Communities of Practice (COPs) are popping up all over the place in my clients’ organizations. Are they really? Or were they always there and we just didn’t have a great buzz word to place on the practice of sharing and illuminating information?

Wenger and Snyder define COPs in their book, Cultivating Communities Of Practice, as groups of people who “share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis”.

This sounds like what happens around the water cooler and coffee machines, doesn’t it? People in COPs typically share information, insight, and advice. They help each other solve problems and discuss their own situations and aspirations.

I realize that I have been involved with many COPs, both in a very informal way and in a structured way. I have seen, for example, where some organizations have used COPs to become more intentional and systematic in managing the information and knowledge of those who are leaving the organization and therefore use COPs as a way to “codify” knowledge.

But have you considered using COPs as a fluid way to encourage an organization to become skilled as a learning organization? There are, of course, challenges to creating the mindset required to utilize COPs effectively. First, managers must be willing to see the inherent “chatting” that informal COPs utilize as valuable. Secondly, a COP must determine the depth of formality and structure that it wishes to engage in. Thirdly, trust must be developed between participants to allow them to be vulnerable – in sharing both their ideas (without fear of theft) and their problems (without fear of censure or ridicule).

As a leader, are you taking advantage of the informal COPs in your team? Or do you see these informal teams as a waste of time – and everyone should  just get back to work?

What about your own growth? Do you look for opportunities to learn from others?

For more on Wenger and Snyder, see Cultivating Communities of Practice; Harvard Business School Press, Chapter One, pages 1-21.

I recently stumbled onto an book written by J. Pfeffer with an intriguing chapter called “Can you manage with Unions?”. Pfeffer began this chapter by identifying why it is essential for managers to understand how to work effectively with unions. The author goes on to identify the reasons for management and union reluctance to work collaboratively. This is followed by ample data to support the theory that organizations with unions are more successful! What? His overshadowing caveat (or exception) is that this success is based on union and management working collaboratively and cooperatively for their mutual success.

Is this even possible – collaborative relationships between unions and management?

Pfeffer believes that managers are reluctant to work with unions because they fundamentally believe that union effects on productivity are “presumed to be deleterious”. In other words, unions create impediments to management control in the workplace and hindrances to achieving competitive levels of costs, quality and productivity.

Unions are not without sin, themselves. Pfeffer found that unions traditionally have not pursued input in workplace governance and have been focused on simply bargaining issues, primarily over wages. Another reason for union resistance to joint union-management cooperation was a fear that their members might see them becoming too friendly with the ‘enemy’. 

Can the problems experienced by management and their organizations with organized labour be due to the failure to achieve a mutually beneficial relationship and accommodative working arrangements? Is the state of an organization’s labour relations rather than unionism and collective bargaining per se the element that determines productivity?

In his book, Pfeffer makes a clear argument that organizations with unions succeed more than organizations without unions – but – hear that big BUT – only when there is considerable willingness on both sides of the bargaining table to work collaboratively and cooperatively.

Does your management see unions as a good or bad?

J. Pfeffer, Can You Manage With Unions? A chapter in his 1998 book called The Human Equation: Building Profits By Putting People First (Harvard Business Press)