Ep 71: 3 Surprising Ways to Better Serve your Community

Jun 27

3 Surprising Ways to Better Serve Your Community as an Entrepreneur

The concept I teach often surprises people. It's challenging for individuals, especially community leaders, to comprehend and embrace. However, understanding it is crucial for your success as a community leader. Write this down: Your role as a community leader is not about prioritizing individual interests, but about prioritizing the collective well-being of the entire community.

I understand it may appear counterintuitive. Community often revolves around showing love and care for each individual member. While it's important to care for them, it's not possible to cater to every single person. If you attempt to do so, your community will become scattered, weak, and you may experience burnout. Allow me to reveal three unexpected approaches to enhance your service to the community once you embrace this concept.

Uphold Boundaries to Protect Your Community Culture

The first one is to uphold boundaries. In episode two, I talked about part two of my four-part Community Cultivated Framework™. We talked about culture, and a big part of having a strong culture is having established boundaries. Boundaries are there to protect your culture, but here's the deal. Boundaries are only as good as your ability to uphold them. Doing what's best for the community as a whole involves enforcing boundaries that may negatively impact individuals in the community.

Too often, business owners don't uphold boundaries because they fear hurting or upsetting one member of the community. They're sacrificing the safety of the entire community by doing that, and it impacts all of the members.

In episode eight, I talk about not needing to fear conflict, and we talk about how to handle people in your community that are pushing up against your boundaries and culture. So if this is something you struggle with, I want you to go back to episode eight and listen to that so that you understand how to enforce boundaries, because that's what allows you to create a safe space, which is essential for connection.

Ignore the Naysayers and Focus on Your Community's Purpose

The second is to ignore the naysayers. Lots of people are going to have negative feedback and opinions about what you are doing in your community. The majority of them are not the ideal person you're creating the community for in the first place, even if they're paying members. Many times, I notice business owners getting worked up over negative emails, support issues, or critical comments on Facebook. They try to remedy every problem and make changes to appease the masses, each and every complainer. This is really dangerous.

I'm a huge fan of soliciting feedback. Just listen to episode three of this podcast where I talk about communication and the importance of incoming communication. But not all feedback carries the same weight. When you're focused on the good of the community as a whole, you are driven by fulfilling the common cause of the community. You are very clear on who you want to serve, how you want to help, and the result you want to help them create.

Naysayers, and even well-meaning people who have genuine complaints about your community, can distract you from that purpose. Now, I 100% want you to hear them. I want you to acknowledge them even. But before you make any changes, you want to know that this feedback is coming from your ideal customer and that it's a recurring theme, not a one-off concern. And then you also want to check your data to make sure that it aligns.

Stay focused on your true north and avoid making changes just to appease the loudest voices in your community. When you know your purpose and the transformation you're aiming for, along with the people you're serving, stick to that path. Keep your compass pointed in the right direction and don't allow anything to veer you off course. Otherwise, you might end up making unnecessary adjustments and tweaks for the wrong reasons, leading you astray.

Stay the Course and Foster Long-Term Transformation

The third point is similar to the second one, yet with its distinctions. Stay committed to your path. As community leaders, and as individuals in general, we like to follow the crowd and align with the most popular opinion. However, blindly following the crowd can lead to trouble. As a community leader, what's popular isn't always what's best. Your community will never unanimously agree on their desires. Why? Because your community consists of members at various stages of their journey.

The needs and desires of your community members vary depending on the stage they are currently in. When you initially established your community, I hope you defined a clear purpose and identified a pathway to assist your members in fulfilling the community's promise. If you haven't done so yet, I encourage you to revisit episode seven, "The Secret to Member Progress," where I discuss the success path with Stu McLaren. Engaging in this exercise will help you gain clarity on the distinct stages and milestones that individuals in your community will encounter. Now, it's only natural for people in your community to want you to produce content that is very specific to their stage, to their current problems, needs and wants. But if all your content caters to the most popular opinion and needs, there will be a ton of community members you aren't serving. Whether they're further ahead on the journey or they're not quite to that stage yet.

If you solely focus on catering to the popular opinion and creating content exclusively for the most popular stage, you won't effectively guide people along the path to transformation. As a leader, you carry a broader vision and recognize the significance of long-term objectives. You possess the ability to think strategically and consider the sustainability of the entire community, not just the immediate needs of its members.

You're familiar with the foundational elements that your community may want to overlook but actually need to revisit. You understand the type of content they'll crave when they reach future milestones they may not even be aware of yet. It's important to have faith in your vision, even if it means creating content and experiences that don't cater to the majority of your community. Your decisions are guided by the overarching journey of the entire community, not by the individual preferences of each member. So maintain a clear vision, chart the path, and stay committed to it. You know the foundational elements they'll want to ignore, but need to revisit. You know the content that they will want to have at their fingertips when they reach the next milestone that they're not even aware of yet. You need to trust in that vision, even if that means creating content and experiences that don't serve the majority of people in your community. The decisions you make are not based on the personal interests of each individual, but on the big picture journey for the entire community. So get a clear vision, map out the path and stay the course.

Focusing on the Community as a Whole

Now you can see that as a community leader, you need to focus on what's best for the whole community, not just individuals.

Here are three ways to do that:

1. Set boundaries to protect the community's culture.

2. Don't let negative comments bring you down; not all complaints require action.

3. Stay true to your vision and keep working towards the transformation you aim to achieve.

If you found this valuable, do me a favor. Share with the fellow community leader so that you can give them the freedom and the wisdom that comes with this concept of serving the community as a whole and not the individual.