Takeaways from a conversation with Ryan Letada
I've been reaching out to folks I really respect lately for feedback on our Worldwide program. Here are just a few of the amazing nuggets and takeaways from my good friend Ryan Letada, founder of Next Day Better.
What's their motivation? Community-building.
The motivation for being part of this is to build a community. The people are out there, so get them together in the same room. We can't do that from New York, but you can, and you can show how awesome they are to a broader, global community.
This is an opportunity to build a community of likeminded people, and to facilitate collaboration and serendipity between them that have the potential to spark new initiatives, conversations and projects that change the world.
What's our motivation? Community, content, and reach.
Our motivation is to engage and grow The Feast community, and so raise brand awareness and achieve our mission. It is also to create and showcase content highlighting this community and increase the number of people in The Feast.
Celebrate them continuously
Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. How do you continuously celebrate your hub leaders? Good cue from Creative Mornings, always sharing content about their hubs, reposting their content, giving them their own page to tailor, giving them tools to build a community, thanking them, calling out their creativity and brilliance. What's our equivalent?
Here's a good example structure for a check-in to thank them:
Start: How are you, what's going on?
Body: What are the next steps?
Close: Thank you so much, again, this is why we're doing it and so glad you are a part of making it real (a constant bombardment of thanks)
What are the expectations?
Instead of pouring hours into a technical document detailing exactly how everything should be, start with the basic expectations that highlight what we're all about:
We expect you to create an experience that gathers likeminded people
We expect you to make opportunities for those people to connect, collaborate and talk to each other
We expect you to discover and call out the most incredible entrepreneurs doing work you believe in
We expect you to share that experience with the rest of the world, because you (and your city, and your community) are awesome and the world needs to know about it
Build camaraderie and friendly competition
Ryan did a #dancebattle last Friday randomly, recording a video of him and Kirk at Next Day Better HQ dancing to a song. Then he tweeted it to all the hub leaders and emailed it, saying it was their turn and to pass it on. What's something similar we could do to connect our hubs so that they can talk to each other? He featured Toronto's speakers on Facebook so that L.A. could see and know they need to up their game.
Make the program's vision my own
I need to tease out the elements of the vision that I can own and really believe in, because that's the only way I'll be able to ever sell it. The vision overall maybe continue to be lofty, so I can't let that roadblock me. What's my version of it? It's to build a community of people in your city who really care about each other, their work, who want their work to matter and their lives to have an impact. It's connecting them to each other so that together they can go further than they ever could on their own. In a community you start to see what's possible and believe that hey, it not only could happen but must happen. It's powerful, and it needs to exist.
