Structuring Teams

Key Concepts

Teams are critical to organizing, in part because they deepen relationships that help us commit to action.
Effective teams are bounded, stable and diverse.
Starting a leadership teams requires establishing shared purpose, interdependent roles, and explicit norms.
The snowflake model is defined by mutual accountability and commitment, a sustainable number of relationships, clearly defined roles, and capacity for exponential growth.

Why Organize in Teams?

Once again, organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want. The snowflake model suits this approach to building power, and working in teams is critical to effective organizing in the snowflake model.

But first, why organize in teams? First and foremost, working in teams is more fun than working alone! Teammates offer support and mentorship to one another, which plays a key role in leadership development. People who feel supported and who enjoy what they’re doing are more likely to keep doing it. We’re up against a lot in our organizing, and doing this work with others can provide the motivation needed when times get tough. Additionally, we can meet higher goals working in teams by tapping into the diverse range of resources (including skills and knowledge) multiple people bring. And most importantly, by working in teams, we develop relationships with fellow teammates that facilitate and deepen our commitment to taking action.

What do effective teams have in common?

Effective teams usually have three elements in common:

They are bounded. It is clear who is on the team and who is not on the team. It is clear how new people can join the team and what is expected of those who must leave the team.
They are stable. People make clear tangible commitments: regular meetings, length of time, etc. Your team is not a revolving door, never knowing who will show up.
They are diverse. It has the appropriate diversity of skills, talents, viewpoints, and constituencies that will be needed to do a good job.

Launching a Leadership Team

These are three decisions that a leadership team should make when first coming together in order to set itself up for success, and should continue to revisit as the team evolves. There are no “right” answers to these decisions, but they must be addressed for a leadership team to succeed.

See this worksheet that walks you through answering these questions as a team.

Shared Purpose

We can’t start building an organization without a clear purpose. A team must be clear on what it has been created to do. Its purpose should be clear and easy-to-understand, while it must also be challenging and significant to those on your team. Team members should be able to articulate their shared purpose.

Interdependent Roles

Each member of the leadership team must have responsibility for their own piece of work that contributes to the team’s purpose. A functioning team will have a diversity of identities, experiences, and opinions to ensure that the most resources and perspectives possible are being brought to the table.

In an effective leadership team, no one works in a silo. Roles are truly interdependent when each person on the team needs the output of another team member’s work to complete their own.

For example, if a team’s purpose was to educate youth in your community about consent you might have an organizer as Teacher Liaison contacting teachers to book classroom sessions, another organizer as Facilitation Coordinator recruiting and training workshop presenters, and a third organizer as Curriculum Coordinator in charge of designing and refining the workshop content. The Teacher Liaison will be dependent on the Facilitation Coordinator to provide presenters to fill the workshops they book in schools. The Facilitation Coordinator will be dependent on the Curriculum Coordinator for lesson plans and other materials. The Curriculum Coordinator will be dependent on the Teacher Liaison and Curriculum Coordinator to get feedback from teachers and presenters on how to improve the workshop content. By designing roles that require the different members of the leadership team to work together, the team will be bounded and sustainable over the long term.

Explicit Norms

Your team should set clear expectations, or norms, for how to govern itself. How will you manage meetings, regular communication, decisions, and commitments? And, importantly, what will you do if a norm is broken so that they remain active and relevant?

Teams with explicit norms are more likely to achieve their goals. Some team norms are operational, such as – How often will we meet? How will we share and store documents? How will we communicate with others outside the team? – while others address expectations for member interaction. Setting norms early on in team formation will guide your team in its early stages as members learn how to work together. Making norms explicit allows your team to have open discussions about how things are going. The team can update and refine norms as they work together to improve working relationships.

The Snowflake Model: Interconnected teams

The snowflake model is defined by its distribution of leadership and by its commitment to leadership development. Relationships are the glue that hold the snowflake together, and these relationships support the interconnected teams that make up the snowflake. Read on for more information on the key elements of the snowflake model.

Distributed leadership: Core and local leadership teams

In the snowflake model, decision-making responsibility is decentralized whenever possible. The core leadership team ensures the whole organization or campaign is coherent and effectively moving in the same direction towards Page 52 | Organizing: People, Power, Change long-term goals. Distributed leadership teams ensure the organization or campaign is flexible, effectively delivering on short-term objectives. Everyone is responsible for contributing to strategizing, ongoing learning, and identifying and growing new leaders and resources. The core leadership team devises strategy, while distributed leadership teams test that strategy on the ground. They adapt it locally and provide feedback to improve organization- or campaign-wide strategy.

Some organizers see team structures as hierarchical and prefer not to establish formal structures in an effort to avoid hierarchies. However, hierarchy develops regardless of whether you create it intentionally or not. Oppression and privilege, pre-existing social relationships, and some people having louder voices and others feeling too shy to speak up all lead to hierarchy within our teams. By intentionally structuring leadership teams, we can create hierarchies that are more effective and equitable, and then change them if they aren’t working. See Jo Freeman’s work list in ‘Further Reading’ for more on this topic.

