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

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8) Avoid and forget coalitions. Build Strategic Partnerships.  A coalition is a lazy organizer’s way of organizing.  We just round up all the people who agree with us and trot them out in front of the Capitol.  Coalitions are about seeming unity, long letterheads, and high-energy fecklessness.  In the corridors of power, they are ignored.  One image we might keep in mind while we are listening to one predictable speech after another at that coalition-sponsored rally is that K Street lobbyists, every day, are in every single conference room where anything of substance is being decided.

In contrast, a Strategic Partnership is a carefully cultivated long-term relationship among organizations based on a deep understanding of each partner’s organization and an empathic relationship between and among the various leaders.  It requires patience, understanding, empathy, and, in its mature stages, clearly defined mutual interests.  If a coalition organizer is like an action junkie, a Strategic Partnership organizer is like a Major Gifts Director at a large university.  Bigger prizes take a much longer time and constant attention and don’t always pan out.

Most progressive organizations are not even structured in a way to cultivate and sustain Strategic Partnerships.  They have no dedicated staff to build the early relationships, to cut through the layers of gatekeepers, to do the organizational research.  Instead, the most familiar practice is for the President of the organization to maintain relationships with other Presidents.  They are all friendly, but the deeper organization-to-organization strategic focus is a rare product of that friendliness.

9) Practice. Do it with a coach.  If you want to be good, practice.  Then practice some more.  Then some more.

Whether it is the ability to give speeches to various sizes and types of audiences, or the ability to be effective in meetings, or coach, or train, or supervise, or be on TV, or think strategically, or build complicated relationships with other people of power, it requires practice.  No one gets good without practice.  I am aghast at how little progressive leaders practice, and equally aghast at how few leaders are getting the coaching they need to do the right kind of work.

I learned many valuable lessons when I was with the Saul David Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the largest network of community organizations in the U.S.  Three of them had to do with individual proficiency practice:

a) Have 8 individual meetings a day.  As Malcolm Gladwell has argued, you have to do something 10,000 times to be really good at it.  Quality requires quantity.  Even assuming we didn't hit the 8/day goal every day, IAF organizers were meeting and attempting to build relationships with around 1500 new people per year, enough to begin to get good at it.

b) Think, evaluate, and write notes after each of those meetings to maximize the learning from each.

c) Make it personal—“How did I do?  What could I have done differently, better?"

d) Practice with a coach.  Professional athletes, actors, and CEO’s of large companies all have coaches.  Some of them have multiple coaches.  Why?  Because they want to practice the right thing, the right way to elicit desired reactions.  It is almost impossible to see ourselves as others see us.  We can be churning, working, laboring, doing our best, but it takes someone else to tell us what we are really doing and to show us how to do it differently.

I learned that the only way to know how developing organizers were really doing was to go with them as they had their individual meetings.  One young organizer, eager, but full of himself, was waxing to me about how much he had had in common with the people with whom he was meeting.  Sure enough, in his individual meetings in which I sat as an observer, he was looking for common ground, which was the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing.  He was supposed to be looking for what was uniquely particular to each person, not rounding it off to what they shared in common.  Without my observation and coaching, he would have continued to get better, but at the wrong thing.