Title: Conversational Leadership Café: What is communityship?
Date: Wednesday, 13th July 2022
Time: 14:00 to 16:00 London time
Host/Speaker: David Gurteen
Location: Online Zoom Event
Price: Free
Registration: Please register on Eventbrite
Introduction
This event is one in a series of online Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership run on the Zoom video conferencing platform.
Each Café is themed on material from my online blook on Conversational Leadership.
Before each Café, I may ask you to do a little homework and read one or more posts in my blook relating to the theme.
If you are not familiar with the Knowledge Café concept, this event is participatory. It is NOT a webinar.
I will speak about the following theme of this Café and pose a question to trigger the conversation. We will then divide into break-out rooms for three rounds of small group conversations followed by a whole group conversation.
Theme: What is Communityship?
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 really 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.
How would you define communityship and how would you nurture it?
Reading Material
Please read this post in my blook on the subject if you have the time, as it will help set the context for the conversation. It is not a prerequisite.
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