WAISI needs a smoother journey from "new" to "experienced"
You don’t create a culture. Culture happens. It’s the by-product of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, and you give them the freedom to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust then trust will be built into your culture.
—Jason Fried, You don't create a culture
- WAISI, like all student-run clubs, exists in a constant state of churn. We struggle to activate new members and new leadership. Senior leaders are bottlenecked by time, junior leaders are bottlenecked by competency; micromanaged task delegation both wastes time and fails to build competency. This results in bloated subteams that fail to accomplish present goals and set themselves up for future ones.1
- We need a smoother journey from "new" to "experienced." Sudden role transitions are a recipe for (1) poor outcomes, and (2) resentment on both the junior and senior side of the aisle. ("You're not doing your job!" "Well, you're setting me up to fail!")
- So, how and where do we implement this?
Leadership Succession
- I claim that the first priority of a club leader is finding and enabling their successor. If a leader fails to find and activate a new successor, the group they are in charge of (be it the technical wing, policy wing, or the club itself) ceases to exist. Impactful activities that counterfactually would have happened no longer happen. Also, it's a lot harder to revive a dead group than it is to continue an existing one.
- Two things qualify someone for any leadership role in a student organization. The first: do they actually care? The second: can they do the job? If they have both, they are a fit for the role.
- So, how can we determine this for leaders?
- We already guess at club buy-in from members through the evaluations of club facilitators. We know that spending 8 weeks with someone is a good judge of character.
- A point of improvement for "determining buy-in" is more 1:1s. I did this informally during my tenure, but did not push as hard as I should've for this being implemented at scale. I think fellowship facilitators should surface folks that exec should talk to, and exec should find time to talk to one another more. I tried to grab coffee or go on a walk with each of you at least once during the semester.
- GT implements 2-week work trials to judge whether or not people can do the job. We should do something like this moving forward for all roles. This lets us give prospective leadership the opportunity to show up and show out, and gives us the grounding to let people go if they're not a good fit.
- I'd say for student groups, 90% of it is the "actually caring" piece rather than the "can you do the job" piece. (But as you climb up the org chart, it becomes increasingly important that you can actually do the job.)
Membership Structure
- We are running into the limits of what vibes can do. We currently do not track basic org metrics, and we should be doing this.
- There's been some discussion in #spam-ideas about a big:little system for members. This seems great!
- Whenever minor catfights happen, the inside joke has been that "WAISI needs an HR department." A takeaway from EAG is that the Community Health Lead2 is something we need to revive. I liked the way that Julia Wise put it: do we have mechanisms for "dealing with situations that happens when large groups of humans get together?" Informal channels have been good enough here, but this is something to improve.
- Anaya talked to Julia about this. One takeaway is that Community Health is incident-response rather than an ongoing role.