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5 People Who Can Turn Your Community into a Focused Influence Network

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It More Than What Naturally Occurs

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I sat at Brogan’s Roast earlier this month and the thought struck me how much we depend on each other. No one would question that our friend, Chris, enjoys the friendship of thousands of folks who would stand by him and help whenever he needs it. All you had to do was be there to feel the expanse of love in the room coming from the countless people who are in his massive network of colleagues, friends, coworkers, family and people who consider him their teacher.

Numbers like that can provide a huge pool of energy when you want to help a cause, make something happen, or move an idea across the internet. Certainly that’s true. But knowing a lot of people and even having a lot of people who know you is not the same as having a strategic network. To be strategic, we have to look how we the sort of individuals in our networks into groups. How we sort our networks into groups can support or thwart our goals. Our choices in mentally forming those groups inform our decisions about who we listen to and what we do.

Most people consciously or unconsciously group their community in an outward fashion. If you ask, they can see how the community becomes part of what they do. Who are the people in your community groups?

  • Chris will always have people who are like him, those who aspire to be like them, and those who can’t or won’t ever do the work to get where he is or is going to..
  • Cult leaders see their community as those who spread the message, those who follow the message, those ready to be converted.
  • Builders see their community as those who provide resources and funding, those use the tools, and those who buy and use what they build.
  • Financial analysts see their community in three groups: those who can count and those who can’t. (and the rare group who notices that was only two.)

That sort of grouping naturally occurs in any community group.
It takes more — 5 particular types of people — to turn that community into a focused influence network.

5 People Who Can Turn Your Community into a Powerful Influence Network

Strategy looks at building something with thought and opportunity to strengthen the network and build a well-rounded group. Rather than looking who shows up in an outward fashion. Strategy builds with a plan of action. Strategy chooses five types of people who can provide infrastructure and stability that power the network with information and communication when we want our networks to help that cause, make that something happen, or move that idea across the internet.

Look at successful leaders — people you think of as influencers and people who enjoy repeat success. They’ve gone past community to developed information channels. They have skills at collecting and managing their contacts. They also include five kinds of people in their networks to keep the systems working fluidly and with balance. Can you spot these five in the successful communities you know?

  • Leaders – Leaders exemplify the vision and clearly articulate the mission. In a company or community, they live the brand. Leaders know where we’re going and what to do when the unforeseen appears. Leaders are masters at integrating information into a whole picture and communicating how nuance of a small change might or might not affect an overall plan.
  • Scouts and Guides – Scouts know the terrain that must be covered. They keep an eye on the competitive ground. They understand and translate new territories. They know where the shortest paths can be found. They see the possible opportunities, pitfalls, and possibilities for ambush.
  • Sleuths and Spotters – Sleuths are fascinated by changes that dicrupt and catch fire. They stay close to the competitive edge, monitoring what is becoming popular. They’re first to know that a new tool is gaining traction and the first to try it. More than early-adopters they gather the global intelligence of the group to report on the fever behind the trend.
  • Insighters – Insighters are the perceptive and well-connected people who can give you the inside scoop and insight into how an influencer or decision-maker might view a situation. Their skills are particularly useful when someone’s decision or response to your actions might affect you in significant ways.
  • System Pros – Systems pros know every detail of a particular system and every role that make it work. They ensure fluid, efficient operation and tend to potential breaks before they occur. Systems pros are driven to tweak the system to constantly and consistently meet and exceed the goals of the network to reach out in connection and communication and gather information to improve performance overall.

It takes a focused team to manage the firehouse flow of information that comes at us from every direction. It takes that same kind of focus to deliver on a promise of service that will scale beyond the one Chris Brogan or even that brand team that might want to be everywhere doing everything in the best way we know. The people who celebrated this guy we all admire and love came in many types and play many roles in the community that is Team Brogan. We’d all be wise to find a few of those types to support us too.

If you look in your community, I bet you’ll find that you’ve got a few of them already there. How will you introduce yourself and invite them into your brand?

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

4 Essential Elements to Deliver Consistently Repeatable Success

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Can You Articulate What Makes Success?

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Once, at least once in your life, you succeed at something big. You learned to read. You graduated. You built something, won something, proved you could do something well and elegant. You stood up for something believed in. You held a friend’s hand through the night. You were part of a winning team. Your team brought in a project in a way that only your team can.

