21: Carrie Melissa Jones on Community Managers, Closing Communities, and Leaving Well
Carrie Melissa Jones is an author, entrepreneur, and strategist whose work is dedicated to the world of digital community and belonging. Named by Salesforce as one of the three community experts to follow, Jones has been building online communities since the early days of web forums and chat technology. Today, her work influences the world’s leading brands and organizations, including Airbnb, Discord, Google, Microsoft, and two US presidential campaigns.
As the founder of The CMJ Group, she teaches and guides brands through the application of digital leadership, community building, and community strategy. Her company has worked with organizations including the American Medical Association, Equinix, The Ken Blanchard Companies, Project Management Institute, Patreon, Microsoft, and many more. Together these brands connect well over 100 million people worldwide.
Carrie’s book, Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging, co-written with bestselling author Charles Vogl, helps leaders understand and explore the concepts of authentic community building. Building Brand Communities is the recipient of the gold medal in Networking & Communication from the Axiom Business Book Awards in 2020.
Beginning in 2014, Jones served as co-founder and COO of CMX Media. CMX (acquired by Bevy Labs in 2019) provides forums, events, and content for community builders around the world. It now boasts a 20,000-person and growing membership.
Her writing on communities has appeared in VentureBeat, The Next Web, and First Round Review. She has a B.A. from UCLA in both English and Mass Communication and an M.A. in Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where her research focused on online communities, belonging, and digital leadership.
Carrie’s personal mission is to help everyone find somewhere they feel they belong.
“What gets created, especially in a community, is not going to look the way that you think it’s going to look on day one. There’s no way. It’s going to be, in some ways, much more wonderful, and in other ways, much more challenging than you can possibly imagine when you’re standing on day one.”
Additional Quotes:
I don't know if we can ever tell the full story because we need space to really tell it in a way that we're going to be proud that we told it. Maybe that's not true for everyone, but for me, because it was so heightened, the emotions around it were so heightened, I really needed the space.
There are no definitive metrics that are going to tell you whether something's working or not. And so we often are going off of our gut. Unfortunately, our gut is often influenced by outside culture and all these other things. And outside culture is telling us more is better, try harder, rest is not productive, all these things
Build healthy relationships, then you can navigate transitions. If your relationships are rocky, or distant, or you haven't taken the time to really get to know the people in your community, then your transitions are going to be really, really tough.
Leaving well means being kind and graceful to yourself through the leaving process and giving grace to the stayers. Any leaving is not only affecting you, it's affecting those around you as well. So, if we could fill endings with kindness and grace, I think the world would be a better place.
To connect with Carrie:
Take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz.
To learn more about Leaving Well, click here.
My Bookshop.org Leaving Well library has many resources to support your workplace transition journey!
To support and contribute to the production costs of this podcast:
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcript:
And what gets created, especially in a community is not going to look the way that you think it's going to look on day one. There's no way it's going to be. In some ways, much more wonderful and in other ways, much more challenging than you can possibly imagine when you're standing on day one.
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose. And when possible, Joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief, confidence, leadership, and career development.
Braided Throughout will be solo episodes sharing my best practices and leaving well framework. Expect to be inspired. Challenged and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice of leaving. Well, as you seek to leave your imprint in this world, Carrie Melissa Jones is an author, entrepreneur, and strategist whose work is dedicated to the world of digital community and belonging named by Salesforce as one of the three community experts to follow.
Jones has been building online communities since the early days of web forums and chat technology. Today, Carrie's work influences the world's leading brands and organizations, including Airbnb, Discord, Google, Microsoft, and two United States presidential campaigns. As the founder of the CMJ Group, she teaches and guides brands to the application of digital leadership, community building, and community strategy.
Her company has worked with organizations including the American Medical Association, Equinix, the Ken Blanchard Companies, Project Management Institute, Patreon, Microsoft, and many more. Together, these brands connect well over 100 million people worldwide. Carrie's book, Building Brand Communities, How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging, co written with best selling author Charles Vogel, helps leaders understand and explore the concepts of authentic community building.
