I started this piece in late November. It’s a piece I usually write Christmas as a kick-off to the new year. The precise process by which this yearly piece arrives is a mystery. Probably the mental reset that comes with the New Year. So, what’s with the first draft showing up before Thanksgiving?

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been turtling since the US Election. Mostly avoiding all news, standing up and politely walking away when the conversation sways towards politics, deeply diving back into a video game legend. You know. Classic avoidance.

I’m also writing a new book about — wait for it — that’s right, leadership. This topic was inevitable, but since the election, I’ve been wondering whether there is something original or new to write, given the current circumstances in the United States.

Probably not.

Like many friends, I’ve chosen to focus my efforts on family, community, and work. Attempting to comprehend, let alone influence, the larger narratives on the planet strikes me as a particularly futile effort in what appears to be a post-literate society.

So, at the beginning of this year, I want to tell you a small leadership tale about the Rands Leadership Slack and why it works.

The Rands Leadership Slack is a community I created on June 1st, 2015. It’s, yes, a Slack, and as of this writing, it has almost 35,000 members. Over 5,000 of those members are active every week. There are over 800 public channels, and while many are focused on the craft of leadership, there are hundreds of non-leadership channels. I now play a game where I wonder, “Is there a channel for X?” I find said channel and over 100 members are usually already chatting about the topic.

While I am proud of this blog, the Rands Leadership Slack is the most impactful thing I’ve built outside my family and job. Thousands of community members discuss and learn from each other every day.

And it’s hard to have nice things on the Internet.

Here’s how we do it.

Endless Hard Work

First, there was a bit of luck. I was pretty quick to see Slack would be a good tool for this type of community, but Slack, by choice, was not designed for community. The free plan is designed to give you a taste but not a scalable community. After 90 days (or a certain number of messages?), you must pay to see your history. This was Slack’s chosen business model.

I spoke at Slack before I became the VP of Engineering, and they graciously agreed to comp me a pro edition of Slack with no restrictions. They don’t do this anymore. Don’t ask. This generosity allows us to see the entirety of Rands Leadership Slack, which gives the community memory and history.

Second, there is endless hard work.

I use the process for each application, which you can read about here.

• Receive an email from an applicant.
• Read the email and determine if they can follow directions.
• If they can’t, send them a follow-up email that explains the directions again. This is a template. I don’t type this each time.
• If they can follow directions, send them the invite plus the onboarding directions, which ask them to read the Code of Conduct. Set their profile image to anything but the default, and once logged in, introduce themselves on intros and drop me a direct message on Slack.
• If new members directly message me (I feel 40% of the new members do this), respond briefly but thoughtfully.

There was a window where existing members could invite new members, but as I wanted everyone to experience the same onboarding, all applicants now follow the same process. My estimate is that I’ve sent around 39,000 emails (roughly 10% of invited applicants never joined).

39,000. Spread that over nine years, that’s not huge amount of daily work, but it is a process I have consistently followed for almost a decade. Many applicants who are aware of the size of the community assume there is either a small army of admins who handle this or that we’ve got robots doing the work. We don’t. It’s just me. 39,000 mails.

While the size of the community is an essential aspect of the community, this is not what makes it valuable.

Listen, Understand, and Learn

Given the by-design upfront choice not to open the floodgates on user growth has never been outrageous; it has been steady. This gentle and mostly predictable user growth means that social breakdowns that occur when many strangers are suddenly shoved together don’t occur… as fast.

Around the five thousand-member mark, we had the first community request for a Code of Conduct. We had the first serious issue with a member where it was clear that I, the only admin at the time, would need to act. But how? And based on what? My random judgment? At that time, I had this aspirational but erroneous belief that because it was a leadership community, members would bring their best leadership skills to the table, and the Code of Conduct or other cultural artifacts were unnecessary.

My resistance to calls for a Code of Conduct and subsequent additional requests for a formal administration team was impressive… and delusional. I was in New York at the time and spending multiple hours each morning with requests for comment from the community when I finally threw up my hands, found what looked like a good Code of Conduct on the Internet, branched it, touched it up with a smidge of Rands™, and sent it to the complainers.

“Happy now?”

“Yes.”

wut.

The magnitude of the impact of the decision to create our Code of Conduct dwarfs my decision to keep growth sensible by designing a robot-unfriendly complex application process. The fact that it exists addresses many initial concerns of the community. Its regular use in conversations within the community gives us a useful playbook for deconstructing complex people issues. Most of every week since the Code of Conduct landed, I’ve used to explain a bit of this community to another member. Most months, I take time to edit it to help clarify the thinking laid out in the artifact. Policy changes land in the document multiple times a year because I do what I initially failed to do when the community asked for its existence — I listen.

When I realized the single best feedback source on what the community needed was the community, my job became obvious. Not enforcer, but educator. This feedback does not arrive conveniently. It’s usually packaged inside high drama. Two or three, or fifty members are ready to fight. Tempers are often high. When they show up, I clench my jaw and remember that while they might not know it, they are teaching me about the community, and I have to listen to understand the lesson. I have to empathize with the concerns, but not so much that I participate in the often heated emotions. My job is to ask questions to gather as many perspectives as possible. Finally, I must decide: “Does our Code of Conduct help resolve this situation? Or does it need to evolve?”

I need to find the lesson and then do the work to teach that lesson to everyone else.

Lead Peacefully

One of the favorite lines from the Code of Conduct:

“As a leadership community, we believe peer-to-peer discussions, feedback, and corrections can help build a stronger, safer, more informed, and more welcoming community.”

I interview and hire a new set of admins every two years, and within a few months of their start, a new conflict emerges in the community. As new admins, they ask me for advice, and I point them at this part of the Code of Conduct and ask some version of it: “Did you see if they attempted to resolve the situation themselves? It is a leadership Slack, after all.”

“But shouldn’t we help?” they ask.

“We are helping by suggesting they use their leadership skills to attempt to resolve this situation by themselves.”

It’s easy to make instant emotional assumptions about other humans, especially after decades of training on social networks. Our culture asks members to do the work, step outside of themselves and consider the perspectives of others to find a lesson they might not have seen. It doesn’t always work, but it’s where we start.

RLS will celebrate its 10th anniversary later this year. It is the highest-quality, most inclusive, and most authentic leadership community on the planet.

And it only took one hack: Hard work. All the time.

Happy New Year.