One Understanding Community

There are certain features that are almost universal in healthy communities. While communities have different levels of maturation and sophistication, these features will quickly emerge as communities mature and gain importance. Your success in growing a community will depend on how well you can understand and articulate the following features:

Shared values

Membership identity

Generosity required

Moral prescriptions

Insider understanding

We all want to be part of a group of people who share our values. It doesn’t matter if we dress, behave, work, or consume similarly, or even whether we live in the same area. We want to believe that others value what we value (and disdain what we disdain). Shared values are what attract us to a group in the first place. By understanding how a group develops and expresses values, a leader can help a community mature and grow.

We may seek out a community because of a shared activity or interest, which indicates sharing some value for the activity. But we’ll feel disconnected from such a community if we discover that there aren’t enough shared values. For example, consider CrossFit Oakland (CFO). It’s a fitness training facility and an affiliate of the global CrossFit fitness network, which is known for a particular style of high-intensity work-outs. The CrossFit company that created the network was founded in Northern California in 2000 by Greg Glassman and Lauren Jenai.2 There are now an estimated fifteen thousand affiliate gyms in at least 150 countries. More than three million people do CrossFit in the network around the world.3 The gyms are famous for their strong cultural identity, which includes creating supportive communities that help women get strong alongside men.4

CFO is a local gym founded by Mike Minium. He knows that members may join because the gym offers high-intensity and varied training, but they stay because they feel connected and welcome. The community values health, safety, and respect for personal growth far more than strength, speed, and competitiveness. Members show it in their words and instruction and in their acceptance of people at all levels of physical ability. If you look at CFO’s website, you’ll find this language:

We believe in working hard so you can play outside, play inside, play with your kids, play with your friends, play on vacation, and play your way through life.

We do what we do because we believe it works to get you fitter, stronger and healthier.

We do what we do so that more of you can live longer, healthier, happier, more amazing lives.

We serve you if you want to get in shape and don’t know where to begin.

We serve you if you are seeking quality coaching and a supportive community.5

It may surprise you that there’s belief and service language on a web-site for a fitness center. Their public language clearly shares that they value fitter, stronger, and healthier members. They also value community, health, and those who “don’t know where to begin” (novices). I know from conversations with Mike and from personal visits to CFO gyms that there are also unstated values around honoring the effort of those with the most physical challenges. These include valuing safety, patience, and long-term health rather than near-term performance. CFO is a community because the members don’t just train together, they care for one another. And members will stay because of CFO’s enduring commitment to those values.

Virtually all communities express their values either consciously or unconsciously, and often in both ways. They do it with words on web-sites and in marketing materials, and, far more importantly, they do it with actions. My favorite way to recognize a community’s real values is to see where people put their “warm bodies.” I look for what community members value so much that they put their bodies near it. With CFO, for example, leaders and members spend significant time in the gym, greet new visitors in person, and help new or low-performing athletes with their exercises rather than spending their time only with high performers. Where members put their bodies tells a visitor whether leadership means what it says. You may know groups that say they value generosity, contribution, and cooperation, but you have seen that they’re actually selfish. Most people quickly figure out the truth.

Formalization can destroy a community if values are ignored. When efforts arise to formalize or corporatize a community, there’s often understandable concern that the efforts could destroy the very community they seek to grow. This is why it’s so important to recognize both the explicit and the implicit values that attract and keep members connected. Remember how CFO explicitly values higher performance and a supportive community, and how it implicitly values patience and the efforts of low-performing athletes. Any effort to grow will fail if members sense that the community leadership is neglecting important values or introducing unwelcome ones. For-profit corporations are particularly at risk of this if they value members for their revenue potential (a.k.a. extractive opportunity) rather than for member contribution, value alignment, and mission commitment. Leaving any meaningful portion of core members feeling disconnected or abandoned is a real danger when formalizing or corporatizing a community and can lead to its destruction.

My friend Margaret* has been working for years at a well-known ski resort I’ll call Ski Valley. She told me what happened when a major corporate resort operator took over. The new owners celebrated the “soul” of the resort in their marketing, but their actions eroded the connections, camaraderie, and commitment the staff felt at work. She described how she and her coworkers used to look out for one another. She valued the connection between work lives and social lives, the freedom to improve the operations, and the friendliness of a workplace built for happiness.