Building Brand Communities is the recipient of the Gold Medal in Networking and Communication from the Axiom Business Book Awards in 2020. Beginning in 2014, Joan served as co founder and COO of CMX Media. CMX, which was acquired by Bevy Labs in 2019, provides forums, events, and content for community builders around the world.
It now boasts a 20, 000 person, and growing, membership. Her writing on communities has appeared in VentureBeat, The next web and first round review. She has a B. A. From U. C. L. A. In both English and mass communication and an M. A. In communication from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where her research focused on online communities, belonging and digital leadership carries personal mission is to help everyone find somewhere that they feel they belong.
I am excited to have you on, and I would love for you to tell me in your words about your own transition and change story. Hi, it's so great to be here. I'm such a huge fan of your work and really everything that you do. So it's my honor to be here. Yeah, so my story of change and transition. I mean, which one I guess would be the question.
Love to focus I suppose today on communities broadly and how to close them and leave them well. What I can talk about from my own personal experience is creating organizations and leaving those organizations after creating them. Um, and how difficult that is. It is very, very personal and emotional. So I work to build the organization.
From 2014 alongside co founder David Spinks and throughout the years that I was there had been instrumental in growing the organization and despite my many contributions to the organization really struggled to have my work seen and recognized and so. After three, four years of working on the organization, I decided to step back and that was my primary reason for doing so, even though at the time, you know, I said it was to pursue other opportunities.
That was the the public line for why I was leaving. It really was because my work just could not seem to see the light of day. And so I grew frustrated by that and decided to leave to leave what I had started and I've been. Wrestling with that decision ever since it's now been over six years. Has it been six years?
Oh my goodness. Um, and I'm still wrestling with that decision over whether I left that well over whether I should have ever been part of that over if I could have left it better. And then over now, the fact that Sphinx is no longer involved over how he had left the organization and how it continues to this day.
So that's my own personal story with it. I've been part of many communities that have closed and seen many of them close and that's really my area of expertise. I'm happy to talk about that on a broad level as well. One follow up question to that is, why do you think, maybe not why do you think we do that, but is there a future where we can start telling more of the reality when we leave?
Because we all do it. We all leave, and we say one thing, and there's a public version, and then the inside is what we then end up wrestling with, and I'm just curious what your thoughts are. Is that possible in the future for us to be able to be a little bit more Transparent, I believe. I think that's a great question that we should all ask ourselves.
In, in my case, in my story, I needed the space to find a way to articulate why I was leaving in a way that wasn't angry. And not that there's anything wrong with anger. There's not, especially there's a lot, you know, we could talk a lot about like anger and women's anger and things like that. But. I didn't want to communicate with anger.
That's not how I wanted to leave. And there was a lot of other things wrapped up in it. Grief, which I've now processed. Hope. There was a lot of other things mixed up with it. So from the perspective of the person leaving, I don't know. I don't know if we can ever tell the full story because we need space to really Tell it in a way that we're going to be proud that we told it.
Maybe that's not true for everyone, but for me, it could, because it was so heightened, the emotions around it were so heightened, I really needed the space. But when it's maybe a little bit more cut and dry, which I don't know, maybe there's like 5 percent of situations that are actually cut and dry, black and white.
I do hope that we can tell the whole truth. I think me leaving could have at that point in time sparked a much more important conversation around the erasure of. Work, uh, that was really systemic in nature. Primarily women's work, but not just women's work at women's and non binary folks work, and that could have been a really fruitful conversation.
I wasn't ready to partake in it then, and I can assure you that my business partner was not ready to partake in that conversation. I still don't think he's ready to partake in that conversation. So it just, there's so many layers to that. Well, and that brings up, I love that you said about space. Because I think even in your answer, it gives grace so that we don't feel as obligated to hold both realities of what's the truth and what does the public statement need to be.
