Hello, RLS members new and old! Welcome to the Rands Leadership Slack quick-start guide 🙂
RLS is a big community! As of June 2022, RLS membership was the same size as East Peoria, Illinois with 22,620 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 what we love about being in RLS.
Please make sure you read and understand the RLS Code of Conduct. We respect it and take it quite seriously!
Remember what we said a minute ago about wanting you to participate here? We really do mean it - but we also understand that can be easier said than done.
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-rands: Not sure which channel is the best place for your question or post? Ask for directions here.#rands-*: Channels with therands-prefix are related to operating and participating in RLS, such as#rands-admins,#rands-slack-culture, and#rands-slack-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-and-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 donwside 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#rands-slack-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!- Note for private channels: if someone types the name of a private channel that you have not joined, the channel name will be obfuscated to you and appear like this in Slack:
🔒 private channel.
- Note for private channels: if someone types the name of a private channel that you have not joined, the channel name will be obfuscated to you and appear like this in Slack:
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!):
#rands-slack-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.
Some reacjis have a specific connotation that's not immediately clear. This is a non-exhaustive list of some that tend to be used more often:
:raccoon:has various forms, and is used to indicate that someone's contribution to a discussion is off-topic. This usage predates RLS, and more context can be found here.:royr:and:ohroy:have two use cases. The first is to use the reacji channeler on something that Roy Rapoport (the most prolific poster on RLS) has said so that it automatically cross-posts into#royquotes. The second is to appreciate a bit of sarcasm or a dad joke in the spirit of Roy, even if he was not the one posting it. (The cross-posting action is still triggered in this use, it just wasn't the main intent.):shields-up,:shields-at50:,:shields-down:, and:shields-omgbbq:refer the the progression in "job happiness" discussed in this blog post. Instead of being used as reacji, people usually add them into their profile status so that it's visible next to their name or username.
Slackbot custom responses are trigger words or trigger phrases that cause an auto-reply from Slackbot. Discussions about Slackbot responses take place in #rands-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.