Practices or Guilds are powerful cross-organization structures that connect people with similar roles or interests, to define, develop and share their skills, knowledge and experience. Once established, these practices can become the home of the entire employee lifecycle, from recruiting and onboarding, through professional development and cycle reviews, learning and development, and can even participate in promotion or compensation reviews.
There are two ways to develop communities of practice: bottom-up as organic communities of like-minded individuals, or top-down as a formal organizational construct. We find that establishing formal practices can create alignment within and across teams, which helps to prevent the fragmentation that often happens at scale. We advocate a model where we set up the roles, responsibilities, governance and infrastructure for top-down formal practices, then make all of this infrastructure available to anyone who wants to start their own community.
practitioners have been building organization-wide communities of practice for over 20 years and we see time and again how instrumental they are in creating autonomy through alignment.