And I think there's also some protection as you were talking, I was just thinking about protection of the stayers, the people that don't leave also with you, that there needs to be some honoring of their own reality and their experience of you leaving. And so perhaps. Not telling the whole truth of the matter helps protect the stairs.
Yeah, I thought about that a lot at the time, too. And I was very worried, you know, if I said anything that it could potentially affect their livelihoods and that really mattered to me. The reason why I stuck around for so long, even knowing what I. You know, what was happening to my work is because I cared so much about the individuals that I worked with and yeah, if I had told my full truth, first of all, there's my truth is not everybody else's truth.
And if we had sparked that conversation, the company was not in a place where it could have probably withstood having that conversation from a financial standpoint, even if I'm angry at an organization in a situation doesn't mean I need to. Take it, the whole thing down with me when I go, because it is providing value, right?
It's still providing value. I thought a lot about my most recent leaving and the fact that I stayed so that something could be launched, knowing along the way that that also meant I had to tell a specific story when I made the decision to leave. And I do think there's. Moments where it's easier to tell when, say, your family's growing or there's a relocation and you're moving or something else big happens.
And so I'm just wanting to offer support to those that are listening when there's not that, that you, you get to decide and you get to decide what your story is when you leave. What three words would you use to describe your relationship to change and transition? I would say fear, excitement. Openness, I'm afraid of it, but I, I welcome it with open arms because I know it's the only way.
Yeah, I agree. It is the only way I would love for us to go down the path of the community stewardship space and the work that we do. And I think that even those 3 words that you just mentioned for your excitement and openness, I think, you know, if everyone started their communities from that realization that those 3 things will exist, it would be.
A huge boon. I would love for you to talk about the themes of change and transition as they show up in your community work. Yeah, so in communities, things are constantly changing, and this is why I've adapted this very open lens toward change, because it's happening every day, every minute, every second.
In a community, you've got change happening on the big picture level, you've got it happening for your individual members and their lives, and you've got it happening interpersonally between members, and you've got it for the organization itself. So, It's just constant, constant change and embracing that.
So that comes up constantly. The clients that I work with, they, you know, they'll say something worked for us last year. It's no longer working for us. And we really don't know why we really, really cannot figure out why. And. Navigating that and figuring that out for me always looks like, okay, what kinds of conversations have you had recently?
What are your relationships like with people? Are they actually deep enough that you can ask them or will they lie to you when you ask them just to be nice? Right? So I see that all the time. And then during the pandemic, there was a huge rise of online communities. Just so many online communities, whether it was a group of mothers getting together once a week to have coffee and, and share what was going on in their lives to enterprise organizations and the fortune 100 launching massive online communities.
There was just so much going on digitally and there still is, but there was a massive closure of a lot of these communities and it was done. For the most part, completely haphazardly. There's so many loose ends that never got tied up post the height of COVID. And I, I see that all the time. I've always seen communities open and close and things like that.
But in the last, especially last year, I feel like that's been when everything is kind of shut down that was launched for the purpose of getting through those tough times. I just see a lot of communities close and that's neither bad nor good, but how you deal with it determines. You know what, what gets left and what gets created as a result.
Do you think it's advantageous and possible for community owners, community builders? I don't even know if community owner should be a word, but for those that start communities host communities, should they start with the end in mind? Or is that community by community? Would your answer vary? That's a fascinating question.
I think what's coming to mind for me right now is when you start a business, a lot of business leaders will tell you what's the exit strategy, or will ask you what's the exit strategy. You need to know that now, coming into it. I think with communities and with businesses, frankly, you could have an idea of what you might want one day, but what you want is going to change.
And what gets created, especially in a community, is not going to look the way that you think it's going to look on day one. There's no way. It's going to be, in some ways, much more wonderful, and in other ways, much more challenging than you can possibly imagine when you're standing on day one. I think it can be helpful to think about that, but I actually like to go in to my work with a much more observant and, like, a listening stance.
