Why am I talking about croissants on LinkedIn?

Croissants.

Macarons.

Baked Alaska.

Have I got your attention as you drool? Now hold that thought and I’ll come back to this.

When I joined Telstra Purple in a marketing role around 6 years ago, one of my key responsibilities was to grow our private members' forum for CISO’s, ClubCISO. During the first few years, the membership grew to 100 plus. Now the membership consists of over 450 members. I wish I could say that was because of me, however, I decided to move across to the ‘dark side’ - the sales world, and now I hold a small role within that community.

How did we make it happen? We hired specialists who focused on the key objectives of the community including growing the membership and giving our members the most positive experience. Today, we have the ever-so graceful Lisa Han, Community Manager at ClubCISO, making all things possible.

'Community’ was a popular word in 2020. We’ve managed to get through this challenging period because of the one or many communities we belong to. For example, I use my Instagram community for health and fitness tips, inspiration, and support. I use LinkedIn for my professional support, insights, and keeping conversations afloat. Each of my friendship groups is a different community although fundamentally we share the same foundations in our principles and values. There are the dog owners whom I see in my local park - I don’t know them by name, although I do know all their dog’s names! We share our loves of dogs, and natter on until our dogs tire out. That’s another community I belong to.

We are all part of several different communities, whether that’s an explicitly used term to describe the group or not. We have created groups based on shared attitudes, interests, common characteristics, and so forth. We are all part of something. But being part of something doesn’t mean we are all the same nor does it mean we know everything about that subject. We offer our own uniqueness, our own expertise, our own skills. We all bring different things to the table.

Now to my point...

You don’t need to know everything, and you certainly don’t need to do everything ON YOUR OWN.

Truth be told, you don’t possess all the skills, you never will and that’s a good thing!

It’s time to leverage your community - make space to focus on what you need to. Use them as your tool base. What have they done to overcome challenge A? Who can do B? Who knows about C? How would they do D differently?

There are powers in communities - learned experiences, shared experiences, unbound knowledge to tap into and far too many of us are drowning in our own questions and research when the answer is a call, text, LinkedIn message, or Teams meeting away.

In a way, my role does resemble that of a ‘Community Manager’ – my client’s organisation is another community to me. I’m trying to understand the challenges they’re faced with and/or the objectives they’re trying to achieve. I aim to understand what those moving parts or problems are and how they integrate into a comprehensive whole. I help join the dots by facilitating conversations with our subject matter experts to drive the change that they’re looking for. By introducing you to the people who have worked through those challenges, we can recommend how you should tackle challenges, and how you really shouldn't. Why waste time when we can ask the experts?

I use my communities in many ways. Perhaps someone wants to understand what a truly data-driven organisation looks like – I will connect them with someone in our Data & Analytics team and we can share stories. Perhaps a CISO has stepped into a new industry and wants to speak with someone who has lived a similar role – I will connect him/her to a CISO within that industry. Maybe a CIO has stumbled into blocks on their cloud journey – I'll organise a workshop with consultants who have accelerated these programs in the past. The objective is to...

...bring people together and make sh*t happen!

Since founding ClubCISO, we have founded three other free communities – Accomplish More, Data Journeys, and New in Role. This article isn’t an advert for them (although if you are interested, do drop me a note!). This article is a sign for you to use the wisdom that surrounds you and ask for help/support when you need to, and maybe give back when you are asked too...

So why Croissants, Macarons, and Baked Alaska? All three come under the most challenging recipes to make. I love all three but I’m certainly not going to waste my time to make them. Instead, I’ll ask someone to make them for me or simply buy them from the best place known. I’ll be sure to ask my community first.

Thanks for your attention ;-)

What communities do you belong to and how have they helped you?