Editing Building Relationships (section)

== Developing Leaders ==
People move up the pyramid of engagement with the support of an organizer. This happens through a person taking on gradually more responsibility and new roles on a campaign. A leadership tryout is an assigned task that gives a developing leader the opportunity to exhibit their ability and commitment. For example, you might ask someone who seems like a good prospect for a team lead role to chair and host your team’s next planning meeting. To demonstrate ability at this leadership tryout, they will have to organize the location, communicate the meeting details to the team, draft an agenda, and keep the meeting on track. At the end of a successful meeting, they will have exhibited significant leadership skills, as well as their commitment to give the time to the task and follow through. They will also have experienced leading a team meeting. This will let their organizer know that they are competent at taking on that type of role.

Design tryouts so that once someone has succeeded, they are ready to be '''developed into a specific, ongoing role'''. For example, if you need someone to organize a monthly volunteer orientation for your campaign, ask them to organize just one. Support them through running that orientation, and debrief the experience afterwards. If they are successful, ask them to host them every month via a Leadership 1:1.

Sometimes '''leadership tryouts don’t go well''': they may have neglected to attempt the task they committed to do (they didn’t organize the orientation at all) and, therefore, are showing a lack of commitment; or they attempted the task and it went poorly (the orientation was disorganized and didn’t meet its outcomes) and showed a lack of ability. It’s important not to pass judgment or write people off when tryouts don’t go well. Many people want to commit to a campaign, but might lack the time commitment necessary at that due to work or family commitments or the skills to make it go well.

However, if a tryout goes poorly, don’t proceed as if it went well! You may decide to do another similar tryout with different coaching and follow-up if there was a lack of follow-through the first time. If they displayed excellent commitment but a lack of ability for a specific task, you may give them a tryout for another skill area and look to move them into another type of role. Depending on the circumstances, you may also choose to abandon efforts to move someone into leadership based on your best reasoning and intuition.

If a leadership tryout is not successful, you may also choose to use a series of smaller asks to help them tryout the skills more gradually. For example, rather than asking someone to coordinate all aspects of a petition gathering table at a public market, you could ask them to coordinate set-up, then support and train a new volunteer the next time, then to book the table space for the next event, and so on until they have performed most of the tasks needed to run a petition table at a market. Then, if you decide to ask them to organize the whole event from planning through to action, they will have practiced all of the tasks and it will be easier for them to follow-through on their commitment. Note that using micro-tries is slower and will take more time than bigger leadership tryouts, and that the two can also be used simultaneously within your team or even to complement each other with the same person.

To summarize, building strong, resilient relationships is critical for effective community organizing.

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