And... Again, being open to what unfolds I use this, this imagery of unfolding a lot in describing my work. So, I, I don't think it's actually very helpful to think about the end when you're launching a community, because if you start thinking about that. You're already going to be limiting what can be possible in that space.
And you're already going to then be, you're going to close down to different ideas. People will bring you ideas, they will bring you conversations, and you will shut those down. Instead, what I often counsel folks to be really clear about is what their purpose is going into that. And your purpose might shift over time.
It might need to shift. Maybe you achieve your purpose and now you have a different purpose. But that purpose is probably going to be fairly Static the whole time. And so with that in mind, you can be flexible about how you how the community looks, how your organization looks, what leadership looks like all these things as long as it helps the purpose that then that's a helpful framework.
To keep with you. I also think of some communities who have a purpose that is maybe more encouraged or more informed by their membership. And that also makes me think that it would be really, really hard to think of the end if you have no idea what's going to happen in between the beginning. And the end based on membership and who's, who's in the community with you.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm, I'm part of a group that meets we used to meet every week. Then we started meeting biweekly. And now we meet monthly. I think it might even be quarterly, but we've been part of this group for over 3 years. And I remember the 1st year of the group every.
Every week we would sit down and say, what are we really here to do on our, and are we the right people to do it? And so a lot of our conversation was just meta conversation. And we've kind of evolved into sort of a cooperative, a loose cooperative of people that build communities professionally on client's behalf.
And we can kind of share what we're learning, share our challenges with each other. But I think that's perfectly okay. And if anything kind of gave us. It's a taste of what many of our clients are experiencing and going through when they're starting communities. You, you might think that your purpose is one thing.
You might think that the way things need to look is one way. It's all going to evolve in relationship with other people. Piggybacking on what you were talking about with the beginnings, is there anything that you have as a, I know your work is Multiple facets to it, but is there a couple of things that you would encourage anyone who's listening who has the idea of starting a community, um, that you would give them as advice?
Slow down. That's also my advice for leaving. Spoiler. Slow down. I, I cannot emphasize that enough. What we often hear about communities is people will say, oh, I have this community and they'll brag like, oh, it's got. 10, 000 people in my Facebook group or whatever, you know, we don't have to talk about the fact that those people might not actually be paying any attention to your group or anything like that.
But what we talk about is like the sheer size or the magnitude and these kind of, um, vanity metrics that we, is how we often refer to them and. You don't get there on day 1. You don't even get there on day 10. And most communities that get there on day 10 are actually not that healthy because they haven't taken the time to get their purpose really clear, make sure that the right people are there and that those who have intentions that are not in alignment with the purpose are not there.
So when I say slow down, what I really mean is. Take your time in getting that purpose really clear, making sure you have, I usually say about 10 people, the 10 people, who do you want to make sure in the room for whatever conversation you want to be having an ongoing fashion with your community. They can be your co organizers.
They can also just be what is often called founding members. Those are who you're starting out with, and those are the foundation and the groundwork for everything else that happens. So if you spend months talking to those 10 people, that's okay. Before you get to that 10, 000, you will be better off having done that than if you Launched really widely and then grew really fast and then have to ask all these questions about why are we here and and and are we.
Really here to, to do the same thing as everybody else. So, yeah, and I, I see those communities close all the time. The ones that, uh, grow really fast tend to burn out just as quickly. I'm thinking about the 10 people, and for my experience with a Facebook community. a community that was hosted on Facebook, I should say.
Having those 10 also really helped during the hard times in the middle, and they were the ones that had my back. They were the ones that I could lean on when we sunsetted at the end. It was the same people all the way through, so I highly echo that of take the time to get those folks in the room. What do you wish that more community stewards slash tenders slash managers, and I know there's probably some, a lot of nuance in between each of those kind of role titles, but what do you wish folks knew about navigating in the middle space of their communities about transition and change?
