Building a High Performance Community

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to today's growth group. Super excited. My name is Drew Bridewell. I'm head of Product and Design here at Growth Day. Know some of you already, if this is your first time joining the growth group or just joining growth groups in general, I'd love for you to introduce yourself in the chat. What we do every single week is we pick a new topic and then we talk about how you can get the most out of the product, the most out of the experience. Experience. So my intention for today is to talk about building a high performance community. We have a incredible community here in Growth Day, but I just want to talk a little bit about the value of community and the value that it's served in almost every one of my roles since I got into product design and since I got into product management. So I think it's going to be really good resource for you and a good reminder of building your community of high performance in your life. And even if it's not just inside of Growth Day, how are you going to build this network for your family or for your friends or for your work? That's what we're going to do today. The first thing is to set the tone for today and then I want to dive into some call to actions and notes that I'm going to be dropping in the chat just so you have those resources heading out of the session. Building high performance community starts with thinking about how you elevate the communication, the collaboration, the empathy and the encouragement and success together as a group, as a united front, working on these things, even with people that you don't even know or you're just going to be meeting for their first time, these are some essential ingredients and we're going to just talk about them today. So why are we here? I just want to also just thank you for, for attending this session and if you have any interest in just building better growth systems, this is what the series is all about. So I go live every Thursday at 1pm Eastern Standard and my goal is to teach and also train about the Growth Day app, but also deliver some training along the way. So we're here today to talk about community, something that is an incredible ingredient to growth and continuous, like, connection with people. Today we're going to have some fun doing that. And if you haven't yet met me, my name is Drew Bridewell. I'm head of Product and Design here at Growth Day. I'm also a father, a husband and I am a UX instructor, a coach. I'm a chpc. If you ever heard of certified high performance coaches with Growth Day. And if you want to connect with me, feel free to connect with me outside on social media. I've had some wild adventures just so you, you know where I'm coming from. Community spent many years in California working at some of the top tech companies in the world like Facebook, LinkedIn, Envision, Lynda.com been across the country working in E government. I'm on the east coast right now. I'm in Asheville, North Carolina and we're getting ready to embark on another couple adventures. But community is everywhere where you make it. But the thing is there are different levels of community engagement, community energy and how what you get out of a community and what you put into the community. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But I have traveled so much across the country and the world teaching in product design and high performance product and engineering and design. So I'm excited to share this. Some of the things that just are very basic ingredients, they might even be common sense to you and they might be, of course, Drew, this is what we should be doing. But I just want to give you those reminders today as we go through this in this growth group. So a little bit also about me, my history, like worked in a lot of different companies working in product and design. So every one of these companies building their communities, building their networks, building their foundations for their product and how they build relationships, how they build better people and better talent and develop people all I'm going to talk a little bit about that today. So when we think about high performance in general, we have the high performance habits inside the product which you can go to, you can go to the Learn pillar and then search in the courses for the high performance habit builder course where you can learn all about the high performance habits. But when it comes down to it, high performance is that consistency of delivering excellence while maintaining healthy habits and relationships throughout your pursuits. So it's not about burning out, it's not about working harder, it's about working smarter and sustaining that over the long term so that you can exceed expectations and you can have continuous growth, continuous improvement. And that's what we're, that's what we're shooting for side of the platform and delivering products and services to our strivers. But what is a high performance community like? You have a high performance individual, but what does a high performance community look like? And high performance community, it's a community that aims to create an environment that nurtures and supports individuals in their pursuits of excellence, helping them reach their full potential and achieve exceptional results. Similar to building a culture where we want to be able to do this individually in our home, in our environment, in our relationships, the people we surround ourselves with. But when we think about, oh man, if I add the high performance in front of the word community, what does that look like? What is the My friend network look like? What does my collaborative network look like? And I think these are really important things to consider when thinking about how are you going to make this year the best year of your life? You're trying to shift into a new rhythm, you're trying to readjust, recalibrate something that's really important to you. Community is an essential ingredient of how you can make this happen faster. When we think of this community, I want to break it down into four key steps. So make sure that you're taking notes over in the right sidebar. If you haven't used your notes yet, the first thing that I want to draw your attention to is engagement. Engagement is an incredible important part of building a community. Not only for you, if you're building community yourself or if you're collaborating and being a part of community. So if you haven't yet checked out our community, there's a lot of engagement and every day there's engagement happening in there. But it's not just when you post something. It's about following up and closing the loop with people that