In this Café, I introduce Henry Mintzberg’s concept of Communityship. I then initiate a conversation to explore the concept more deeply and how we might practice it.
Theme: Communityship
Format: Knowledge Café
Delivery: Face-to-face or Zoom
Duration: 120, 90 or 60 minutes
Introduction
This Café is one in a series of Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership that I run face-to-face, on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Each Café is themed on material from my online blook on Conversational Leadership.
If you are unfamiliar with the Knowledge Café concept, this event is participatory, though I can run it as a webinar.
Theme
In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Rebuilding Companies as Communities, Henry Mintzberg talks about a concept called communityship. This is what he says about the idea:
How can you recognize communityship?
That’s easy. You have found it when you walk into an organization and are struck by the energy in the place, the personal commitment of the people and their collective engagement in what they are doing.
These people don’t have to be formally empowered because they are naturally engaged. The organization respects them so they respect it.
They don’t live in mortal fear of being fired en mass because some “leader” hasn’t made his or her numbers.
Imagine an economy made up of such organizations.
But interestingly, he doesn’t define it.
Unlike leadership, with communityship, we are not talking about a single person but a group of people — a community where everyone takes responsibility and sees leadership as a practice, not as a position of authority – one where everyone practices leadership.
This is how I currently define communityship:
Communityship is where everyone in a community takes responsibility for the community as a whole, practices leadership, and works together towards a set of common goals.
Format
In this Café, I talk about the theme for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the participants and the time available, and then pose the Café question
How should we define and practice communityship?
We then go into Café mode.
Reading Material
This post in my blook is optional reading material for the participants before or after the Café.