So for those who are really, who are in it, The number one thing to keep in mind is that you're not alone in oftentimes feeling like what's going on around you is chaos, or doesn't make sense, or isn't purposeful, or isn't working. Every community builder I've ever worked with has wondered, is what I'm doing working?
I actually don't know. And there are no definitive metrics that are going to tell you whether something's working or not. And so we often are going off of our gut. Unfortunately, our gut is often influenced by outside culture and all these other things. And outside culture is telling us like, more is better, try harder, rest is not productive, all these things.
Even the way that we feel about it might not be objectively accurate about its success. So I would just say that whatever thoughts that you're having and questioning that your questions that you're asking yourself about whether what you're doing is successful or not, keep asking those questions. And don't pressure yourself to have an answer and don't pressure yourself to push harder and do more, more, more.
There's a huge misconception among community builders that more is better. And we all talk about, you know, like, that size doesn't matter and all this stuff, but then I will go in and work with the community builder really closely. And even though they know intellectually that size doesn't matter, bigger isn't better, all these things, they're still running the tape in their head of.
Like, oh, well, we only have 20 percent of people that are have signed up for this thing have actually shown up and done anything with us. And for me, anywhere between 4 to 20 percent of your membership showing up and doing things is incredibly successful. And I think that shocks a lot of people because they think that that number is really, really low, but that's just the way that communities.
Function is that between four and 20 percent of your membership is going to contribute way more than that other 80%. And if you see more than that, then fantastic. You're doing something very special. You have a very special group of people. You should celebrate yourself, go take yourself out for a nice meal or something.
But 20 percent fantastic baseline. Yeah, we just we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do things that are important to you. Not even necessarily possible or wouldn't even be helpful, even if they were done two things that you've said just now. I'd love to expand a little bit. 1 was the concept of consistency and I'm curious what you would say the relationship is.
Between consistency and transition and how they can feed off of each other or support each other, especially in the space of community tending. Yeah, consistency is so important in community building, just as it is in all of our individual relationships as well. If people don't know what to expect from us, or they are afraid of how we might react to things or any, anything else that feels inconsistent, then they won't continue to show up.
So, So that's always something to be paying attention to. It's also really hard to be consistent. So that is where the work is. That's the maintenance. Uh, as one of my friends, um, Alex Jacoby talks about maintenance art. That is that is the art of community building is maintenance art. And so if you've built healthy relationships, then you can navigate.
transition. If your relationships are rocky or distant or you haven't taken the time to really get to know the people in your community, then your transitions are going to be really, really tough. It's going to be really tough to, you know, ask somebody, this is a very common community problem of like, Go from our 1 platform that we used to use, and now we're changing to another platform.
It's going to be very hard to navigate that transition with people if you have not been consistent up to that point, and you do not have a strong relationship. So if you invest in those relationships during times of just regular times of transition, then when you have these big transitions, it's not going to be catastrophic for you.
Which brings back feelings of like, oh yeah, that's right, like trust, communication, all of those things start to play in the same kind of pot of soup with transition change and community building. What would you say about Community building or change transition that people might be shocked or surprised to hear you say, you're pretty blunt and you don't hold back when you're talking about these things.
So maybe you don't have anything, but I'm curious if there's something that you think would shock or surprise people. I am pretty blunt about these things. You are. I was just thinking about that today. I'm like, I just kind of say what's on my mind about these things now. I used to really like talk very gingerly about things.
That's not helping anybody. Being nice is not always. Being very kind. There's so much that shocks people about like what I say about community building, and not just me, any community builder would say about it. And it's because so much of so many of us think that we know the right way to build community, or exactly how to connect people and that we think it should be easy, and it's not.
It's not, it not only is technically difficult in many cases, it's also emotionally very difficult and whatever issues you might have with, you know, relationality in your life, whether it's relationship to yourself, relationship to your mother, relationship to, that's mine, um, relationship to siblings, like all of that stuff.
