Leadership comes with its fair share of challenges and triumphs. What’s the one experience or lesson you had to struggle through that ultimately made you a stronger, more effective leader?
It can be very tempting as a community (or other) leader to need to know everything that is going on and to have a controlling hand on every decision. This is never a great way of working and can create a toxic environment. You need to trust your staff to do the right thing and allow them to make decisions - and mistakes - on their own.
I trusted someone to be a co-founder and co-owner of a forum and I worked really hard coming up with ideas for the forum such as promotions, forum contests etc. I had created a lot of valuable threads and got everything almost ready. The co-owner was in charge of all the tech stuff and when it came about a week before the grand opening he blocked me from the forum and I was no longer able to visit the site. I know he still opened the forum because I had friends who told me that they were able to access and sign up to the forum.
I really trusted this person and thought they were a great partner but boy was I wrong. This taught me that I shouldn't just partner up with anyone and that I should really do my due diligence to make sure that I am putting my trust in someone that is trustworthy.
This is the most important lesson I've learned the hard way as a leader.
Don't give away the core aspects of your forum. I created huge code/skin indexes for the InvisionFree software and pretty much freely gave them away by posting the source code for them on a board intended for suggestions/feedback. I never was accredited for my work. It took away the primary draw-in for new visitors to my board.