reach out or share information. It's about reaching out and connecting with those people. So engagement is an important part because it's that back and forth chemistry that you have with the community. So engagement's super important. The other thing that's really important is thinking about the values and principles. So these are the things that people share when they actually are in the community. So when you are posting, are you being encouraging? Are you being negative, Are you being supportive, Are you being empathetic? What is the values and principles of when you're going to be engaging with that or anything on social media or anything up on the Internet? What is that energy that you're putting out there? What are you going to be putting out there and maybe what you're going to get back from it. So I think it's another important thing to think about the values and principles. So like Values of Growth Day, we really strive to be empathetic, we strive to be encouraging, and we strive for excellence. So when we're working through our projects and doing our collaborative work, we really want to strive to have those three values and Then the principles are the things that are going to help us finish and work through those experiences and those values in the design world. Our principles are really aligned to trying to help make sure that we have a certain quality bar and that we're consistent with our delivery or that we're sweating the details and we and the quality really matters for what it is that we're doing. This is the same level of rigor that you want to put into how you design or how you engage or how you think about the community that you're a part of. And it's another important thing. The other one is your rituals and routines. So I know that you probably have heard me talk about rituals and routines before, but the rituals and routines that we create in our communities for how we touch base, how we stay connected, how we re engage when we're not very engaged, or like, when do we do this throughout the day because we don't want to create an environment where all we're doing all day long is checking our notifications inside of the community or checking the. A laundry list of things that are dealing with everybody else's priorities and not really what you came to do. So you want to still create the boundaries of how you engage with community. And that goes for social media. That goes for even, even entering into the app and the community. Like, when do you want to do it throughout the days? When can you be consistent with how you contribute back to the community? Or you can ask questions or you can deliver prompts. There's different ways to do this, which we'll talk about a little bit. But rituals are, tunes are important when it comes to building I formed community. The other meter of success is collaboration success. So when you think about engaging your new community adventures, what kind of collaboration environment do you want to create? What does success look like when you do go in and engage with community? What kind of things are you looking to get? What kind of things are you looking to contribute? Are you just browsing and trying to explore and discover? Think about what success looks like before you go into an experience so you can save time, so you can save energy and so you can say laser focused. So you might be thinking too. Building community takes time, patience and energy. It totally does. And you might be thinking like, is it worth my time? Is it worth my time to engage with community? Is it worth my time to build relationships in community? Oftentimes if you aren't doing this, then maybe you're doing a little bit of this which isn't super fun and you're having challenges and arguments and other things that are maybe going on. But when you can create an environment that's healthy with a series of encouraging remarks, positive attitude and, and a very supportive environment, you tend to remove these sorts of engagements in your daily activities because you're attracting a lot more positivity, you're attracting a lot more encouragement and motivating energy. And when you can do that, then you can start leaning into okay, I have I'm building a community of highly supportive people. I'm getting faster feedback about what I need to do when I'm engaging with this community or no, how I can ask the questions better to get better results. I'm thinking about the deeper connections that I can have with the people that I'm working with or the people that I'm meeting inside the community. I have a new level of accountability because I'm going in, posting and I'm getting feedback. So it's my accountability check. And even if you are trying to build that accountability, it could be that you post in the community a big question once a week, or you learn something in the product and share your insights once a week. Or it could be that you reach out to three people from the community and you ask for them to be accountability partners. There's all sorts of things where you can build in accountability into your community. It also naturally helps you with networking because you start to learn what other people are doing and you might have very similar paths of how you've came together and maybe why you're also in the platform. So networking can also be just very helpful with high performance community. Then you have a collaborative environment, right? Being very collaborative helps you open to different ideas and also helps you be able to collaborate on a bigger idea. So you have that support and you're working towards those things. What does good look like? I want you to put in the chat and I'll come back to you shortly to talk about what good looks like. But just a couple like keywords of things to think about. Good, collaborative, fulfilling, relevant, fun, supportive, alive, insightful, authentic, adaptable, candid. Community is embodying these things. But we also need to think about how we are doing this within our team. So I know that the community might not feel like a team, but it is a bigger team in a sense. So you have to create what we call psychological safety. Psychological safety was founded when Google had done pretty extensive research study around what helps create the best environments and the best teams environments and that came along to psychological safety and making sure people feel safe in the environment. To share their ideas, their thoughts without ridicule or judgment. And this is a common practice, but it's not yet a norm in society. So we have to keep working on it and we have to practice and model that. The other thing is like being dependable. If you are a part of a team or you are being a part of a community, being