I grew up in Michigan where hockey dominated every day conversation. It snowed most of the year and as soon as the ice froze, skates were pulled out. Which is why I have drawn the parallel for scoring in social business strategy with hockey?

Certainly being persistent, repeating you and being resilient are characteristics we understand. But what I believe we must embody in our actions and words are:

Honest conversation. From strategy model development conversations to actual community conversation. We look in the mirror through social every day and we must be honest with ourselves, with our words, with our actions and our approaches.

Authenticity. We approach our strategy development and social business validation process with authenticity with our peers, our clients and our ecosystem with that top of mind. A shout out to many great thinkers in this area, including: Joe Pine, Brene Brown, Marcia Reynolds and Sally Helgesen.

Trust. If we do the H and A well in our work, the trust comes later. But it is paramount to successful dialogue, strategy development and conversation to establish trust. By the way, it isn’t monetized yet although people are trying to do so. Trust to me is something that is hard to achieve but easily lost.
Just thought I would take a few moments out of a busy day to share some secret sauce.

During a recent trip to Mexico, I was inspired by this Mexican gold, as the sunset depicts.  Yet today during a call with Andrea Weckerle, the founder of  Civil Nation I was reminded that I have an obligation to give back to the beauty of our world as a master community weaver around core competencies for networking as I’m developing a competency framework for community managers. 

Social is now part of the way we work, it’s how our kids learn in school, how students interact in college and how many of us are working within our day to day jobs, whether we like it or not.  Therefore, I’ve found it useful to document key skills and abilities for the roles such as; community managers, super connectors, community weavers and digital ambassadors.    Perhaps what is the most interesting is how valuable the key skills of trust, authenticity, conflict resolution, communications and leadership are for the future leaders within our organizations.

What do you think about these three core competencies for an entry level community manager?  I welcome your input and hope to continue the conversation together as we help to create a bevy of trusted and authentic community weavers.

I facilitated a virtual fireside chat with Sally Helgesen, author of the Female Vision and spoke afterwards about my role as a community weaver at Executive Networks.   I shared with Sally that the majority of the time I spend performing networking coaching with community managers and weavers around approaches and techniques they can consider using as the foundation of building relationships for the purpose of networking. 

What we talk about is how individuals can within the construct of networks build relationships.  I’m not talking about teaching people about selling a brand or building a personal brand.   Rather, as a networking coach, how we spend time understanding individuals and their understanding of themselves, their goals and archetypes.

Do they understand their strengths and weaknesses?  Do they have development areas clearly articulated?  Where have they or do they plan to explore, etc? 

What matters to them in the lens of this network experience?  How have they networked in the past, what are they most comfortable offering and giving to the network?  What do they desire in return?  How much time do they have to spend on these activities?    Only then can we have authentic conversations that are tailored to be high value for time around what is most important to them, their gift areas and new contacts or knowledge they would like to develop.

The role of a networking coach tends to often involve the archetype of a detective, adventurer and revolutionary.

Lauren can become  an advisor and collaborator with individuals or a team in order to bring out their community potential through workshops, training or coaching.   Alternatively, she can also facilitate or speak at  team events and conferences.

Lauren partners with your employees and teams to introduce, reinforce and inspire community teams.  She holds immersion sessions on network weaving techinques that allow them individuals and teams to build models and techniques that help them overcome obstacles and realize their leadership potential.