You know the feeling of succeeding. Everyone does.
But can you articulate what made that success?
Can you repeat it, consistently achieve it, and deliver success with confidence?

4 Essential Elements to Consistently Achieve and Deliver Repeatable Success

Success relies on a four important characteristics to be realized – the right mind, the right heart, the right skills and talents, and the right focus and passion in the right direction. How do we align all of these “rights” in a truly successful combination?

  • The right mind – The decided outcome was clear. Success was defined in clear concrete terms. You named it and were determined to claim it.
  • The right heart – The currency was trust not fear. The idea that you or your team wouldn’t succeed wasn’t even on the radar. Getting to the goal was just the plan.
  • The right skills and talents – The chosen challenge was at the right level. Peak performance comes when the challenge stretches us just enough to keep us from being bored without causing anxiety.You played to your strengths. You took advantage of opportunities.
  • The right focus in the right direction – Obstacles, distractions, and roadblocks were irrelevant. When we have our entire focus and passion on the prize, those things that might have sabotaged, undercut, or sidetracked was simply another detail to deal with or ignore on the way to success. If we look back, every roadblock and obstacle to a true success seems like a learning experience, an adventure, or a quest that made the hero’s journey more valuable in our eyes.

Let me say that as clearly as I can. I’m willing to bet that …
Every time you succeeded, just as many obstacles and roadblocks found their way to your path as every time you tried something and left it unfinished.

Those four essential elements of success are all you need to repeat the success that you’ve enjoyed in the past. Everything else — the people, the resources, the money, the business plan, the whatever you might mention — depends on the four that I just named.

We have to know a few things, believe a few things, and take on our path fearlessly. It’s a matter of commitment of head, heart, talent, and focused passion to achievement. Or as my husband just said, “No victory is won by the side that is only willing to fight until it hurt a little bit.”

Which of the four essential elements do you need most to achieve and deliver consistently repeatable success?

Be irresistible,
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Be a Magnet Not a Missionary

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When Your Values Are Baked Into Your Value Proposition

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At SxSW this year, I enjoyed a deep conversation with Dave Fleet @DaveFleet about the new offer that Terry St. Marie (@Starbucker) and I are launching. I was telling him how we’re applying the SOBCon models and masterminds method to build high-performance leadership influence teams who

  • guide their decision making with high loyalty customer values and a high ROI value proposition.
  • get to innovative ideas through that balanced customer-company foundation.
  • can make that innovation reality through influence — by showing the benefit of doing it to peer employees, senior managers, and customers

Needless to say I was quite passionate. I’ve been working on getting this enterprise offer exactly right for about 3 years.

Then Dave said something like this to me, “So who will be your key market? I would think that with so many companies in Chicago you might never have to leave.”

I said, “My market will be people, like you, who get what I’m saying as quickly as you did.”

Be a Magnet Not a Missionary

What being in an emerging market like social media and building an event like SOBCon has taught me is that I’d rather be a magnet than a missionary.

According to Dictionary.com, a missionary is “a person strongly in favor of a program, set of principles, etc., who attempts to persuade or convert others.” He or she has to educate, evangelize, relay information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold those beliefs.

A missionary considers every person in a given group or location a possible client and thus, has to turn disinterested folks, nonbelievers, and skeptics into converts. The very nature of disinterested, nonbelieving, and skeptical folks is that they don’t value or trust what the missionary does. They aren’t likely to pay for what they didn’t want, don’t trust, and didn’t value from the start.

The missionary has to offer a new belief system that gives disinterested folks, nonbelievers, and skeptics a reason to want to convert. At the same time that missionary has to establish a relationship of trust and communicate the value of his or her work. If the missionary succeeds, it’s a sale, but that’s only the first battle. Converts don’t always stay converted especially in times of stress. When a crisis occurs or difficult decision crops up, the missionary has to do the conversion work over again.

A magnet has a much easier time. According to the World Dictionary, a magnet is a person or thing that exerts a great attraction. We find people who think in the same ways we do attractive and smart (and those who don’t think as we do are less attractive because they seem to be not so smart or are being difficult.)

When we have an offer we believe in our bones that we can deliver with highest standards to the benefit of the people we serve, the folks who understand their needs and value what we offer will recognize it immediately. No conversion necessary. If you take the magnet metaphor seriously, it’s our unlike poles — our solution to their need — that forms the true bond. However it’s the magnetic field of immediately clear communication, like values, aligned standards and goals that attracts the ones that fit and repels those that don’t.

