Editing Structuring Teams (section)

== The Snowflake Model: Interconnected teams ==
[[File:Snowflake 2.png|thumb]]
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.

<div style="background-color:#eee; padding:1em; border:1px solid #ccc;"> 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 [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm Jo Freeman’s work list in ‘Further Reading’ for more on this topic]. </div>

=== 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.