Mozilla CBT Build Principles

Making implicit information explicit allows us to grow. We are able to recognize and add to something that works well, while focusing less on what doesn’t work well. Being explicit allows us to talk about something we do and/or experience – it allows this information to be shared and understood by others. When we focus on value and impact, we must be explicit in order to understand what is happening.

During my work on the Community Building Team (CBT) at Mozilla, I have been exposed to several themes of how the team works when success happens.  Intrinsically, these are the agreed upon ways by which we do our work. Extrinsically, these are the principles by which we do our work.

I cannot claim to be the single voice for these principles on our team – that would be not Mozilla-like. However, these are things I have been exposed to by working with and reading about the work of all members of the team.

1. Build Understanding – Demonstrate competence. Seek first to understand. Every engagement is different. We care about people and doing the right thing for them. In order to best help them, we are curious.
2. Build Connections – Be a catalyst for connection. Our team has a broad reach in the organizations. Sometimes the best way we can build is by connecting what is already there.
3. Build Clarity – This is important when bringing more people into a project. We seek to navigate through the confusion to create clarity for us, our partners and the community.
4. Build Trust – This is about having someone’s back. It’s important that the people we work with know that we are in this with them, together.
5. Build Pilots – Our work is not a one size fits all. We care about the best solution so we test our assumptions to see what works and build from there.
6. Build Win-Win – Focus on mutual benefit. We engage in win-win partnerships because our success is dependent on others. More people can only sustainably come into a project when it’s mutually beneficial. We want to make our partners look good.

Having these principles allows others people and teams to understand how the CBT works and what things are a valued when doing that work. It allows allow members of the team to have a toolkit to reference when entering into a new engagement and builds a level of consistency about interaction – creating clear expectations for others. All this leads to the sustainable success of the CBT.

I’ve places these into a nice PDF format below.

[Post also appeared on Sean Bolton’s blog.]