Hello, RLS members new and old! Welcome to the Rands Leadership Slack quick-start guide 🙂
RLS is a big community! As of January 2023, RLS membership was the same size as Neehah, Wisconsin with 25,694 people. As RLS continues to grow, it can be harder to figure out where to get started. This quick-start guide is intended to give you that starting point to exploring and participating in this community.
And please be assured that we do want you - yes, you! - to participate. You are not too junior, or too new, or not leader-y enough to contribute. Our community benefits from being able to discuss and learn from all of our perspectives and experiences, and it's one of the great things about being in RLS.
That being said - active participation is not mandatory! We know that some folks prefer to hang back and take it all in, and people who choose to be more passive participants are still welcome here.
Please make sure you read and understand the RLS Code of Conduct. We respect it and take it quite seriously!
This community is especially sensitive to appropriate interactions around commercial activity. The CoC has a detailed section around these expectations that you should read, but the tl;dr is that commercial behavior is strictly limited to a select few channels, and there is an especially low tolerance for community members who choose to repeatedly ignore these CoC guidelines.
If you find that the CoC section about commercial activity has left you with insufficient clarity, we also have a whole document discussing commercial activity with some examples and discussion.
Our CoC has specific guidelines around unsolicited DMs and generally leans toward any kind of unsolicited DM being a breach of the CoC. If you're OK with people reaching out to you via DMs, you may want to mention it in your profile.
This is a big place, and it can feel intimidating. On the surface, Rands Leadership Slack looks like a group of high-performing leaders with extensive experience and a wide range of expertise. And that's true - but that's not all we are. We are humans with strengths and weaknesses. Our community is a fabric of many individuals from different backgrounds, companies, countries, and working cultures. We each bring different perspectives to the discussion - and so can you.
We know what imposter syndrome is. Many of us experience it regularly in some form, and you may well feel it too upon joining. Finding yourself amongst a self-selecting group of leaders, often in high profile roles, you can suddenly feel smaller than you did before. We strongly encourage you to push past this. Start contributing. Find your own voice, share your own insights, and ask questions where you want to learn. We welcome you and hope you will quickly find it rewarding to engage with us.
We treat leadership as a human quality, not just a job title. We make mistakes and learn from each other. We support and encourage each other. We're a community.
Some channels have specific guidance on what's considered on-topic for discussion - if so, that information is typically in the channel topic and/or description, so have a look there before posting.
Many channels also have pinned items - links and resources that people have considered useful or important enough to bookmark for easy look-up later.
Rands Leadership Slack has many (many) channels. We could not hope to describe all of them here, but this should help give you a starting point for being here.
#how-to-rls: Not sure which channel is the best place for your question or post? Ask for directions here.#rls-*: Channels with therls-prefix are related to operating and participating in RLS, such as#rls-admins,#rls-culture, and#rls-rules.#daily-ftw: This is where we celebrate our wins, and it's a great channel to get started in! Post your own wins so we can cheer you on, and join the conversations on other people's posts!#help-and-advice: If there's not a more specific channel that's relevant to your question, you can always ask in this channel.#anonymous-help-advice: For various reasons, there are times where someone may not feel comfortable asking for advice publicly in RLS. This channel was created to support those times and allow members to create an anonymous top-level post using a channel workflow. The downside is that it can remove the ability to have deeper discussions, since the original poster cannot respond anonymously in threads to participate.#lobby-*: Lobby channels are public channels that enable members to request admission to private channels, which would otherwise be undiscoverable. Right now only two exist,#lobby-adoptionand#lobby-non-binary-and-women, and you can see past discussions about the implementation and use of#lobby-*channels in#rls-culture.🔒#the-treehouse: a private (but not secret) channel for non-binary folks and women. If you'd like to join this channel, please use the workflow in#lobby-non-binary-and-womento make a request!#lgbt: public channel; channel description is discussion for and by people in all areas of the sexuality and gender spectra. ALL identities welcome; no invalidation or gatekeeping allowed.#gender-diversity: public channel; channel description is for folx who may like binary code but not gender binaries.
Here are some channels to join that are good for helping you discover other channels (plus some of these are just nice channels to be in!):
#rls-gratitude#dancing-penguin#royquotes#brightideas#new-channels
Several channels are set up with a workflow to automatically cross-post in a different channel based on specific emoji reactions (also known as reacjis). In Slack, you can use a slash command to view all of the channels with this cross-post workflow: /reacji-channeler list.
Slackbot custom responses are trigger words or trigger phrases that cause an auto-reply from Slackbot. Discussions about Slackbot responses take place in #rls-bot-responses, and there's a pinned link in that channel with the list of responses as of December 2019.
RLS has a Slackbot that automatically flags non-inclusive words and phrases and makes alternate suggestions. People often ask about using these Slackbot responses in their other Slack communities - you can find the instructions on how to do that, as well as the custom responses used, here.
Have you been on the receiving end of this Slackbot for using some particular term? Don't feel bad - many of us have too! It's not there to draw attention to you personally - it's simply a mechanism we use to gently shape the whole community towards inclusive language and set some norms around how we communicate. Please just take it as intended: a friendly prompt to consider refining how you express yourself.
Angela Riggs is the maintainer of this document. DM @angelariggs in Slack if you have questions.