It's gonna come up, and it's gonna be knocking on your door and asking you to deal with it, um, because you are dealing with people, and so all of that stuff just is, that's all in the soup. So, I mean, in terms of what, maybe that's shocking to folks, the fact that their, uh, their mother wound is probably going to come out when they are building community, and, uh, you can just greet her and be like, hey, mother wound, I see you.
Let's, uh, let's talk about this. Let's figure this out together. It's so interesting that you say that, but it also comes back to full circle what you said at the very beginning about like, you're not only navigating the change of the community or transition, you're navigating your own transition, especially who you are when you started the community is not who you are in the middle and definitely not who you are at the end.
And then I'm just thinking about. If your mother wound's coming up as the community steward, what wounds are coming up as people are bumping up against each other in the community? I mean, that's just, that's a lot. Not to mention the actual logistics and tech stuff that happens when you're in an online space with a community.
Yeah. Yeah. Which the tech stuff is just, that's all easy in comparison to everything else. And I think it's, maybe this is something else that's might be a little shocking, but I think it's important that we. Don't spend too much time thinking about how hard this work is because if we did, we nobody would do it.
And it's why a lot of people don't do it. And why we're in a crisis of connection in America, but also worldwide. So I think it's really important that we don't spend too much time thinking about. Just how deep all this goes, because that is the work that is so, so needed. So, yeah, just even to recognize that who you are is different at the end of your journey than you started.
That's a beautiful realization, and it's not something that you can plan for. At the start anyway, so just maintain or staying open to it and staying open to other people's reactions to it. I think that that's really hard to do. It's a lot like the work of like a mental health professional, you just have to hold space for it.
You've probably seen this but Sonia Renee Taylor's, the body is not an apology. That community is closing, and I think they're actually getting close to, they announced this a year ago, nearly a year ago, and have given a whole year. To the closing process. So if you haven't looked into how this is transitioning, it's fascinating.
And they've particularly been organizing spaces and dialogues, people to talk about what's coming up for them. And that takes so much emotional labor and what beautiful work to offer the world. And how rare is that opportunity for us to fully process something over a year span. We don't even give ourselves containers like that when someone Leaves this world like we don't.
And so, yeah, I think about that and I'm like, what a beautiful closing to that. And let's acknowledge that it is work. It is definitely, definitely work to do it. You said some things that all really tie in beautifully together around. Normalization of it's hard, but don't let that stop you from starting. I think the most beautiful thing from my experience in building a community and holding space for it was that I learned along the way.
I started mine because I couldn't. Manage the influx of communication from people that had seen a blog post. And what I didn't realize in starting it was that there was so much, I still needed to learn about the topic and about relationships with people and all of those things. And so I think even just the normalization of coming back to center, kind of, for those that are community stewards of like, what, why did you start this in the first place to your point about purpose is really important to keep that front and center.
And I love that you brought up that about. Sunny Renee Taylor's community. I did not know that they were closing that they have given it that space. What a beautiful offering. Show that and have that be something that others can learn from. That's outstanding. Yeah. Sounds exhausting. Right. Right, it does.
And beautiful and necessary necessary, and I think there's something to be said to about. I've so appreciated your work because it shines a light in what's possible. And it comes from a deeply research, deeply known space of reality, but it also shines this light of, like, we don't know what's possible. We have to keep going.
And so I think about. It's 1 more field guide or set of notes that people will be able to follow in the future around community building. What is your biggest piece of advice kind of going back to the beginning with the story and your experience that you were sharing about leaving something? What's the biggest piece of advice you would give someone who's navigating their own transition away from something?
I suppose more than anything else. What I would say is. To let it go and let yourself have plenty of space and time to let it go. It's okay to hold on and to feel 5, 000 things in a day about what you're leaving. As long as you have the intention that one day you will let it go. There's so much you can't change.