A magnetic person only shares his or her offer with people he or she respects and trusts. When someone of value joins the conversation it’s easy to mention there’s a new offer and let the other person open the door. Then the conversation isn’t about conversion or education, it’s an invitation. The magnet can learn more about the valued friend’s needs and goals, and the valued friend can learn more about what the offer is. The trust and open communication leads to a variety of connections that might be moving forward on that offer, new introductions and referrals, or entirely new ideas that spark in the moment.

Magnets Win

If you have to convince or convert someone to work with you, you’ll be convincing and converting every time you make a decision. If you have to explain why what you do is valuable and worth the price more than once, move on.

It’s easier, faster, more meaningful to be a magnet. And the people attracted to what you do actually value your work. A magnet starts with a bond of trust that a missionary doesn’t. The client who values and trusts you will value your work and trust your decisions. That’s why the client who doesn’t value and trust you is always more work (and never worth the price of admission no matter where you set it.)

Is your business thinking like a magnet or a missionary?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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How Will You Find Out Whether Your Community Is Bored, Broken, or Inspired to Take on the World?

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(Updated in 2020)

10-POINT PLAN: Assessing and Setting a Benchmark

Finding Out Before You Start

Ever asked someone to change something she’s been doing for years? It’s not the easiest endeavor. Even when we hate what we’re doing it’s become comfortable to us. For some people in some circumstances, it might even be part of our identity. Change is heady stuff.

No matter the value of the reward. It comes with the thought, “maybe the situation I’m leaving is somehow better. I wonder …”

One way to overcome the psychology of change is to measure.

Measurement proves to the people involved that the change is providing the progress that was promised, even when the progress only feels like work.

But before we can measure progress, we have know where we are when we start.

How to Benchmark Who’s Bored, Who’s Broken and Who’s Inspired to Take on the World

It’s an art and a science to gather the people who help our businesses thrive into a true community.

A community isn’t built or befriended. It’s connected by offering and accepting.
Community is affinity, identity, and kinship that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions.
Wherever a community gathers, we aspire and inspire each other intentionally . . . And our words shine with authenticity.

How do we know whether any of this is truly happening? How do might we benchmark our community connections before we start moving forward?

Evaluating Individual Relationships

A few years ago, Gallup came up with the q12, a 12 question survey to measure employee engagement. Though they were intended for employees, they work well for any person, any barn raiser involved in creating a working community — employee, manager, vendor, partner, customer, friend of the business. Here they are:

  1. Do you know what is expected of you at work?
  2. Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
  3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
  4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  5. Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
  7. At work, do your opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
  9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do you have a best friend at work?
  11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
  12. In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

In the Q12 test it becomes easier to see which points of performance are being frustrated by resources and which are being frustrated by personnel issues.

Evaluating Social Relationships and Networks

When the q12 is paired with a simple informal social test called a sociogram, we can lay out an important picture. A sociogram points out channels of influence, communication, and interaction. Simple questions such as

  • Which person would you ask to teach you something new?
  • Which person would you ask to attend or a gathering of your friends?
  • Which person would you want to offer you a recommendation on the quality of your work?

Those choice that receive many choices are stars. Those who receive none are isolates. Groups who mutually choose each other have formed cliques.

Whether we’re working with few freelancers, a team, or a corporation having firm idea of where we stand before we move forward is ideal. If we find someone from outside the system — someone who looks something like me, easy to talk with and sure to keep thing confidential, we can learn by using these two two sets of questions how people feel about the community that is forming. We’ll draw an idea of how bored, broken or inspired the community might be.We’ll be well on our way to pick out the champions who can pick up the tools and begin building new things with us.

They will raise a barn, not work away as they build our coliseum.

What are you doing to find out whether your community is bored, broken, or inspired to take on the world?

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

7 Steps to a Vision that Grabs a Community by Its Soul

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(Updated in 2020)

10-POINT PLAN: 1.2 Articulate the Vision

CommunityPhoto by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Why Have a Vision?

Last week, I wrote Why You Absolutely Must Share Your Vision Early and Often. Now, it’s about the how-to.

Imagine three corporations that build and sell computers for small business and entrepreneurs. Each corporation defines its business in a different way.

Brand A says: Our company is in the business of making products for consumers who need them. We do the work they can’t do and offer it at a fair price.

