Coaching practice week on cases

Reps Coaching Training
#1

Hi All,

As a part of Practice week, Me and Mehul setup sometime and discussed about the following cases.

CASE-1: The mentee is an active functional area contributor who has contributed to a couple of projects but this is the first time he’ll be involved in a community. He wants to learn how he can reach out to people inside and outside the community to grow and make quality contributors.

Mehul as a Coachee: Thoughts:
Self approach : I can do it, you can do it ; this is what Mehul Follows
Self assess in terms of reputation - Carrying out the brand value with his quality of delivering a talk
Mobilize - Analise if community is ready to take this up or not
Approach the coach to take feedback.
Power of questions to attendees-- ask - do you like to work/ work in team/ your area of expertize…/do you learn something new.
Ensure to share the precise information which makes the people feel it interesting.
Being confident and the attendees must embrace “Teach yourself” way of participation.

Some of key things Mehul mentioned which I think are very important in Mobilizer which will help to grow the community and helps to make quality contributors are as follows:

  • You have to know how to ensure that information is accurate.
  • You have to know how to illustrate a point and make it interesting to a listener.
  • You need to learn how to remain confident while sensitive to others while standing among or in front of many people.
  • You need to know how to lead a discussion without being bossy
  • Teach these to yourself.

[Dinesh as a coach] Observations & Feedback:

  • Learn by doing. ++1 for this approach
  • I really liked the approach which Mehul has come up with. (+1) for Aligning with brand value in community
    ** The contributors will Be able to work as a mobilizer to empower a community
    ** The contributors will be able to coordinate or manage a team of mobilizers
    **The contributors will be able to train new mobilizers
  • I only have one suggestion - A functional doer who is an expert must assess the attendees by getting into their shoes just to undertsand their level of understanding a technical area - before delivering a talk/workshop
  • After the successful talk/event, A functional doer - should be available (social channels etc) to help the people who approached him post event (offline/online). This motivates people to work more.

CASE-2: Being a new rep, the mentee wants to be more involved in being a leader in his community. His community had a lot of achievements before, but it all stalled as community members slowly became inactive due to organizational changes, community conflicts and shifting priorities. He wants to learn how he can move forward as it feels like a big task to him that he isn’t even sure if he can do something about.

[Mehul as a Coachee] Thoughts/ideas:
Sharing the real time experiences of forming a Gujarat Community:

  • Analyze the social media communications to understand what the community is upto.
  • Less Communication & lack of leadership wrt to building a local community.
  • identification of problem & find a solution
  • Made a proper communication with senior contributors and got to know about feedback and suggestions
  • Set up meetup and talked about future plans - Listening happened
  • Organizing fests by inviting new people to take talks which motivates them to take leadership.
  • Focus on people who are interested and who aligns with the mozilla.
  • Being a community, take part in Local fest and invite member to be part there and present their skills; this way they boost their confidence and you will get a upcoming leaders in community
  • Regular communication in calls/telegram
  • creating platforms on social media to reach far about community.
  • Encourage and appreciate people who are contributing to both tech n non-tech.

[Dinesh as a coach] Observations & Feedback:

  • Good approach and did a good job. Gujarat is one of the active community in India now. I feel this is an inspiring story. Kudos Mehul!
  • One suggestion which helps to strengthen at this point is, Inviting more contributors(ex. developers) from different platforms/communities and making them involve in our projects by sharing the success stories/projects which are working on. This way we can build a strong developer community base.
  • Throwing some limelight on the contributors who are doing good and making them to bring out new people to the community.
  • Evangelize the amazing works we are doing in our community at a tech-conference will help to bring valuable contributors.

@rowdymehul Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to listen more such thoughts in next call.

CC: @sayak

Thanks for reading,
Dinesh

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Reflections from Coaching Practice Week
Reflections from the Practice Week
#2

Sharing the insights from Day-2 call with Mehul:

CASE-3: The coachee is a part of a small but growing community and would like to know how they can increase their numbers, enable these volunteers to make impact and make their community visible in the local tech scene.

[Mehul as a coachee] Thoughts/ideas/Observation:

  • Mozilla is not justFirefox but its beyond that having so many products/platforms.
  • Some active contributors are helping them to shape. All are focusing to a particular project but there are many projects which are inter-connected. e.g.MozActivate and Mozilla Campus Club are a way to know about
  • Building medium to Mozilla foundation n Mozilla corporation to do more activities.
  • Not focusing on the activity but the main brand names & Confused with choosing the tracks like mozactivate or mozcampus clubs.
  • How to solve the issue? Self way identification and share the results
  • Encouraging people to take feedback in different ways like a local community form, campaign form, particular activity form and so on.
  • You can create some rules for the recruiter on recruiting volunteers, Like;
    –Share your journey as a volunteer: people love to listen successful stories and yours probably is
    –Tell how your community is organized, don’t get afraid while sharing your story(successful/not worked) because honesty is very valuable, especially if you are working to improve it
    – Ask for the plans for their involvement
    – Get informed about the interests of the local people in the area of volunteering you are looking for; may be some upcoming campaigns, projects and so n.

[Dinesh as a Coach] Observations/Feedback:

  • Mehul covered all most all necessary point which I think are very crucial while assigning a role to a individual in a community.
  • Identified the issues and found a way withing the border line.
  • This approach helps contributors to get motivated and inspires many Mozilians in community

CASE-4: The coachee is an existing member of a community who do activities as the opportunity comes (i.e new campaign, invitation from schools) making the community stalled sometimes. The mentee wants to learn how he can step up to drive his community to a better direction.

[Mehul as a coachee] Thoughts/ideas/Observation:

  • Talk in public ; this will be helpful to come more closure to community
  • How to talk to the audience ? (shared some skill points)
    – Start with a simple and small goal, step by step as way!
    – Don’t memorize but practicing is better for your “show”
    – Put examples in your talk because everyone can follow them and are very attractive and easy to explain
  • Always think about, Why you are here? You are a human and people want to know why are you here
  • The above approach will help you to step up in community.
    –Now, its your turn to show use your skills to bring community to a better direction by take lead or initiating new campaign, get involve with universities, and so on
  • How you did it? Keep sharing your experiences with your community via blog posts.
  • Encourage interested people to take up roles and responsibilities of their expertise, invite them to join the existing community programs. - this will help your community keep active if in-case in future you may be not interested or shifted priorities or migrated somewhere.
  • The things can be solved If we try to resolve our self,
  • Demotivation is a major factor and this usually feels because of 3 reasons: (Not in particular)
    —Missing confidence on the project/activity
    —You need to understand the reason and create confidence
    —Poor results
    —Define new objects and understand what was the reasons
    —Hints not enough
    —Ask what is missing and do it

[Dinesh as a Coach] Observations/Feedback/Learning :

  • I must say, Mehul has a good observation skill and that’s why he always share something which only few people can observe.
  • Mehul’s idea of self assessing and taking feedback it helps to improve the quality of our contributions to community.
  • And for the de-motivation factor, contributor can always approach to peers from other community or reps or alumni to get inspired to do more.
  • We can also invite people from other opensource communities to work on our projects.

PS: We shared a lot of insights about the community and contributors. Learnt alot from Mehul.

CC: @sayak

Thanks for reading,
Dinesh

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