Have you been fostering or advocating leaderless or a leaderful community? Here is what it means.
Leaderless community: It is where there is no leader or purpose in the community.
Leaderful Community: In contrast, in a leaderful community everyone has equal power.
Who are ideal leaders?
They are the backbone of your community, who hold everything together. Starting from helping community members to keeping the community in harmony.
Leaders direct their community towards success and it goes hand in hand with the purpose of your community.
So, what happens when there is no leader or when the community is full of leaders? Let’s check out the story of Roy who has seen and been in this situation.
Leaderless community- The free land of chaos
Roy is a startup owner who decided to build and run a community. He was not aware of the importance of leadership in a community.
Here is how his dream community without leaders turned out to - Plot twist
He saw people joining the community and also saw a spike in engagement. But, it had no relevance. Every time he would try to get insightful conversations, he found it difficult to make his community members share quality conversations or lacked engagement there. This eventually put his community in trouble.
Climax: Community lost direction, deviated from its purpose, and became a ground for meaningless conversations. As a result, his community was seen unfit for users who associated this community with a purpose. It eventually became dead.
Leaderful community - Everyone is a King
Roy then decided to make everyone a leader, so that accountability can be shared and he would be able to achieve his dream of building a community that has its purpose where he could find a plethora of insights from the members.
But, he did not expect this to happen in his story - Plot twist
To his surprise, a leaderful community did not provide a better result either. In his community, everyone has the power to make decisions. Again, his community lost its purpose to the ego. Despite having leaders who are experts, the power war curbed the chances of having a healthy discussion and ended up being a place that exhibited conflicts.
Climax: In a sea of ego and biased leaders, it became a ground for war, where there would be a hierarchy, abuse of power, and eventually it drowned the community in the sea of chaos. Eventually, the clash of leaders led Roy’s community to sink.
Poor Roy then realized how leaderless, leaderful, and balanced communities are different from each other.
Balanced Community - It’s all about balance
Life is all about balance from family to business without balance everything crumbles. A balanced community helps to find potential leaders who happen to be contributing to the growth factor of the community. They help each other in the community, they are gatekeepers who keep the community away from toxic leadership or meaningless conversations.
Leaderless Community | Leaderful Community | Balanced Community |
My purpose is diluted, as there was no guidance | I have many leaders and purpose got deviated to conflicts over the discussion | Purpose and distribution of power and control keeps me successful |
I can’t connect, because my content is meaningless and directionless | I feel there is a disconnect, as my content is biased | There is an unbiased and open environment that helps people to connect and offers a judgment-free space to discuss |
I’m chaotic because I’m free | I’m chaotic because there is a clash among leaders | I’m organized and leaders here help to resolve conflicts and keep the community away from the chaos |
Roles...What does that mean? | Roles? Hahaha… I’m a leader and no one can defeat me | I have distributed roles according to their merits to stay organized |
Habitate- Helps you build a balanced community
Roy came across Habitate, a SaaS-based platform that provides community as a white-labeled solution. He got to know that Habitate also helps brands and individuals build and maintain community.
Habitate always believed in the distribution of power and balance.
With the user reputation scores mechanism, users who are consistently contributing to the community are identified
The identified users are marked as potential leaders with user identification mark called tags
This means, creating a hierarchy to segment roles to maintain balance in a community comes in handy. This in turn helps organizations or individuals to create a community that helps to create better connections, stick to purpose, and always give importance to use content in the community.
Roy decided to create a community with Habitate. Using Habitate, he defined the role of the leaders very clearly which helped him achieve a balanced community. If you wanna create a successful balanced community like Roy, why don’t you check out Habitate and Habitate community.
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