Not only of your own actions in the past, but also you never could change anything with the other people in that organization or scenario. Did thought felt that's not your work to do. So give yourself all of the grace and space to let it go. Is there anything that we haven't covered before I ask you my last question that you would like to share with those listening about any of the topics we've covered or those we haven't covered?
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that is important to talk about is. What it often looks like when people do close communities and a better way forward through that, because it leaves a vacuum in people's lives when a community closes. And we're not very good at processing that. I mean, we've, we've got the counterexample of, uh, Sonya Renee Taylor and the work that's been done for the, for that community.
But, um, usually what happens is that people simply send out an email and say, this community is closing, they'll kind of explain why they oftentimes are not yet ready to articulate even why they're shutting it down, much like my, my scenario. And then, They'll put a date on it and they'll shut it all down and it will all go away and it typically doesn't give people enough time or reminders to make sure that they're connected to everybody they need to connect to make sure that they know where else they can talk to people, continue those conversations, continue those relationships, and there's very, very rarely any kind of closure ritual or ceremony or anything like that to To mark the end of something and so yeah, what it does is it creates a vacuum and people don't know how to fill it.
So an enormous gift you can give in this scenario is to help people navigate where to go. If they want to continue to have the kind of conversations and relationships that they were having in the space that you had been stewarding, help them find or create their own space for that. Or it could be that your community achieved its purpose and its goal and you should definitely have a big party for that if that's the case, not just an email and then a shutdown.
So I don't know if you have seen that in your own experience as well, but I see that happening all the time. It's very disappointing. Well, and it was interesting when we. Closed down, I am a triangle. We first moved from one platform to another, and that was a huge learning experience. I assumed that because these folks had moved all over the world, literally that this kind of a change and transition from one platform to another wouldn't be a big deal.
And I was wrong, but what I found when we then sunsetted at the second platform, we needed to leave. I'll say this. We needed to leave Facebook because it was right after Trump's election. And there's just a lot happening on Facebook that I couldn't.
And so that was a necessary ending, but when I closed down the second platform hosted community space, it was a much more slow process and that was beautiful. We, we offered all this time for other like minded, like oriented communities to come in and give insight, give opportunities to say, come over and hop over and join ours.
And I'm so grateful that we did that. I made all sorts of mistakes when I. Sunset of that, but it was a better ending because of exactly what you said about letting people know how to continue with the relationships. And I think 1 thing that stuck out when you were talking is if they have put the trust in that community and you as a community steward, helping them.
By having like a trust bridge, almost of like, here's other places that you might find helpful is so supportive. Instead of having people try and struggle to find it themselves, especially when there's so many not so great community spaces out there. That's a huge gift. I'm really glad you brought that up.
Also, the closure ritual. That's powerful. And when you're just in a rush to close things, it can be really hard to think about. I know a lot of people close communities because they're exhausted. That is why a lot see an end. And so planning any kind of ritual can feel. Really exhausting in that. And that's where we're seeing, you know, some of the, the hierarchical kind of structures that we're trying to get away from by building communities.
We see them reflected in the way that we even build them, because it's this idea of like, there's one leader and you have to do it all yourself and all that. It's so pervasive. So maybe the closure ritual doesn't even have to be created by you. Maybe it can be created or co created with the people who feel that the community has been important to them.
You know, it doesn't all have to be on your shoulders to plan that. It's a beautiful set of recommendations and advice. I love it. Carrie, what does leaving well mean to you? Leaving well means being kind and graceful to yourself through the leaving process and giving grace to the stayers. Any leaving is not only affecting you, it's affecting those around you as well.
So if we could fill endings with kindness and grace, I think the world would be a better place. Thanks. Thank you, Carrie. I appreciate you so much. Um, you as a person and individual and you as the person who is birthing all of this amazing work into the world. It's so necessary. Uh, and I'm so glad that you are, are, are in it right back at you.
Seriously, to learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit naomihattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation.
Until next time, I'm your host. Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.