing that unleashed a stream of conversation that was incredibly productive. Though I’m sure it goes against more than one advice book about being efficient at work, leaving the unstructured time available for people to connect, and having the psychological safety in place to encourage open communication, is incredibly valuable.
And we’re dogged about reinforcing that our CoP is a safe space — we maintain strict confidentiality and practice non-judgement. We’ve also created a Slack channel where we can connect asynchronously between our meetups. These efforts mean that we all know we’ve got a big community of support, opinions and advice available whenever we need it.
The Most Important Letter in CoP
Cookie Monster may want to fight me on this, but in this case, C is for community. And, to me, that’s the most important letter in the acronym. Because that’s truly what a well-functioning CoP delivers — a sense of community and belonging. The opportunity to share challenges out loud and have those challenges validated by others (“I find that a challenge too!”) and then working together to find a solution is not just comforting, it’s also empowering.
There are endless idioms I could use here (“many hands make light work”; “a rising tide floats all boats”; “teamwork makes the dreamwork”…), but whichever saying you choose, you get the idea — CoPs make all of us better. I can think of no better use of time than that — even if there isn’t an agenda.