accountable and dependable is very important, too. So you want to be there for people when they are asking for your support or if, you know, you're building those bonds and the relationships. The other thing is just having awareness of what's going on in the community and sharing ideas and thoughts and just having that awareness, having that clarity about what it is that you want to get out of the community, but also what. How you want to contribute to the community, and then thinking about that trust you build with people, that trust you build with the network that you're building and having a very foundational level of purpose around how you show up. So why is this important now? Why is community important, y'? All? It's always been important. It's never stopped being important. But I think sometimes we step away and we're like, ah, I don't need that. I have this, I have that. But thinking about community is what's going to help you have that sustained connection over the long haul. So you want to find your people, find your community. And if it's not inside of the app, then you can go off and look for those in groups and smaller groups and to start to build that community because it's so critical to your growth. And you can do that by building and even inspiring yourself to be community champions, where you're posting consistently and you're supporting and giving back to your community. You can also share your stories, like, share stories of lessons learned and what you got out of it and how it impacted your life. You can share your wins, like sharing things that you accomplished this week and you want to celebrate, because we will celebrate with you so you can raise the visibility of the things that you're doing. And that helps, so helps with this accountability. You can also start with having just a shared understanding with the people that you're sharing this with of why it matters. I did this and this is how it impacted me. So I just want us to say, let's go build that together, just to give you a little bit of a warmup of we get to do this together inside of the app, which is incredibly fun. It's incredibly inspiring. But these essential ingredients of, like, engagement and having awareness of your Network and your community. These things are table stakes when it comes to it. Now what I want to do is I want to think of high performance community. I'm going to pin this to the chat. High performance is that relentless pursuit of excellence, surpassing expectations, and consistently delivering exceptional results. So how can we do that in a community? I got three for you right here. I'm going to pin them up to the chat as well. So the three things that I want to remind you for today, as you go off and you build your epic communities or you come back to growth base, think about your community engagement. How can you engage or communicate so that when you jump into a community, think about the community engagement of how you want to engage with this community. Think about the rituals and routines of how you want to engage with it as well. So you're not just in here all day, but you're making good use of your time while you're here posting comments, engaging with people that you are interested in following and learning more from, and then thinking about what success looks like for not only your community engagement, but what success looks like for your day. What are you trying to achieve this day? If you have top three priorities, then you can come over to your plan tool, list out those top three priorities, and then think about how you can leverage the community to help you achieve and finish and complete success those three goals. Thinking about how you engage with community is another. An important part of what you do here. The other thing that I want to share with you is you can create valuable and relevant content in the platform. You can also cultivate a sense of belonging by recognizing and appreciating what your community members are doing. Right. Whenever you're thinking about, like, how do I build better community? These are the. Your tips. We got a couple more. So rituals and routines and then project success. Diane was just saying that she's an accountability group and she's been thinking about running in the community to support others. Yeah, absolutely. So what you could do is you could even create a growth group, a community accountability group, and that you could. And if you want to be private or public, if it's private, and you only want those like four or five people in that group, that accountability group, then you can create a private group and then invite them all to it or. And that's really easy, Diane. So you can just go to the Learn pillar here, let me share my screen and show you how to do that really quick. So if you go to the learn Pillar, which is where we're currently at right now, then you can scroll down and create and you can go to schedule group and then you can create that accountability group and you can make it private or public, audio or video. If you don't have a hosting plan, you do get free growth groups in your first year. But if you want a hosting plan, we'll, we're going to continue improving this and making it really great for you. You can do that as well. So you can schedule those growth groups and then you can have those accountability sessions in person and then you can post if you need more people to join you. People will join you if it's in the community because everybody sees it if it's public. But if it's not public, then you do have to go and share link with other people. And just so you know, if you share your growth group link and you've already set up your referral program link, your PayPal account, then you will get paid if people sign up through your link to join growth day. So you'll get actually paid and you'll be hosting growth groups. It's a win win scenario. Awesome. Great. Okay, great. I hope you enjoy this crash course of this growth group and building a community of high performance. Just thinking high level about how we can elevate our practices as community builders. And this can happen in your home, this can happen at work, this can happen inside a growth day. And I just want to encourage you to find your community, build your community, tap in to the greatest energies around us that love, that support, that empathy, that encouragement, that excellence that is here. It is surrounding us. We just have to know to tap into it and it's going to be super fun. I hope everybody has a great day. This was fun, y'. All. I really enjoyed the session today. Diane, thanks for helping with getting the group going. Appreciate you. Wish you all a beautiful rest of your weekend and your next week.