A sustainable number of relationships

In the snowflake model, each person has a sustainable number of relationships. While you are likely to interact with many people in your organizing work, it’s important to focus on maintaining relationships with those on your team (one way to do this is through regular team meetings or maintenance 1:1s). As a general rule, if you are organizing full time (i.e. committing 40 hours/week), then you can maintain up to ten relationships. If are organizing part time, as is the case for the vast majority of grassroots organizers, you can maintain up to five relationships. Notice that in the previous diagram, no one is connected to more than five people.

The 1:1 meeting is an important tool for building the relationships that hold your team together. See the Building Relationships section for information on 1:1 meetings.

Mutual accountability

Notice how the arrows in the diagram point both ways. The snowflake model doesn’t operate as a top-down hierarchy, with managers delegating tasks and expecting results. Rather, team members are accountable to each other, Organizing: People, Power, Change | Page 53 mutually agree on tasks, and expect results from and provide support to each other. Someone within the core leadership team may assign a distributed leadership team with a task, but someone within a distributed leadership team is just as likely to assign the core leadership team with a task that will better enable them to meet their goals.

Clearly defined roles and responsibilitie

Each individual in a team has a specific role with clearly defined responsibilities. While the team works together towards common goals, every task should be assigned to a specific team member(s) and each team member should clearly understand their responsibilities. Roles can vary based on the strategy and tactics (e.g. in an electoral campaign, roles may include a canvass captain, phone captain, and data captain, with a community organizer in a team leadership role).

Capacity for exponential growth

Because leadership in the snowflake is distributed into many small teams, and because the model is based on leadership development, the snowflake model has the capacity for exponential growth. As tams add more people, those people may break off and form their own teams, and those teams form new teams, and so on. Therefore, it may take three months to grow from five to 25 people, but in the the next three months you could grow to 125 people, and three months later 625 people, and so on.

The size of a team and its growth rate will vary from campaign to campaign. For instance, teams working in the snowflake model structure can range in size from a few people running a small local campaign to thousands of teams with millions of volunteers: in the 2012 Obama for America campaign, the snowflake model enabled 10,000 local teams with 30,000 organizers to empower 2.2 million volunteers. That said, if implemented properly, the snowflake model has the capacity to get big, and get big fast.

Team Stages

Teams aren’t created as perfect, fully-functioning snowflakes. Rather, they go through different phases of growth and learning, and inevitably experience growing pains along the way. You can use the descriptions below to assess the state of your team and get ideas for next steps.

Phase 1: Potential - At this stage, a person is interested in organizing around an issue. To build a team, they will network and recruit within their community by scheduling 1:1 meetings. The organizer will organize events to meet potential new team members.

Phase 2: Team Formation - At this stage, the organizer has identified a few individuals that are interested in getting more involved in the campaign, but there are no official roles on the team. The team leader has to work to start recruiting team members and solidifying roles on the team. Note: this phase usually takes the longest.

Phase 3: Team - At this stage, everyone who is interested in getting involved in the campaign has made a commitment to do so. The organizer has held a core team meeting to identify the team’s purpose and norms and place people into roles. Now, the team is official and it needs to grow to increase its potential. As more people attend events and join the team, the team grows as the leadership tryouts are conducted, leaders develop, and make hard asks. The challenge for organizers in this phase is to grow sustainably – that is, without growing too quickly and neglecting members of the existing team. In this phase, you must continue to invest time and resources into developing individuals that deliver. In other words, don’t get hung up on people who don’t show up; focus on those that do.

Phase 4: Developed Team - At this stage, there is a core leadership team and distributed leadership teams. If the team follows the pyramid of engagement approach, it will grow into a bigger and more efficient snowflake over time.

Phase 5: Team Transformation - At this stage, the team has grown to its fullest potential and can multiply into more teams. Organizers may start training existing team members to start new teams in other geographic areas (neighbourhoods or regions, also known as “turfs”) or to perform new tasks (adding a team that supports a tactic that is new to your team). Teams may split in two, with one half moving into new turf to start a team there. Organizers must be intentional and thoughtful in supporting the transformation process, as this can be a complicated time for teams and strong emotions amongst team members could come up.

Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phase 5

Above all, remember that effective teams are bolstered by strong relationships, and that in the snowflake model, leadership is distributed, and organizers are committed to developing the leadership capacity of others.

This page adapts material from “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” Version 5.0 (August 2017). Credits: Originally adapted from the work of Dr. Marshall Ganz (Harvard University), the Leading Change Network, the New Organizing Institute; revised by contributors from Dogwood Initiative, Leadnow, One Cowichan, David Suzuki Foundation, Stonehouse Institute, and genius (Organize BC & Organize Ontario). Design/photography: Shelby Tay. See Rights and Use for the full terms (non‑sale, attribution required, include these restrictions, send significant modifications, and grant back a royalty‑free license).