Our guest today is Jono Bacon, a leading community and collaboration strategy consultant, speaker, and author. He is the author of ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams.’ He joins us today to share insights on the importance of culture in communities.

Community Strategist

Jono Bacon is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting, which provides community and management strategy, execution, and coaching. Aside from his book People Powered, Jono also wrote the best-selling The Art of Community. 

“My work is: trying to figure out how do you build a great community culture. How do you put together a strategy that can predict that culture? It’s challenging but fascinating work.” -Jono Bacon

A Sense of Shared Purpose

Jono shares how fascinated he is with communities. He defines them as a group of minds, availability, and experience. They are a network of brains. However, the concern lies when these people side on different teams and have a disconnect in terms of purpose. 

“The reason why that is a problem is, there are so much experience and insight living in people’s minds, that when you connect them together, with a shared sense of meaning and purpose, its amazing the results you can get.” – Jono Bacon

Further into this episode, Jono shares he received an email from an African child that made him realize the phenomenal things people would do when they feel that sense of culture and shared purpose.

“He told me when he was walking 2 hours back that he felt this real sense of ‘Im part of something, something bigger than I am.’ Locally, he was the kid in a rural village in Africa, but when he was part of that community, he was a machine that could have a transformative impact.” – Jono Bacon

Motivating People

Jaime Jay poses the question most leaders would ask, how do you motivate the creativity of people? Jono answers candidly that he believes that every individual tactic that we work on to build a community or a company, has a genealogy that translates back up to the value of why we’re doing something. This motivation varies, depending on the kind of people we want to attract and the kind of community we are building. 

“We, first of all, have to figure out what that core motivation is, realistically. The second thing is, we need to design an experience where you can very easily commune into a community as a window shopper, ‘cause all community, people, first of all, they browse first and see what’s going on here. If they see a reason for them to play a role in this, they sign up and they participate.” – Jono Bacon

Download and listen to How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams to learn more. Remember to let Jono know you heard about him on Culture Eats Strategy with Jaime Jay!

Connect through the links below:

Twitter: @jonobacon

Facebook: @jonobacon

Linkedin: Jono Bacon

Book: People Powered