Improve the performance and well-being of volunteers and members by giving them autonomy

Sophia Zaia | January 19th, 2024 | 4 min read

This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.

In my previous role at Sunrise Movement, I was responsible for organizing an ambitious voter contact program to elect Green New Deal champions.

I couldn’t do the work alone and quickly realized I needed to build a team of Sunrisers to run the program. We faced several challenges. One was that as a youth-led organization, most of us (including me!) had never done anything like this before.

I needed to build a volunteer team of young people new to organizing who would learn and improve with each election and smash our goals. I discovered the best way to do this was by creating the conditions for the volunteers to be autonomously motivated.

At the end of the campaign season, almost 50 core leaders aged 12 to their mid-twenties had led one of the largest youth-led voter contact programs in the 2020 elections. We did some of the best work of our lives together (imo).

Let me share why autonomous motivation is essential and how we worked together to produce extraordinary results.

Autonomous motivation involves acting because you believe in what you're doing, understand its value, wholeheartedly endorse it, or enjoy the activity.

Autonomous motivation is associated with more sustained engagement, greater commitment to goals, better performance on tasks that require problem-solving, and greater satisfaction and well-being.

Controlled motivation is the opposite of autonomous motivation and involves acting out of a sense of pressure or having to engage in the action. It can result from external pressures, such as rewards and punishments, or internal pressures, such as the need for approval from oneself or others.

Controlled motivation is associated with diminished performance and well-being.

Here’s how the core leaders and I created the conditions for the team members to experience autonomous motivation.

We built teams with responsibility for outcomes. Rather than delegating one-off tasks like facilitating a phone bank to super volunteers, we built teams with real ownership over meaningful outcomes. We invited volunteers who had been consistently involved to take on interdependent roles on well-structured teams responsible for setting goals, running the phone banks, and coaching their peers. Our distributed voter contact program's success relied on these teams' success. Decades of research have shown that well-designed teams produce team improvement over time, a positive experience for team members, and excellent outcomes.

We created a team purpose statement together. Writing a team purpose statement increases alignment, focus, and motivation. Here is the statement we wrote for fall–summer 2020:

We are building a movement of young people across identities and backgrounds to elect movement champions by building a distributed voter contact monster in time to be a deciding factor in the August and September primaries.

Team purpose statements should specify the team's intent. However, they should not be overly directive on how to reach the goal so the team can choose their approach. If the team purpose already specifies the means, it may discourage innovation because people will think the methods are already locked in.

We set goals together. I brought draft goals to the team, which we workshopped together and refined. In my experience, when organizers have challenges with accountability, the solution isn’t more monitoring and pressure, it’s about increasing ownership. When people have a say in goal setting, they have a greater sense of ownership over the outcomes. Ownership leads to follow-through and extraordinary results.

We debriefed and learned together. The team was responsible for measuring progress and determining how we could improve our strategy. This allowed the group of 12-24 year-old volunteers, armed with the necessary data, to reach their own conclusions about our successes and failures. They had the strategic autonomy to make decisions about how to move forward. Feedback from the work itself can lead to better performance because, unlike externally provided feedback which can feel coercive or controlling, it just involves the facts of the situation.

We gave people clear, interdependent roles on the team. Roles included writing facilitation scripts, making follow-up calls to everyone who attended our phone banks, and leading the team by taking responsibility for fellow team members' learning and skill development and tracking progress toward our shared purpose. People have a universal need to feel they matter to others. Knowing that others are counting on you and you on them increases your sense of belonging, respect and significance, as well as your commitment.

We used a coaching approach to management. The volunteer team leaders and I attended a GROW coaching training like the one in the We're a Nerdy Movement Study Group. We managed team members by asking open questions to help people determine their approach to reaching our shared goals rather than being overly prescriptive about how they should do their jobs. This can increase volunteers' creativity, persistence, and performance.

We engaged volunteers in selecting candidates to endorse. We discovered that motivation waned on the phone bank team if volunteers didn't have input in choosing the candidates we threw down for. This was true even if they agreed with the ultimate endorsement decision. We created a way for the phone bank team to weigh in on our endorsements alongside local chapters before our political team made the final call.

We prioritized social time and fun! A highlight for team leaders was having autonomy over planning team social calls to appreciate each other, play games, or eat dessert together over Zoom. Making sure to celebrate team wins and each other and unwind together after big election dates was crucial glue that held the team together through hard work and election losses. Teams that turn to one another when times are hard stay more engaged¹.

The autonomy-supportive practices above created the conditions for the distributed phone bank team to grow to a team of teams of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and twenties who supported thousands of volunteers to make more than six million dials and send more than one million postcards for our endorsed candidates in 2020. The benefits of autonomous motivation are clear: it improves performance and well-being.

If you want to learn more practices that improve work outcomes and the well-being of volunteers and members, join Nerdy Movement.

It's a six-week program for organizers who want to use evidence-based approaches to build high participation, high commitment, people-powered organizations.

A former participant said this about the program.

I signed up for the Nerdy Movement course just as I was preparing to step in as project lead for a new program at work convening a diverse cohort of advocates, researchers, and organizers.

I was interested in learning specific strategies for building and cultivating a shared sense of ownership over the outcome, to improve my relationship management and organizing skills, and to gain access to a community of like-minded people who I could learn from and with. I got that and so much more through this course.

I feel much more confident and equipped to meet our program goals because of the specific, actionable, and evidence-based strategies I learned for designing systems that build power and where participants are self-motivated.

The course design also ensured we had ample space on each call to practice what we were learning, and troubleshoot challenges we encountered in real time. I can't recommend this course highly enough!

– Azza Altiraifi, Liberation in a Generation²

Learn more and join the hundreds of organizers around the world using the Nerdy Movement approach.

Best,

Sophia Zaia
Coach at PowerLabs and former Distributed Director at Sunrise Movement

¹ Hahrie Han used in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments to uncover why some organizations are “better than others at getting--and keeping--people involved in activism.” She describes her findings in “How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century” as:

As activists’ commitment to the voluntary activity inevitably flagged, people in high-engagement chapters reported thinking of their relationships with the people around them, feeling motivated to continue working because they did not want to let their peers down. People in low-engagement chapters tended to react by thinking of their commitment to the issue, trying to push themselves to say that their work on environmental or health issues was absolutely necessary.

² Organization listed for identification purposes only.

Related resources

Behind the scenes of Sunrise Movement’s volunteer-led phone bank program
[90 minute video or 18 minute read]

Watch the webinar recording or read this post to learn how Sunrise structured volunteer teams to make them more likely to produce excellent results and contribute to the growth and learning of the team members.

School's out, phone banking is in: Learn how Sunrise teens and twenty-somethings created fun and welcoming phone banks
[1 hour video]

Discover the five principles that guided Sunrise’s national phone bank program and get tips and tricks for creating a phone bank program that is welcoming, fun, and effective.

Designing powerful teams
[90 minute video]

Watch this recording of Ruth Wageman, one of the leading experts on team effectiveness and author of “Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great,” to learn how you can design a team so that the team gets stronger over time, contributes to the growth and learning of team members and produces excellent work.