Why communities need strong values to thrive
Every community has a goal or purpose and its values help it to fulfil that purpose.
For Borough Alliance Football Club, one of Sphere’s first customers, its primary purpose is to provide a space where players from all walks of life can come together to play football and blow off steam.
If you talk to its members, you’ll know there are certain ways they behave with each other, both on the pitch when they’re playing football and in their group chat when they’re not. These behaviours are guided by the club’s values.
Matt Moir and Max Scales, the club’s leaders, put a lot of work into developing the club into something they wanted it to be. It’s clear that its members recognise this effort. When we spoke to one of the club’s players, he said this about Matt and Max:
You know no matter what you can talk to them and that rubs off on the boys. They actually care and it sets the foundation to express ourselves because we’re not going to get rejected.
It’s like I’ve got an outlet for my troubles and when I’m playing football I forget about everything. It’s definitely had an impact. It’s allowing me to achieve what I want.
Matt and Max value making people feel welcome and safe in their group — they set the example as the group’s leaders and everyone else starts behaving in the same way.
Values aren’t just about achieving goals though. They also help people enjoy the journey to those goals and let others know what the community believes in.
I like this definition of values:
Values are basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate attitudes or actions.
In other words, good community values guide thinking and behaving (essentially defining its culture) such that:
- The community achieves its purpose.
- Its activities and impact feel meaningful to its members.
- The right kind of people are drawn to it.
What happens when communities don’t have the right values?
Sometimes we set out with a goal in mind, we’re enjoying the journey and we seem to be attracting good people to our community. But then something we didn’t expect to develop does, negatively affecting the community, and we realise that our goal or our values might need tightening up.
Stack Overflow, one of the world’s most popular communities for computer programmers, had a strong value of hosting the best-quality content for its members very early on. That helped it build a reputation for being a place where developers could find helpful answers to their programming questions.
But while its creators had thought about how to develop high-quality content for its members, they hadn’t focused as much effort on making it a friendly and welcoming place. Feedback from its members soon showed that it had become an unwelcoming place for some. In an inspiringly vulnerable post, former EVP of Culture and Experience Jay Hanlon wrote:
Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions.
The community recognised it had a problem and did something about it — by refining its values and implementing systems to encourage behaviour that aligned with them.
Because values determine community culture, it’s important to develop and strive for clarity on values throughout the entire life of the community: from initial conception, as it evolves in its activities and as it grows in size.
In future posts, I’d love to talk about how to assess and incentivise behaviour against values, but for now, let’s take a quick look at how to first develop them.
How can we develop community values?
You might already have started your community with certain values in mind or maybe some became apparent as people within the community interacted and consistent patterns of behaviour (norms) emerged. You might also have community guidelines, which are often values themselves or principles that are rooted in them. These are all great bases for conversations and decisions with your community about values.
The Community Canvas team have also put together an excellent framework that can help. It suggests asking yourself these questions to figure out what’s important to your community:
- How do we want our members to treat each other?
- How do our values help fulfil the community’s ultimate purpose?
- What is the “vibe” of our community?
- What is the aspirational way of life our community promotes?
For a bit of inspiration, here’s a great example set of values from one of my favourite communities, LVRSNFRNDS.
Remember that strong values will attract people they resonate with and repel others. That’s ok. Your goal isn’t to get everyone in the world in your community, but rather to make it clear what you stand for (and what you don’t), so you can get the right people in.
I always liked this quote:
“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
What are Sphere’s values?
At Sphere, we want to help bring people together. To do that, we need to figure out what we stand for and keep talking about it as we evolve.
We’ve talked a lot at Sphere about things like psychological safety, intellectual humility, inclusivity, servant leadership and vulnerability. But we’re really just at the start of our journey and we know we don’t have all the answers right now.
We believe we can only build something truly great if we build it with people, not for them. To that end, we want to hear what values are important to you, what you’ve experienced so far with us, and which ones you think can help Sphere on its mission the most.
To do that, you can join our community or just sign up to our app waitlist. I’ve started a specific thread on our forum around values where you can share your thoughts and we’ll also be hosting regular live events where we discuss this and other community issues with anyone who is interested to be a part of the conversation.
If you want to help your community thrive, build a more utopian internet, or just find a place where everyone can belong, then we’d love to talk.
Jeremy ❤️
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