Excellent advice.
leadership
Core Concerns & Fair Agreements
Here are a couple of my recent highlights from Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which resonated with me.
Pay attention to “core concerns.” Many emotions in negotiation are driven by a core set of five interests: autonomy, the desire to make your own choices and control your own fate; appreciation, the desire to be recognized and valued; affiliation, the desire to belong as an accepted member of some peer group; role, the desire to have a meaningful purpose; and status, the desire to feel fairly seen and acknowledged.
Any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties. (A wise agreement can be defined as one that meets the legitimate interests of each side to the extent possible, resolves conflicting interests fairly, is durable, and takes community interests into account.)
The book by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton has been an enjoyable read thus far, chock full of insight, while remaining easy to read.
Whether to delegate
Promoting from within vs. hiring from the outside
Consistency, Communication & Experimentation
Setting consistent meeting times and regular communication is key to the success of your group, but without a bit of experimentation, you may not find what works best. Each compliments the other.
Consistency
Set up a regular schedule for your meetings. Refresh Austin meets the second Tuesday of every month from 7:00 to 9:00pm. Those few times when we’ve had to find a new venue, we have made sure to get a guarantee from the new spot that we will have that day and time every month. Switching the day, time or location in any but the most extreme of circumstances is a recipe for confusion, resulting in reduced participation. Make a choice and stick with it for at least three months.
Your members will appreciate the consistent schedule as that gives them a chance to arrange for babysitters, reschedule other events and make it easy for them to avoid conflicts down the line.
Communication
It’s easy to let the days slip by without sending an update to the group, yet we all hate a communication vacuum. Make sure you let people know what’s happening early and often. This is your opportunity to build some excitement and provide some warning when change is in the air. Once you have established your routines and the group is running smoothly, make sure you continue to send updates. I cannot stress this enough – update update update!
Experimentation
It’s important to try things – what works for one group may not work for another, so be willing to give something different a shot. This may seem to go against the consistency point above, but it’s the one way that you can strike the right balance.
Be ready to kill off an experiment if it isn’t working, but make sure that you won’t frustrate the members of the group with too many changes in too short of a time. Don’t forget to communicate the changes and the reasons behind them to the group. People don’t likely care about all of the details, but everyone likes to know that there’s a reason for a chance.
Benevolent Dictatorship
If you can get a dedicated group of people to sign up for the work involved and consistently meet their responsibilities, then you’re good to go. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s time for you to become a benevolent dictator. You may not want to be the sole person in charge, but decisions need to be made and work needs to be done. Step up.
Democracy is great, but if you put every decision up for a vote, or if you rely on people who can’t or don’t get the work done your group will fail. Step up. Make decisions.
Your group wants the group to work and they want decisions made. You’ll lose a lot of time and effort spinning your wheels if you wait for approval instead of actively building. Step up. Make Decisions. Move Forward.