Community: an opportunity for teams and their leaders

In these times of transformation, corporate attention tends to be on digital tools, platforms, dashboards, analytics, budgets, timeframes, business models, ROI and an inordinate amount of technical detail.

Our instinct seems to be that systems will solve all our woes. But leaders will tell you that successful change occurs when people in the business are “on the bus”. So why is it that conversations about digital transformation focus on systems first and people as an afterthought?

Think about it: in the new connected world, successful publishers rely more than ever on collaboration between the people on the inside (editors, community managers) and those on the outside (readers, authors, bloggers). People-passion is at the heart of community and, yet we fail to take the time to open it up and overhaul the moving parts.

Transitioning a traditional book publisher from a book-centric business to a community-centric business requires something special: leadership at every level of the business, regardless of job function; leadership instilled right across the workforce.

Meeting the needs of community is a collective game that requires the entire business to be outward facing. That scale of change means rethinking, resetting and re-configuring business practices and the roles of every employee. Core transformation is about refocusing the entire publishing activity to align with new goals, a larger playing field, new forms of distribution and marketing,  a bigger more aggressive competitor environment and the consumption and buying habits of a new generation of media consumers.

Setting the vision for this level of strategic leadership, and planning the operational outcomes is a job for leaders and their leadership teams. It starts at the top with a new vision for the business and it drives down to the teams who, in turn, take ownership of the vision and enact the changes needed to achieve the newly defined goals of the business. To ignore this process of resetting the business in its entirety is tantamount to suicide. Leaders not doing enough, not being rigorous and exacting enough in this process of core change and not moving fast enough to redefine the focus and practices of their business will fail their staff and fail their communities.

However, the leadership team can only go so far. Staff need to step up and seize the opportunities that are being presented to them and avoid hanging on to outmoded practices. The job of change is a collective process of immense learning and discovery.

For leaders and their teams, everything begins with an understanding of community and the new role and place of content within the new media environment. The good news is that, as publishers, we already have some of the most sociable and creative minds around, and this talent can easily be transitioned to the new media world. The focus across the business needs to adjust from being book-centric to people-centric.

For this, team members require a 360- degree pan optic view of the new media environment and their roles in it; only then can they truly start to engage with the breadth and length of opportunity that emerges from a community-centric publishing model.

Educating teams on the diminishing scarcity of expert content and, working alongside them, to expose ways in which the disruption is affecting the traditional publishing model garners a desire for action. This is why, when drawing on employee knowledge, leaders will see their teams quickly put forward initiatives that address the need to change business practices, job functions and collaborative workflows. Discussion will uncover new opportunity and business practices to make money from community. Everything the business does will begin to be viewed under a different angle: through the lens of community, not the lens of book making.

What changes in a team is seeing and accepting that we are no longer in the business of publishing books and, that challenged revenues must be replaced by other sources of revenue which are only possible with a community-centric business model.

Together, with our teams, we need to examine the dynamics of people and content, connect the dots between the two pillars of the business (content and people) and embrace audience marketing. We need our people, who have long been experts in very specific content domains, to fully appreciate the way digitally-empowered audiences consume, produce and circulate content and the initiatives that are required in our content and social commerce hub to attract and retain fellow enthusiasts, in community. That’s the 360-degree view our teams need to embrace in order to make a full contribution.

What needs to be done isn’t a mystery (I’ve written it before) and there are some key actions that can help accelerate the process of inoculation. Here are four suggestions from a repertoire I developed in my last corporate leadership role:

• Set clear learning objectives: we are all students of business. We need to be constantly learning and improving. There is no room for passengers. Personal learning objectives put valuable focus and structure around learning and help employees learn on the job and apply that learning to work.
• Establish collective learning teams: these are groups of people who are given a responsibility and opportunity to participate in a learning initiative together. These can be task or subject orientated. The group can be given a room and some time for group discussions to talk about ways they can improve their jobs and subsequent contribution to the business and they can report back on their progress.
• Offer mentoring: change is a time of personal opportunity and as leaders at all levels in the business we can have the opportunity to take another member of the team under our wing and by means of coaching help them develop new skills and strengths.
• Offer guidance, encouragement and feedback: in the current climate when financial reward is not possible, encouragement is a great incentive.  A constant stream of feedback, both corrective and reinforcing, is one of the best ways to develop employees. Without a clear and balanced understanding of what they are doing right and wrong, employees, like athletes, are unlikely to improve. That’s not good for the business and not good for the people in it.

Specialist book publishers, if they are to survive the post-digital age, need people who can see the reality of today and describe a brighter, more prosperous tomorrow; people who challenge the status quo and change everything. Those publishers who choose to behave like a swift-footed 2-toed flightless ratite bird will only know the consequences when it is too late.

Special interest publishers who bury their heads when they could be acting will only have themselves to blame