Building Genuine Relationships and Something New with Rochelle Sonnenberg

In this episode of the CLG Journal Podcast, David talks with Rochelle Sonnenberg.

1. Community is built through relationship, not scale: Rochelle emphasizes that bigger isn’t better, obsessing over membership numbers loses the humanity of community. Her practice: personally reaching out to every event sign-up on LinkedIn to learn what brought them there and what they need.

2. Go narrow, not wide: A key insight from her mastermind at CLG: “If you make a community for everyone, you make a community for no one.” Her new women-in-tech group, Her Tech Community, is being intentionally focused rather than broad.

3. Reframe “difficult conversations” as clarifications, not confrontations: When you approach a hard conversation as confrontational, your nervous system fires up and derails you. Seeing it as a clarification, aimed at the success of the relationship or company, keeps you grounded.

4. Community must be cross-functional inside organizations: Drawing from her time at Microsoft, Rochelle argues that if only one person “owns” community at a company, that’s a problem. It needs to be integrated across engineering, product, and the leadership team.

5. Understand your audience’s KPIs, not just your own: When building internal programs, you need to learn what leadership is actually measuring and speak to those goals, while being honest about what’s realistic and what milestones look like over time.

6. Authenticity over performance: A thread throughout: stop the performative layer with others and especially with yourself. Her Tech Community is designed as a space where women can “take off the mask,” including rituals and exercises to help members arrive and depart more consciously aware of their emotional state.

And much more that you can listen to here!

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Thanks again to Rochelle for this conversation and for coming to CLG!

-David and Zach