I’ve been reflecting a lot on my salaried role building community at Sseko (now merged with Noonday) starting in 2015 - being managed, managing people, and the transition to start consulting. More to come on this, but for now here’s five things I would go back and do differently if I could.
1. Reframe the relationship with my brand and manager
I would have sent my manager this article (it’s a bit hefty, but I HIGHLY recommend this read!) and asked to have a conversation about how we could build an alliance. I would have asked how my time at Sseko could have the biggest impact on the company. And I would have boldly asked my manager to support me and my ambitions.
2. Find a community of people in my role
When I was building community, I existed in an isolated silo. I didn’t even THINK to look to connect with people who might be running ambassador programs for other brands. If I did, I thought it might be construed as competition. I also felt like any time not spent executing on my own programs wouldn’t be supported by my management or viewed as worth the time it was taking away from my execution. I wish I would have have asked for it and been willing to articulated the value in connecting with peers.
3. Ask for a coach/consultant/mentor
If I could go back, I would have done this WAY earlier. I had zero experience building a community when I came into the field, which meant I learned a lot, but groping around in the dark for so long was extremely unnecessary.
4. Get a virtual assistant
This one sounds funny to do as a salaried employee, but I wish I would have asked for it. If my employer was really interested in empowering me to do better work for our community rather than being in the weeds all day, they would listen. Anything I did more than once I would have passed on to a virtual assistant and freed up more time for building connections with members, designing training, and other programs. Or maybe I would have just used the extra space freed up from a virtual assistant to have some well-deserved rest and better boundaries so I could show up better in my role. There's a novel idea!
5. Craft careful experiments
In my execution, I wish I would have tracked our programs and experiments more carefully and in a framework that’s easy for others to understand (ie. easy for me to turn into stories and case studies for potential clients in the future!)
Here's a recipe for a good experiment:
We wanted to learn if _______(hypothesis)_____. So over the course of ___(timeframe)___, we ___(explain the experiment)___. We discovered _______.
6. Post 1x a week on LinkedIn with something we learned.
I think we can all say we wish we started posting interesting content on LinkedIn earlier. I wish I had carved out time for one post a week to talk share about:
something a team member did that was awesome and helped me grow
a mistake I made and what I learned
what I’m working on and the questions I’m wrestling with
7. Crafted a monthly personal newsletter, practicing building in public
It's not enough to simply become more visible on social media. Collecting owned email addresses and practicing how to create value in their inboxes starts now. Hindsight is 20/20, but even if I never went on to become a community consultant, I know I would have benefited from the practice writing one newsletter a month about what I was learning and building in my community. Becoming a better writer is something that takes practice and building the habit of creating empathy and establishing authority in the inbox is something I wish I did sooner.
Each of these seven points would not only have made me better at my job, they would also helped me start exercising the muscles I would need for a consulting.
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