Brand B says: We’ve are the leader in quality, creative solutions to the complex technology problems that entrepreneurs and small business owners face today. We make it our business to know their problems and to find a way to solve them. We deliver on our promises and we’re committed to staying the best in the industry.

Brand C says: We are a network of deep and strategic partnerships with employees, vendors, partners, and small businesses leaders who work together to build products and work environments that inspire and generate creativity, competence, performance, and trust and to create jobs and solutions that build the economy now and for future generations.

Brand C is the description that connects the company to every person on the planet.

How Does Vision Attract Community?

The vision is more than the mission. It’s the destination drawn clearly so that every member of the new community can see it, understand it, speak about it with passion, and believe that it will happen. The vision is not a product devised and made by a crowd or a committee. It’s a leadership decision — the original strategy expanded with thought and design to elevate it to a higher calling.

The vision is the cause that attracts and unites the people of the community. It why they invest tireless hours and best efforts — because they are building …

  • something that makes an important difference;
  • something that no other company is building;
  • something that needs every individual’s unique contribution
  • something that no one individual could build alone.

The vision isn’t a dream. It’s a work in progress … a group aspiration in the true sense of it’s definition, breathing toward. The vision gives the community a why for why they are investing the time of their lives each day into this work. The vision is more than economic, more than profession, it is a commitment to accomplish something meaningful in the world.

7 Steps to Communicating a Vision that Grabs Folks by the Soul

If you’re looking to build a thriving business, start with a long-term, loyal internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers. What better way to build a brand than to agree upon the values that you stand for and create an environment that nurtures brand ambassadors?

It takes the right vision to attract the right people to that kind of community culture. When we meet the best people, we have to tell them about that vision, or how will they see it? Here are 7 steps to articulating a clear vision.

    1. Think contribution. Think partnerships. Re-imagine your team or your business at this highest, most useful place in the world — financially, professionally, and philosophically. Talk through what you see with people you trust until you have a image, a vision, of what that business offers to employees, partners, vendors, and customers.
      We’re inviting the highest quality people who have a stake in teaching and learning technology to join together in building products, services, and opportunities that show other people how business can work better for customers.
    2. Think ideal membership. Make the vision irresistible: smart, feelingful, and life-changing on a world-scale.
      We’re only interested in the best minds, best designs, and the best problem solvers with the highest values. We’re going to align our goals and build stable, successful, ethical business models that freely give support to fledgling business in depressed areas to create an economy that helps us all grow.
    3. Think contributions and returns. Find the words to describe it simply in ways that others can see the value of what you’re going for.
      We’re building the business that listens, learns, contributes, and invests in the people who help it thrive — it will be the business that people want to work with and for — the sort where every person makes a difference.
    4. Think recruitment. Be able to speak to the benefits of being a part.
      One benefit is that under-achievers and those who will sacrifice anything to raise the bottom line won’t want to work here.
    5. Think champions and heroes. Invite the people who see the vision to be involved in highly visible ways. Talk about what they’re doing encourage them to talk too.

The communications team has started a newletter for partners and vendors working with inner city high school enterpreneurs. Let us know if you want to volunteer.

  1. Think honest communication. Talk publicly to everyone in as many ways as you can — live your message.
    I’ll be listening to the folks who have experience where I don’t. I’ll be looking to learn from you how to do this better. That includes everyone I know.
  2. Think evangelism and growth. Invite people to pass on the vision and the invitation.
    Who else belongs here? Tell us.

It’s not the how or what of work that builds community. It’s the why. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.

Once the community sees the vision and realizes that leadership commitment. People who share those values will pick up the message, the tools, and the passion to contribute to the cause. The culture will grow from their actions.

Humans are wired to be deeply inspired by causes greater than ourselves. To inspire a community to invest its soul, we have to show them why we’re willing to invest our own.

Have you really communicated your vision? Are there ways you might make it clearer to the people who can help it thrive?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Reasons You Absolutely MUST Share Your Vision Early and Often

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(Updated in 2020)

10-POINT PLAN: 1.1 Articulate the Vision

Why Define the Vision?

Tom Peters says that a business either supports the over-achievers or the under-achievers. The ones who feel supported call up their friends to say “This is a great place to work!” The other group feels unappreciated and leaves. My experience has shown over and over again that this is true. A business reinforces gets the behaviors it reinforces through its models and processes.

Zappos is a great case study in a how to build a internal community of brand loyal fans. What makes the Zappos culture uniquely strong and attractive is the commitment they make to the core values of the community. The vision is articulated clearly and acted upon in highly visible ways.

