Here’s an essay on Leadership Development that’s worth reading. That doesn’t mean I agree with all of it.
This is written by a white guy who wants to build a multi-racial, multi-class, feminist and whatever movement. Blah, blah, blah. If you are a rational person but don’t have a lot of experience in Lefty junk, this essay will make next to no sense to you unless you read it closely.
That said, it’s worth reading closely. It’s a very honest piece in which you can feel an Organizer struggling with what Leadership means and how Organizes can cultivated it. I found myself struggling with it in various ways.
On one hand, if I can build a great big movement with lots of poor people demanding the same things (roughly – see previous post), I could care less if all the people up front are white males. If it’s working.
Honestly, I care about efforts that work and win.
On the other hand, this guy makes some great points that totally undermine the above in the true long term. He says, for example, that if you don’t nurture people from oppressed groups, they will never do anything because they don’t usually feel entitled to do it. Entitlement is a blessing and one huge freaking curse, as well. Organizers have to fight entitlement and use it, all the time.
So if you’re going to build that great big movement, you probably need to nurture some people from oppressed groups who might want to do things, deep down, but have to be convinced they can.
Besides my general rejection of the all-out, identity-first, ideology-second, pragmatism-eighteenth approach that I see in this person’s writing, I can also see from reading this that he’s accomplished some good things. So I have to respect him on that score.
I feel the writer and readers here might benefit from thinking about two different kinds of power. I think they are confused here. In fact, I think they are conflated.
Leadership and Authority.
Leadership is having followers. Period. Leaders are people who can get others to come along. That doesn’t mean that he or she has power over them, it means that those people respect and admire the person enough to generally do something if that person asks them.
Authority means having something in your purview. Having say. Look, just because an Organization gives you “say” over what goes into its newsletter, who gets to write and what the final product looks like, that doesn’t make you a leader. That means you have some Authority. Authority is great and diverse people should be given authority, it should be shared, and it gives people a chance to learn Leadership, but it’s not Leadership.
Authority is assigned. Leadership is earned.
Organizers embrace Leadership. Any Organizer that rejects leadership is a fool. A fool. Hopefully, you have an Organization with lots and lots of leaders. Little leaders, with small followings, and leaders of leaders, with big followings.
One of the most interesting points in this article was this comment: “And while the general meetings were also majority men, women made up half of those who did the work.” Who does the work is a good sign of leadership. I’d be interested to know which women were doing the work and which ones reeled other women in to the work. Those are the leaders.
Many Organizations mistakenly give all the authority to non-leaders. In churches, you’ll often see the pushy men in charge, but the work is getting done by a large group of women, all of whom were reeled in by a smaller group of women within the larger group. That smaller group is your actually core of leaders.
As an Organizer, they are the ones I’m trying to find. My next job, is to help them realize that they already have a following.
If you’re an Organizer, most of the people you deal with give you their time freely and voluntarily. Many of them will probably try to hustle money out of your organization, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t contribute for free. For some of us, we have a base for whome hustling is a way of life.
That said, when you work with people who are volunteering their time or thier presence to you, you have to let go. Many Organizers, even good Organizers, disagree with me on this point. That’s fine. This blog fits my philosophy and my approach, but it’s my belief that you can’t be a control freak when you are Organizing.
When you have a base of volunteers, there will be screw-ups, tardiness and chaos. You must accept this. As the base grows, so, too, does the chaos. Accept this as well.
Over time, if your base is consistent and you are oriented toward Leadership Development, you’ll have leaders within your base that can help maintain order while also making sure people feel their participation is welcomed and valued.
But if you’re in the middle of a big crazy effort, like an election campaign, and folks are coming in and out, you’re going to have to let go in order to welcome volunteers. Some of them will rise up and take on leadership roles. Welcome that. If they want to be in charge of the sign-in sheet or the phones, let them. They will do things you wouldn’t do. Let it go. Let it go. Unless it’s egregious, let it go. Welcome the involvement and let it go.
If you take a bunch of people lobbying officials, they won’t follow your script. Let it go. They will say the wrong thing. Let it go.
This is the price you pay with volunteers. It won’t be tight. It won’t be efficient. Let it go.
People get the funniest about things written on paper. This is where the control freak in everyone sets in. I will say this once: you know that your volunteers are starting to take ownership when they do writing work for your organization.