That all changed when the new corporate leadership came. The welcome sign at the lodge entrance was replaced with three new signs: No Dogs, No Alcohol, and No Drones. Instead of each department celebrating its holiday parties as it chose, all were invited to a combined 1,500-person event with no intimacy. Now, instead of being able to knock on a manager’s door or chat in the locker room about operational improvements, staff receive instructions from someone miles away. Not only does Margaret miss the opportunity to discuss improvements, she doesn’t even know the name of the decision maker. The values that she appreciated about her work community aren’t expressed there anymore. Margaret said that employees who were fundamentally “do-gooders” have left. Instead of coming to work excited to improve guest experiences, many others just “show up.” I suspect that whatever standards the executives wanted to bring in, they didn’t plan to destroy a culture of vigilant improvement and mutual support.

Communities can have unhealthy implicit values without knowing it. Unhealthy values are those that aren’t serving members and may even restrict connection and enrichment. You’ve probably seen this in a community somewhere. I briefly worked at an elite educational institution where there was an implicit value of demonstrating “effortless brilliance.” Some seemed to love this and showed off their mastery by dazzling others. But many students felt oppressed, fearful, and trapped by this value. They weren’t confident that they had brilliance to share. Often, they wouldn’t say anything aloud for fear that someone else would cut them down and thus demonstrate greater effortless brilliance.

You can imagine how little social connection and enrichment was fostered when students feared speaking. The problem was so severe that several students I knew created their own secret communities to be safe from the inevitable criticism and judgment of their peers. Spiritual and religious communities, in particular, often run into this challenge of unwelcoming implicit values. They may advocate an explicit value of welcoming strangers, but their language (and whom they stand next to) shows that they value their own homogeneity, familiarity, and conformity. It’s largely the disagreement over values and apparent hypocrisy that angers outsiders and prevents visitors from joining for connection.

Because members share values, communities help answer three important questions for members in some way:

Who am I?

How should I act?

What do I believe?

I call this membership identity.

Stop here for a moment and think: How would you describe your community’s membership identity? If your response is that your community doesn’t tell members who they are, what they should do, or what they should believe about anything at any level, then there are two possibilities. First, you’re not really creating a community but only a group. A group may share interests and values, but a community has connections so that members care for the welfare of one another. Second, you’re simply not recognizing the membership identity. Consider why someone would seek you out and what that person hopes to gain as a member. Consider what that person expects of members and leadership, both formal and informal.

For example, if you have a weekend bicycling community, are there ideals that your members hold about bicycling? Perhaps they enjoy biking because it’s good for their health, or because it’s for the brave and adventurous, or because it’s an environmentally friendly outdoor activity. These provide an outline for your community’s identity. Does your community have ideas about how good bicyclists act? (This is often identified by contrasting with how bad bicyclists act.) Do you have ideas about your identity as bicyclists? Do you welcome anyone with a bicycle? At any age or skill level? Will someone preparing for the Tour de France fit in with this community? How about a ten-year-old with a mountain bike? You might answer that anyone who enjoys bicycling is welcome, that you have special events for beginners, others for racers, and others for off-roaders. But would a bicycling police officer recording your group for terrorist surveillance fit in equally well?

The point of these questions is to help you recognize that there may be identities present in your community that are unrecognized and un-stated. It’s important for you to consider them carefully, because there’s a twofold danger to not recognizing them—we may not understand who are the right people for our community or we may ask people to adopt membership identities inconsistent with their own personal values. We will talk more about these below.

First, here are some examples of core values and membership identities shared with me by people I know within supportive communities they cherish.

Melissa recently retired as the first female firefighter captain in New Haven, Connecticut’s history. In her career she ran the busiest firehouse in the city and oversaw two teams. Over the years, she has pulled people out of wrecked cars, responded to shootings, and of course put out fires. She told me that she absolutely has a firefighter community that she knows will respond to her no matter the hour, weather, or emergency. They know that she’ll do the same for them. Here’s how she describes the identity of her personal firefighter community:

There are generally two opposing types of community formation and leadership. The first is what I discuss in this book. I call them enriching communities. They exist to bring people together in ways such that, in participating, the members grow stronger, healthier, and more enriched. My guess is these are the only communities you seek out for yourself.

