What I learned building self-managing teams of volunteers at Sunrise Movement
Sophia Zaia | November 2022
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.
In 2020, I directed the Sunrise Movement's distributed voter contact program, resulting in more than six million phone calls and one million postcards sent through efforts organized by self-managing teams of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and early twenties.
It's easy to make work like this sound like smooth sailing when you talk about it in retrospect, but we made many mistakes while building the volunteer teams that made those millions of calls happen and wanted to share some of our lessons with you.
I also want to note that Sunrise’s field work in 2020 was not just focused on national, remote phonebanking, which is not as effective as relational outreach to friends and family, or knocking doors in your own community. While Sunrise pivoted towards increasing our focus on a national phonebank program due to COVID in the spring and to offer an option for participation for people not plugged into a local chapter, Sunrise member chapters also organized their own voter contact work to support Bernie in the primary, local candidates they endorsed, and to defeat Trump.
What went wrong
Given the political environment (spring 2020 COVID, uprisings for racial justice, the election of our lifetimes looming, and many students at home with more time than usual) we experienced an unimaginable influx of young people ready to throw down to elect progressives such as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush to Congress.
However, we soon realized that having fifty volunteers "on the phone bank facilitation team" did not necessarily mean fifty volunteers actively feeling ownership over improving the work, learning and taking on more leadership, and having a fun and positive experience. Some of the people in the team chat weren't participating on the team at all.
To create the conditions for these excited young people to do meaningful work, we decided to go back to the drawing board. We conducted team launch events and co-created team charters to build commitment and motivation for the work ahead, and increase shared ownership over team processes and outcomes.
When the teams were being formed, I put people together without considering how we would update and clarify roles and purpose when our focus shifted to a new election cycle or new members joined. This was a mistake.
We were adding new team members every week, thinking it would result in more capacity, but we ended up unclear how best to work together, who was on the team, what each person had to offer and what our shared goals were. This led to some people overworking themselves, others hanging back, and wasted efforts.
Lesson one: Make time for a team launch
I learned that a team launch (and subsequent relaunches when the team purpose or roles change in significant ways) is critically important for setting up a team that will work together effectively, improve over time, and contribute to the members' growth and learning.
When team members first come together, they create patterns of interaction that carry throughout the team's life and can be difficult to change.
Instead of leaving the habits, customs, and membership of the team to chance, members should discuss how they can be successful together, as well as how and when to welcome new members.
At the launch event, team members get acquainted with one another and the task. This orientation establishes the boundary that distinguishes members from nonmembers, a shared understanding of how members will work together and what each has to offer, and enables collective engagement with the group purpose.
Here's an agenda you can use for a team launch event. It's written as a six-hour mini-retreat but can be adapted to several shorter meetings. This agenda works for staff and volunteer team launches and relaunches. Agendas for volunteer launches over two 2.5 hour sessions is here and a two-hour agenda is here. All of these agendas can be adapted for staff or volunteer teams.
Lesson two: Create a team charter
Throughout the launch, the team fills out a team charter together. The charter can serve as a reference during team calls, when orienting a new member, at a relaunch event, or whenever it's helpful to review the team's purpose and norms.
A team charter makes the implicit explicit. A written team charter helps people with widely different backgrounds and experiences be more effective team members, reduces unproductive conflict, and improves work outcomes.
The completed team charter includes:
Team Structure
Team Members & Roles
Meetings & Coordinating Systems
Team Norms
Communications Protocols
Schedule
Goals
Get the team charter template we used.
Lesson three: Make the implicit explicit
If you're tight for time, you may be tempted to skip over norms during a team launch. I want to highlight why getting on the same page about norms upfront is important to creating a sound team structure.
When we make our norms explicit, we protect against the assumption that everyone on the team enters with the same background, culture, and experiences and should be able to "read our minds" and guess our preferred ways of working together.
Instead, we recommend:
Making norms explicit so it is easier for everyone to be successful and to enable the team to decide whether a behavior is important
Choosing just 3–5 norms (because more can be hard to remember)
Reaching agreement on what will happen if a norm isn't upheld—and making sure the response is restorative, not punitive.
These are example norms from one of the teams:
What must we do?
Show up for meetings on time and communicate when we can't make it.
Give feedback early and often.