They will not write what you would have written. Fix the egregious spelling errors. Work with them on it. But keep the spirit in place. It’s worth it in the long run.
That’s what Leadership Development is, after all. Other people are in charge. It’s not all you.
Let it go.
It’s better this way.
My approach to Organizing involves a lot of accepting the idiosyncracies of my base because I know that, over time, I’d rather have them with their idiosyncrasies than lose them. You can’t control everything.
If you want to say “hello” and “welcome,” then you need to learn to let it go.
Once upon a time, a more experienced organizer than myself told me that it was not my job to be friends with the leaders I organize. I agree.
That part is not very hard. I find it much harder when people start to look up to me and look for me for guidance in non-political parts of their lives. People are funny. Sometimes they think if you sound smart you can solve all problems.
I can solve personal problems. I cannot help you figure out how to avoid life’s temptations.
It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen: people who might as well have grown up in a different country than me want me to talk them through getting through the day-to-day of this life.
It’s the place of a social worker. I am not a social worker. I usually tell them that the questions they are asking me are out of my depth, but some folks are troubled enough that they don’t take that for what it is. They take it as refusal to help. Maybe it is, but there is help I am here to give and there is help I am not here to give.
You don’t want to lose people simply because they don’t understand the difference between the questions they should ask you and the ones they shouldn’t.
I wish I had a more effective way to deal with the situation.
Here comes some big news from the “Who cares” files. The percentage of the vote represented by single women is slightly lower than their percentage of the population; the reverse is true of married women.
Wow. Stop the presses.
If you read this article, it gives statistics on the percentage of the population single women and married women represent and then how likely they are to vote. If I’m not mistaken, the difference is within a standard deviation on both counts. So, again, I say: who cares?
This is not meaningful information. Moreover, it only underscores the non-issue of the issue. It only shows that whether a woman is single or not is not a meaninful determinant of her likelihood to vote.
Is the issue of being a single woman really worth organizing around? It’s fair to say that a good number of them don’t intend to remain single, and temporary identities are always bad ones to organize around. I’ll write more about this soon.
On another note from the end of the above article, The Organizer continues to yawn in the face of all people arguing to make voting easier – in this instance, by moving Election Day to the weekend. You’re not paying attention if you believe this to be true – you’re just going with your misguided instincts.
Voter participation has dropped the easier voting has become. We took away poll taxes, we offered registration forms at the DMV, we’ve extended the franchise and voter participation has fallen, fallen, fallen.
I’m not arguing that all of those things weren’t good, but anyone who thinks that you’re more likely to see people vote if Election Day were moved to Saturday or Sunday is dead wrong.
In fact, The Organizer believes that the move is inevitable, as the clamor around this silly idea grows, and The Organizer predicts here and now that if Election Day gets moved to a Saturday then within four years the voter turnout will drop by at least 20%.
Why? People leave town and cut the lawn on weekends. That’s why.
And because the ease of voting is not now and never has been the issue. The issue is whether or not voters care.
If you are lucky enough to talk to old school Organizers at The Industrial Areas Foundation, eventually they will get around to one of their favorite rules-of-thumb: if you get your campaign going right, the opposition will probably do your organizing for you.
What they mean is, if you make a demand of a target, they will often reply to your demand in such an offensive and derogatory or insensitive way, that it will tick your base off badly enough that they will fly to your next action. There’s some real truth in this. If you use the offensive reply as an organizing tool.
So I wish some IAF leaders would sit down with John Sweeney and teach him how to use the opposition to his advantage. On The Hill Blog, Sweeney bemoans all of Labor’s recent legal losses. The losses are pretty offensive when you break them down. Insulting to worker rights. But is organized Labor using it?
Change to Win argues that they aren’t. Someone needs to use it and use it right. Labor is still the largest organized base out there, except for maybe churches. They have the power to right this wrong, if they know how to work their people (people who have every reason to be worked and worked up!).
In the cover letter to ACORN’s 2005 annual report, Board President Maude Hurd quotes a member saying, “After getting organized and making change happen, you can never go back to doing nothing.”
Come now.
People go back to doing nothing all the time.
And any Organizer who has been at it more than a season knows it.
