So you want to grow an awesome team?

As you step into leadership, familiarize yourself with these good practices for online community building, so you can show up confidently for your group, respect everyone's time and contribution, and cultivate that special ingredient of effective collaboration: trust.

In this quick guide, we cover some low effort, low risk approaches to your role as a subgroup leader. These insights have been distilled through our observation of practices which have been effective in a lot of varied contexts; once you have the basics sorted, you'll be ready to get creative and bring your unique tone and purpose into the space.

The three practices highlighted in this guide are:

1. managing permissions;
2. aligning your members around one clear action, event or goal;
3. effective collaboration beyond the silo.

In each section, we highlight the teaming practices at work, and provide some examples for how you can use your space on Socialroots to put these insights into action.

Giving permission

Doing work that really matters can be challenging, often taking us out of our comfort zone. Whether that involves collaborating with people we disagree with, building trust between strangers, or supporting your members to develop skills they may be new at, we all make ourselves vulnerable in the process of making a difference. As a leader, you can have a huge impact on the subgroup's capacity by practicing encouragement, both directly and indirectly.

Taking time to consider practical matters, such as what content people have access to view and which actions they have permission to perform is a valuable basis for establishing safety and support. Well-managed permissions among members can cultivate both psychological safety and encourage initiative, both of which are essential pre-conditions to innovation, emergence, and the sustainability of your group in the long-term.

• On Socialroots, permissions are managed both at group and subgroup levels, and we have given a good deal of consideration into how these roles interact; designing defaults that preserve your group's integrity, while offering options for flexibility. For example, anyone from the group who chooses to join an open subgroup will join as a Supporter, and therefore won't be able to send a new note to the subgroup until they are 'promoted'.
• Other subgroup participants can 'promote' a supporter to participant level, but only leaders can promote any members to the leader role.
• As a leader, you may want to consider how to offer a pathway for new members to access greater levels of involvement, such as replying to a dedicated note in the subgroup titled something like "Introduce yourself here".
• Subgroup participants can also invite other group members into your subgroup, at the same or a lower permission level. If a subgroup member is also a leader at the group level, they have the ability to auto-add group members into the subgroup.

• As a subgroup leader, you can always reverse a decision that you disagree with, by 'downgrading' or removing a member from your subgroup. It's up to you and your members to determine how to exercise this ability in alignment with your values (e.g. by majority approval, consent by all leaders, or up to the discretion of the person in charge).

Make your goals visible

Have you ever joined a values-aligned group, or had someone connect you with a mutual interest, yet didn't feel clear what to do or say? Chances are, nothing ever really transpired and you faded out of each others lives. Sound familiar?

When you're leading a subgroup, the most important thing you can do to energize the people showing up and working with you is to articulate a goal that is within reach, and a way for people to be involved in reaching that goal.

• Socialroots provides subgroups with a 'current focus' section for this purpose.
• With rich-text formatting, you can break actions up by bullet points, or clarify the sequence or priority of tasks with a numbered list.

A good Current Focus considers the phase that your subgroup is going through, such as setting up and introducing yourself, gaining information on an important upcoming decision, or communicating the outcomes of your last campaign/sprint; and it's even better if you're able to communicate a timeline, so people can orient themselves to a set of shared expectations.

• It improves engagement to keep this section up-to-date as things change in your subgroup. It's easy for leaders to edit this from the About Subgroup page, or directly on the dashboard.
• Group members who have not joined your subgroup will not see what you write here, so you can provide all necessary details – ideally underneath a succinct headline for those "TL;DR" situations.

Expand your reach

Now that you've set up your subgroup to support and engage members, it's time to think about how your work connects with and expands the greater project of the network you're collaborating with.

Before Socialroots, it was common to give lip-service to network coordination, but almost impossible to actually realize. The times when our networks matter most can also be the hardest times to remember to reach out, and if we do, we have to wade through all kinds of contexts looking for those few people who could actually make a difference.

• Because Socialroots acknowledges the three layers of networks, even our early, basic app offers a variety of ways to achieve more coherence with the larger network.
• If a participant or leader of your subgroup belongs to another group or subgroup where their permissions allow them to create a note (i.e. leader at the group level, participant or leader at the subgroup level), they can write a note from one of these spaces to any number of others, thereby unlocking a conversation between the members of each of these spaces. No more joining each others' channels only to forget to check them; the conversation comes to you! This is a great way to keep other teams informed of your key updates.
• At the group level, you can view other 'organisations' who have representatives in your group, and see the profile of their representatives. This helps you to identify the people in your network who you're likely to share goals and/or values with, and how to reach out to them.
• If there are people in your community who you want to bring into a conversation or share an update with, but they don't use Socialroots, it's no problem! You can start a note as usual, and add their email address to the 'external recipients' field. Not only can they view the thread of conversation without logging in, they can also respond; making it easier than ever for your team to communicate with external people.

Summary

Like a group setting out on an expedition, we have a much better time following a guide who's familiar with the terrain and who clearly communicates what's expected and how things work.

You don't need to be an expert to provide this sense of trust; taking a little time now to think through (and articulate) your shared goal, the things that people are encouraged and empowered to contribute, and how this interacts with your wider network will set your team on a steady course for impact.