“Everyone that’s hired, it doesn’t matter what position–you can be an accountant, lawyer, software developer–goes through the exact same training as our call center reps. It’s a four-week training program and then they’re actually on the phone for two weeks taking calls from customers. At the end of that first week of training we make an offer to the entire class that we’ll pay you for the time you’ve already spent training plus a bonus of $2,000 to quit and leave the company right now.” — Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos, as interviewed in Fast Company, The Happiness Culture …

They pay new employees to leave!

It’s Not How Or What … It’s Why That’s Important

Zappos says that it’s not a company it’s a mission — the Happiness Culture. That says something about who they are and why they do what they’re doing. Read the the core values of the Zappos culture.

The Zappos Core Values are:

  1. Deliver Wow Through Service
  2. Embrace and Drive Change
  3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
  4. Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded
  5. Pursue Growth and Learning
  6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
  7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
  8. Do More with Less
  9. Be Passionate and Determined
  10. Be Humble

They explain why people work there, why people do business there, and why people talk and write about them.

Tony Hsieh has articulated, built, and protects the community values that make Zappos a great place to work and a great company to work with. No wonder Zappos has such a huge and love-them loyal fan base.

That vision built a company in an enviable position. There is Zappos! and the companies who wish they had what Zappos does.

It’s Not the What or How, It’s the HUGE WHY Behind It

Leaders know where they’re going — direction and vision. They know how they will get there — a strategy and tactics. Leaders who are community builders articulate that direction and strategy with intelligence and resolve, with clarity and passion, and through a generous invitation for collaboration.

At the core of community building are three key understandings:

  1. A community-building business offers financial, professional, and philosophical/political growth for the community. As we invest our time and resources, a thriving community and its members become more successful at earning income / revenue, gain more visibility and professional authority within their industry, and know that their work has meaning and contributes to a higher purpose.
  2. A community-building business looks to align goals rather than trade services. Communities collaborate and communicate to raise a barn. Gone are the hierarchies and silos that used to negotiate to build a coliseum. The difference is in shared ownership of ideas, interactive problem solving, and commitment to the vision. Invest in people and they will return the investment.
  3. A community-building business knows that the people doing the work know what’s working and what isn’t. The exact interpretation of how the HUGE WHY vision is put into action is defined at the team level. Teams discuss and design simple decision models based on the agreed upon core values. As a result, people at every level know how to respond to new situations with positive action.

The vision of where a community-building business is gone draws from those three understandings. It’s good to know them, but it’s not enough.

5 Reasons You Absolutely MUST Articulate Your Vision

It’s critical to put the three key understanding of community building into action by defining and sharing a distinct vision. The vision sets the value of the business and the higher purpose that attracts and unites the community. It defines the internal brand and affects everything from hiring decisions to how employees treat customers.

Here are 5 reasons you absolutely must share your vision early and as often as you can:

  1. To make the thinking concrete and achievable. We all know things better when we have to communicate them. By articulating our vision, we internalize our commitment, begin to know it, and see the reality and flaws our thinking.
  2. To fulfill your leadership responsibility. It’s the role and responsibility of the community leader to define the reality of the community. The vision is and will be what attracts and retains the best employees, vendors, partners, and customers as part of the community.
  3. To visibly underscore the community values. Once the vision is articulated, the core values of the community can be listed, illustrated, discussed and integrated into every part of the business.
  4. To unify the community around one well-defined vision. Without a well-articulated vision, each community manager and member will be forced to make his or her own definition of what the community stands for and how those values are best incorporated into decision making.
  5. To empower and protect the community. In the same way that a budget or a schedule allows people to make decisions with confidence, the definition of the vision allows people to make decisions. A strong vision statement lends confidence to people who want to do the right things for the business.

A loyal internal community is a huge advantage. Every employee becomes a brand ambassador who invests emotionally in building the community as well as the company. Even in a solo practice, not to set your vision is to leave yourself in a place where your idea of where you’re is open to redefinition and loss of focus far too easily.

The strongest businesses know where they’re going and can share that with confidence and clarity. Yet too often we assume that folks understand the importance of where we’re going and why we’re going there. We have to share our vision or folks won’t see it and believe it’s going to happen.

Have you set the vision for your business? Is it HUGE enough to include everyone who helps your business thrive?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

–ME “Liz” Strauss