In fact, ACORN people know it better than anyone. ACORN is big on doing quick hits to win members. “Quick hits” are small scale actions on issues on a block level (like an abandoned house or a drug corner). It’s a good strategy for winning a few members quickly (the action happens, it feels sort of exciting, people join up and give money on the spot), but if you know a little more about ACORN’s work, you also know that it’s not infrequent for people to quit ACORN as soon as they get their nearby problem solved with the quick hit. All the time.
Over my years in organizing, I’ve seen lots of good people get agitated, work hard, attack issues for months or years and then leave never to be heard from again. I often blame myself for losing them, and there may be some validity there. On the other hand, sometimes people just get fed up.
Some people have fun organizing. Some people feel compelled to do it. Some people do it because they think it needs to be done and want to help. Those last people, especially, can get worn out. They are probably the largest group. They eventually decide to give it up, feeling they have made their contribution, and let someone else take on the struggle.
It is a struggle. There is a reason people call it “The Struggle.” We all know what struggle means. It’s an internal and external struggle that most people can only tolerate for a while.
It may sound harmless when people say nice sounding rhetoric like the line in the ACORN cover letter, but it also propagates false beliefs about organizing. The quote above is a truism that isn’t true. While it is empowering to get organized and to win, that doesn’t mean you’re going to keep doing it.
Organizers have to plan for people to move in and move out and move on.
Once upon a time, at a particular phase in my organizing career, I asked my boss whether or not Organizers in his network tended to get involved in external organizing efforts. Protests against political leaders that came to town, for example. I had lived with some “Organizers” who did a lot of that sort of stuff on the side.
He told me that they did not. They didn’t usually have time.
If you get deep into organizing, and meet Organizers from different networks and schools-of-thought, you will discern a certain myopia (unless you are, of course, yourself myopic). The myopia comes from overwork and a fierce belief in their rightness of ones own methods.
In part, through some personal failures on my part which – maybe – were beneficial in the end, I have worked in a variety of the schools. I am not plagued by the myopia. To the contrary, I really appreciate the richness of the diversity of organizing styles. They all have their pro’s and con’s. Which one is better depends on what you value most about organizing.
Anyway, I recently did some campaign volunteering of my own. I learned a lot about what I want to volunteer to do. I think it might help some Organizers to get out there and give some time for a variety of efforts that they don’t have any power over. It would be a new experience for a lot of Organizers (and I can think of many, many of them who’s egos would not be able to handle it).
I found that I really like to volunteer for an operation where I can walk in the door and just start working on something as soon as I walk in. Where the machine is humming, different people are doing different things at different levels, and I sit down and hum away at my own task and trust that the larger strategy is taking care of itself.
I also learned that even I, a pretty experienced guy, can have buy in despite the fact that I haven’t been a part of the larger decisionmaking process that decided the course that the campaign would take. In fact, I’m very glad that I didn’t have to sit through those meetings. I’ve been to enough meetings. Yet I still have buy in.
A lot of Organizers believe people won’t work on an effort they didn’t have some say in steering. I don’t know that this is true for everyone. It is true for some. Not for me.
Well, this is depressing. It sounds like more and more people are working to get out the vote this year, but the AP is not very optimistic that it will accomplish much. Apparently we’ve got lots of volunteers pounding the pavement to get out the vote on both sides, but, overall, lots of voter registration lists are declinining in numbers, not gaining.
I don’t want to add to the steadily growing list of speculation as to why so many people don’t vote, but I will say that I think much of the GOTV effort is rushed and impersonal. According to Robert Caro, LBJ had a very personalized campaign style. He had teams of Organizers who went out and met people, talked to them and sent back contact information with notes about personal information.
Then teams of typists and writers would take that personal information and type up thousands and thousands of individualized letters to each of the people the advance team met, and follow up with more letters!
In today’s computerized world, this would be even easier, but somehow I doubt anyone is personalizing their voter identification to this level.
Government runs on hearings. I can’t ever tell if they actually accomplish anything. It’s a tenet of open government that before decisions are made, hearings should occur. It almost always seems like everyone has already made their decision.
Still I go. I go because the obvious often needs to be said. I go because I want to believe that some decisionmakers are listening. I go because I vagely believe “the record” means something. I also go because every now and then, when something really hot comes up, hearings can be a focal point for group action, outrage, dissent or whatever else might move something or stop something.
