Creating Community is Key to Organizational Wellbeing and Profitability

Practices to strengthen community within your organization and drive engagement

Lyndon Rego

Is your organization a community? Should it be one? I spent more than a decade working within organizations on leadership and culture. I am now working on building community in an entire city. In my learning about creating community, I draw on a number of concepts from my time in Africa.

Let’s begin with what makes a community. There are three core elements that characterize a thriving community:

• Mission: The people within share a common place and purpose
• Connection: Employees feel connected and interact frequently
• Collaboration: Staff help each other in times of need

Most organizations can easily check the first bullet; they have a defined purpose and operate in a shared place. Not all organizations, however, reflect the second and third attributes. With greater mobility and technology, the bonds of community in organizations have frayed. We can become isolated and alienated. Our capacity for collaboration decreases and collective productivity drops. Leadership, after all, is a team sport.

When the work requires collaboration across groups, the lack of relationships gets in the way. We may feel a strong connection with our direct team members but may not know much about the people down the hall in another department. When connection and commitment to others are weak, we are less willing to respond to their needs and requests.

So if a sense of community is beneficial to organizations, how do we build a stronger sense of kinship and community? The thing is that communities don’t just emerge when you put people together. They need to be cultivated. Here are some simple practices to build community in your office drawn from practices I encountered in Africa.

Humanize interactions. Take time to greet people. The simple act of saying hello and offering a smile matters. In South Africa, people greet each other with Sawubona. It translates as “I see you.” People who are seen, feel like they matter.

Cultivate connection. In Botswana there is the tradition of Tirisano or working together. A common practice is the Kgotla where people gather to discuss issues. In the Kgotla, everyone may speak and everyone is heard. Traditionally the chief speaks last, after everyone else is heard. Communities need interaction and these are not served by dreary meetings, often chaired and led by the ‘chief’. More later about the positive kinds of interactions that build community.

Incent collaboration. With a sense of connection, we are more willing to help others. A traditional practice in Kenya is Harambee. When people in a village need help, they might put a pot outside their door and their neighbors fill it up with what they can. Helping one another in times of need cements the bonds of community.

This sense of kinship can be hard to accomplish in distributed organizations where people operate from multiple locations and often don’t have a chance to meet in person. At the consulting firm, McKinsey, there is a knowledge resource directory that lists the expertise of people. When a colleague is looking for help in a specific area, they can locate someone else somewhere in the organization who is an expert in that area and send them a message. The culture requires that these requests are responded within a day and rewards them for sharing. Being a person whose expertise is in demand is a mark of pride.

Build culture with rituals. An organization with a strong culture has a set of practices for how people engage. At the African Leadership Group, there is a focus on creating rituals. The all-organization meeting is called an Assembly. It is seen as an important event and is carefully planned with a mix of presentations and celebrations that are hosted by a facilitator — a task that is rotated among staff and cherished. No two Assemblies are the same and people look forward to the experience, much as we might a party.

Cultivate gratitude. Harvard Business School reports that “those who perceive greater affection and caring from their colleagues perform better.” Africa has a rich tradition of praise-singing. African Leadership University (ALU) has adapted a wonderful way to celebrate people, person to person. The tradition, common at big annual gatherings, is the gratitude waterfall. People are armed with two cups, one filled and one empty. They mingle pouring from their full cup into the empty cup of others offering words of appreciation for what they have experienced from them. This, as you might imagine, creates an outpouring of positive emotion that cements bonds.

An organization with a strong community culture creates mechanisms for people to connect and collaborate. This is considered an important facet of getting work done and not left to chance. If your company lacks these kinds of practices, it may be tempting to turn this over this responsibility over to the human relations department. This may be a mistake because HR may not be equipped to do the social weaving that community building requires. Rather look for people who are natural connectors and socializers in the organization and give them the task of creating high-energy rituals. Make sure that senior leaders formally participate in these practices sending the signal that they matter.

Over time, these practices will find their natural flow and become embedded and part of your organization. With it will come bonds of camaraderie across the organization that creates thriving and wellbeing. This, in turn, will fuel job satisfaction, increased collaboration, improved customer service, and greater profitability. Because when people feel seen and cared for by others, they care more and do more for others in turn. Isn’t that what every company wants?

About the author: Lyndon Rego is the chief catalyst for CoMetta. He previously headed the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the African Leadership University and led innovation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). At CCL, he initiated a global effort that extended leadership development to half-a-million people in 30 countries.