so, my concern is addressed and we will have lots of meaningful information and management insight in our smartphone. But what came out after couple of month was a completely different scenario than what it was earlier envisaged.
Days of lull followed by same chain messages and jokes with occasional request from the admin to refrain from sharing jokes became the character of this group. What constructive came was in the form of old photographs of office parties. I chipped in with some ideas but one of my old friends, who is now CEO of a big company, took offence, and I shut myself out of it as a fall out.
I am still the part of that group but have kept to myself after that. This experience taught me what not to do or what to do while creating WhatsApp group. This could be useful for creating a group at any platform:
Don’t create a group when your objective is not clear:
Any work must have an objective behind it. Without objective, it is bound to lose the track and go in loop of meaninglessness.
That is also true with a group as well. My colleague, while creating the group didn’t have any specific objective in mind. It was just an assumption that a group of professionals working in different organizations at senior middle management to senior management level must be having something positive to contribute, which turned out to be untrue.
What I can infer that lack of direction, paucity of time, abundance of idea and size of device must have created a big problem in achieving what was assumed goal of the group. So, the group admin must set an objective before starting the group in definite and addressable terms and inform it to all the group members.
Don’t assume, Ask:
Meaningful discussion on different topics of management was assumed objective of the group. At least this is what the admin of the group had in his mind. Assumption is one of the biggest problems of human race and we create huge problem for ourselves due to our assumptions only.
When we create a group, we are trying to bring in certain number of people together and find a common interest, which can’t be assumed but asked and confirmed. This group had diverse set of people working in different organizations at different hierarchy. We all know that we form our opinion based on the situation we are in and facts and figures in our hand. So, different opinions, different expectations were another shortcoming of this group.
Every group or society has certain amount of homogeneity among them; either based on language, sex, age group, economic profile, geographic boundaries etc. In our group, we were friends in different schools.
which presented a common goal for us, but it was in the past. Now, we all are working in different organizations and different work environment, which means, the homogeneity I am talking about here is a thing of past and we have moved ahead and away from that. Resultantly, we all were talking different language and result was just cacophony.
Don’t create a group, which you can’t control and lead:
When you create a group, you must be sure that you will be able to control and lead the group. This friend of mine was at lower middle management level in the organization of whose employees this group belongs and some of the members of this group were at President, Executive Vice President, and Senior Vice President in that organization.
With such a huge gap in hierarchy, he is not able to set a path of action for the group. All the people being acquaintance, of different hierarchy, juniors loaded with the expectation of getting some benefit from the seniors, this group is showing the picture of any other corporate office work environment with sycophancy and politics embedded into it.
Consider the limitations of the platform while creating the group:
This group created on WhatsApp Messenger is obviously on smartphones, which has screen size limitation and keypad challenges where participants mostly uses their thumbs for typing.
In this particular case, I am afraid that senior people might have been finding it tough to type big messages or management experiences on mobile phones in detail. After all, when someone writes something, he/she attaches his reputation around it and won’t like it to be trivialized due to errors. So this could be one big lesson to consider the limitations of the platform before creating the group.
Do lots of research to be the admin of the group and earn respect:
As an admin, one needs to keep sharing useful information aligned to the objective of the group, which should be beneficial to the group members. To share these informations, the admin must be well read and be attuned to the objective. This will earn him/her respect from the group member and help in achieving the objective of the group.
Have the ability to break the monotony and generate interest:
Not everybody participates with full gusto in any group; while some play the role of active members, some just comment and some just follow. If there is limited number of active members in the group, then monotony is bound to set in after sometime, because of limited participation from other group members. So, it becomes important for the admin to generate and sustain interest of the group to keep it alive and meaningful.
what are you using your platform for?
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