The second is what I call extractive communities. These are so-called communities where the leaders are overwhelmingly or entirely motivated to get things from members. This usually includes attention, labor, or money (often all three). You probably already know how many of these communities you want to spend your weekends with next year.

This is an important distinction because generosity is a required ingredient for enriching communities. Generosity is what allows the relationships within a community to transcend transaction. Generosity is how we recognize the shared mutual concern for one another. We don’t calculate the cost-benefit payoff for every conversation, favor, or nighttime call for help. We’ll discuss generosity in greater detail in part 3.

When I visit a new community, I look to see how and where members extend generosity. This is what I called the “warm body” sign earlier in the section about how values bind a community together. If I can’t find generosity, then I suspect the relationships are held together with transactional agreements. This is often not fun, and it almost never delivers the rewards of a real community.

A community provides moral prescriptions on how members should behave and treat others. The community may not provide prescriptions for all areas of morality, but it will for those areas that relate to the community’s core values. The morals may be unidentified, seldom discussed, or unacknowledged, but you’ll see them clearly if you ask these questions:

What and whom do we protect?

What is intolerable?

What do we share?

With whom do we share?

Whom do we respect?

How do we show respect?

When you think of communities that have fallen apart or eroded, you may think of activities that betrayed the community’s values and moral prescriptions, whether or not the values or moral prescriptions were clearly articulated. For example, the revelations of child abuse in the Catholic Church eroded respect for the church not only because children were abused but also because perpetrators were apparently protected and justice for the victims was denied. This is opposed to the church’s stated values of serving all church members and honoring justice.

If your group does anything together or supports members in participating in any activity, it’s almost certain that the community advocates certain moral prescriptions. For example, even in a bicycling group there are prescriptions on how morally responsible bicyclists (us!) behave in contrast to others (them!). How restrictive the prescriptions are depends on the community. Many leaders do not recognize that their communities offer moral prescriptions. It sounds too restrictive. But even violent criminal gangs have moral prescriptions about behavior that influence how members honor one another, their leaders, and others important to the community. A member who violates those prescriptions risks being expelled from the gang, and perhaps much worse. As a leader, you may never need to write out standards for community behavior (moral prescriptions). But a time may come when they need to be articulated. Don’t be afraid. Such standards are what define strong communities. As long as the prescriptions truly reflect the shared values of your community, members will be enthusiastic about them. Communities provide moral prescriptions consistent with their values.

One of the great pleasures of being part of a community is that we don’t have to explain ourselves as we do to outsiders. We are seen and understood, without having to explain the parts that outsiders don’t recognize. We feel more comfortable and safer within the community because of this baseline understanding. In the outside world, it may be less clear that we and our values are understood and accepted. We don’t want to have to explain terms or recap the history and fundamentals of our field. We want to come together and share our values and skills.

The important part of insider understanding is the emotional or “internal” understanding. This is understanding about how it feels for insiders and the values that drive choices, no matter how hard, easy, fun, painful, scary, or noble it looks to outsiders. For example, in Weight Watchers communities, there’s confidence that members understand and value the struggle required to maintain a healthy body weight. Firefighters understand both what experiences are dangerous and why they are so, and they share the emotional reality of living through them. They also understand the love of the job that comes from saving people in life-threatening situations. In communities where patients with similar diagnoses and challenges connect, they feel enormous relief that everyone in the room or conversation understands the fears, challenges, discomfort, and elation that come with their own journey.

My favorite example comes from my retired firefighter friend Melissa, who explained to me that her colleagues have a dark sense of humor that may come from regular exposure to mortal challenges. The humor is a kind of release for them. When outsiders are present, even the firefighters’ spouses, the conversation is not as comfortable and the language is not as free. She knows that with firefighters she can say things that would be jarring to outsiders yet respectful to crewmates who share her experience.

I’m hopeful that these past few pages have opened some insight into how and why the communities you already cherish stick together. You may have seen something new that helps you articulate something that has previously remained unsaid. This may be something your community already values or an understanding you share. In naming it, you may gain clarity on why you are together and understand who is looking for you so they can grow what you’ve started. Whatever you grow, it will stand on this originating core of identity.