Let Your Passion Guide You
Characteristics of a Community of Practice:
- Each community membership is self-administered; people join because they want to join. Although training is mandatory, participation in a CoP is not. Since membership is voluntary, the members must be treated like volunteers.
- Membership spans all layers and silos of the organization and even outside the organization to suppliers, customers and other business units.
- Communication is unfettered by anything except appropriate business professionalism.
- People are rewarded for their contribution to each community. Rather than limiting financial reward to what a worker or his/her team attains, the contributing worker is rewarded based on what the whole community attains.
- The CoP helps to capture and codify what the organization itself ‘knows’ beyond the individual contributor.
- CoPs leverage meta-competencies (competencies that build other competencies) such as problem-solving, to build core competencies.
- Respect for all participants regardless of performance or place in the hierarchy; all participants get recognition for their contribution
The major output (deliverable) of an effective Community of Practice is creating a CoP for each strategic objective. Creating a CoP for each strategic objective within the organization provides a starting point for peer (individual) and corporate (collective) learning. Over time, CoPs will develop around specific issues/problems. People from the top executive offices to the service delivery people gain and provide tremendous learning for the whole organization.
Simply stated…
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” – Etienne Wenger
Our next few posts will look at the kinds of roles in a CoP.
January 14th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Thumper’s Blog…
Very nice post. I’d like to link back to it from my new blog. Thanks….