Keep healthy work hours (for example, don't facilitate more than three phonebanks a week max).
What must we never do?
No screenshotting or sharing confidential information: "stories stay, lessons leave."
No using tools that cost money (including but not limited to Spoke, EveryAction, and MobilizeAmerica) without permission from a staff member.
What happens if a norm is broken?
If your team lead notices you signing up to facilitate more than three phonebanks in a week, they will 1) check in to ensure you aren't taking on too much and 2) ask if another team member can take one of your shifts.
Methods of creating team norms are in the team launch agendas.
The results
Protecting the time to make a team launch, charter, and norms happen can be difficult when you are setting up a team amid everything else on your plate, but the research shows that investing the time and work upfront is critical* to the team's effectiveness, capacity to improve over time, and the learning and positive experience of team members.
The team launch and building the charter together creates commitment to the team and work outcomes, motivation for the work ahead, a sense of belonging, and shared ownership over team processes and outcomes.
After undergoing that team relaunch process, we ended up with the Force to Be Reckoned With, a team of six sub-teams responsible for facilitation, recruitment, vibes, retention, coaching local chapters to host their own phone banks, and team management. With clarified roles and responsibility, each sub-team was able to take greater ownership over the quality and continued improvement of their work.
Do you want to improve your teams?
If you want to learn more practices that improve team performance—especially teams of members or activists—sign up for the We're a Nerdy Movement Study Group.
It's a six-week program for organizers who want to use evidence-based approaches to build high-participation, high-commitment, healthy organizations.
If you join the study group, you'll discover:
how to improve recruitment and retention members or volunteers,
how to ensure that teams produce excellent work and strengthen over time,
how to ensure that teams learn and adapt in complex, uncertain, and interdependent environments,
how to increase people's commitment, leadership capacity, and ability to act while facing uncertainty, and
other practices that develop leaders and build healthy organizations.
This isn’t an organizing 101 training. New organizers have attended and given it positive reviews, but the average participant has seven years of organizing experience.
Here's what a recent alum said about the program.
I have been an organizer for over a decade, and this study group brought me back to the core of what I am doing day in and day out - building volunteer teams that have the creativity, resilience, and skills to lead our work forward.
The facilitators present a whole landscape of research in succinct, concrete, and compelling ways so that we can focus on applying these learnings to our work. And the research that we wrestled with here was truly eye-opening and agitational in terms of what is actually effective to engage people in a deep and sustained way and overtime build organizations with high strategic capacity.
I walked away with very helpful tools and frameworks that I'm itching to try out in my work. And the study group itself modeled what it's like to motivate teams, since the vast majority of the learning and application we did during the weekly calls was in small groups where we were in charge of our own learning.
This study group should be essential for honing the craft of strong organizing.
Phoebe Gardener, formerly of Movimiento Cosecha
If you'd like personalized support to improve a team or how your organization approaches teamwork, contact us at [email protected]. We can help you strengthen volunteer, staff, and senior leadership teams.
Best,
Sophia Zaia
Team Coach at PowerLabs and former Distributed Director at Sunrise Movement
¹ The conditions for team effectiveness on page 194 have been updated to the following:
Real team: Everyone knows who is on the team, exchanges information effectively, and works together long enough to accomplish something meaningful.
Compelling purpose: Teams need a purpose that challenges them to use their best skills, connects to their values, and engages their aspirations.
Right people: An effective team consists of people who have the diverse range of knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to achieve the team’s purpose.
Sound structure: Teams should be as small as possible, focused on mission critical priorities, and collaborating using shared work practices.
Supportive organizational context: The systems around the team - such as how they are rewarded, and the training and resources at their disposal – should enable teamwork.
Expert team coaching: Someone who has the experience and ability to support the team to improve their working practices should be available to them.
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.
Reflections on Sunrise Movement’s strike circle program
[50 minute video and 7 minute read]
Watch this webinar recording to learn how Sunrise created hundreds of teams of young people who organized climate strikes on their campuses.
Improve your team by getting clear on why the team exists
[5 minute read]
Read this post to learn the importance of team purpose statements and see examples from real teams.
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.
Talk about fears and feelings to improve your team
[4 minute read]
Learn a simple exercise for teams to discuss fears and feelings to strengthen trust, head off relationship conflict, increase learning and improve project outcomes.