10 Things Your Org Can Do Right Now To Give the Progressive Movement a Chance to Win

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We believe that, as Judge Learned Hand said, “Truth is most likely to occur from a multitude of tongues.”

We had finished the conversations and were in the next stage of our work, figuring out what all those conversations meant.  Then I got an email form one of the administrative assistants we had talked to. She said she had other observations she thought we needed to hear.  What followed was one of the most observant insights we had heard about the organization for a long time. She just needed a place to put what she knew.

Except for the few people who act like the living dead, the rest of us want to learn. It is essential to who we are as people.  When we are learning, we are engaged; when we stop learning, we become back-of-the-room critics and cynics.

A learning culture requires four things:

a) Relationships of trust, at a minimum knowing each other’s story.

b) An embedded learning practice of planning-action-evaluation

c) A recognition/reward system that prizes directness, openness, and collective and individual success.

d) A leadership collective that puts learning at the center (e.g. “O.K., we fucked up on that campaign. Now let’s look at it and understand why.”)

6) Change your organization. Grow it. Merge it. Kill it. All good leaders are in the organizational change business. That means that a considerable part of the job for every leader is to move the people and other resources of the organization toward what they need to become. “What is” is always obsolete.

And let’s be clear.  The present constellation of progressive organizations is like a pea-shooter against the organizational juggernaut of the venal .01%. It’s our issue/advocacy organizations, with tiny budgets, against the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable and the Koch brothers, for whom a $100 million political investment is chump change. And we fool ourselves that we can still win because we are “better coordinated,” or “more aligned.”

The only reason we haven’t become permanent footstools is because of the political gifts of the crazy right-wing, e.g. Romney’s “47%,” “fetal masturbation,” “self-deportation,” the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and the gifts that keep on giving, like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor Rick Perry.

So progressive leaders need to make a fundamental strategic decision—do I grow the organization, do I merge it, or do I kill it?

The one option you should eliminate is the one that is most often in play: Using the organization as your platform.  If when you leave your leadership position the organization is not significantly more powerful, you failed as a leader.  You took a paycheck, worked long hours, and wasted a lot of time.  You played the participation game instead of the “winning” game.

Size matters. A really good heavyweight fighter is going to win almost all of the time against a really good featherweight fighter.  And our side doesn’t have enough heavyweight fighters. Progressives need a whole series of big, powerful, fearsome and feared organizations.  The inverse is also true.  We don’t need a whole bunch of featherweight organizations, scrambling for money and publicity.  I can think of a handful right now that are hanging on by a thread, whose usefulness has been waning for years, and which would make perfect sense to be shut down.  Do a mercy killing, letting the best and the brightest land somewhere where their talents would add value, and letting the few dollars go somewhere else.

Look at the Fortune 500. Businesses in the top 50 one year may not even be around 10 years later. Ideals have to endure. But specific organizations do not.