We had a good discussion at the Denver congress this past weekend about motivating more LifeRing members to take part in the organizational work.
Someone familiar with the Brand-A organizations quoted one of their slogans, "Don't ever say 'no' to XX," and someone else pointed to Step 12, which makes "carrying the message" an integral part of the core program.
So we talked about whether we should make "Service" the fourth "S" alongside Sobriety, Secularity, and Self-Help. (Not much support for that!) And we talked about how we might redefine Self-Help to build service into it. And we talked about whether guilting people to do volunteer work is a good policy.
Nobody in the discussion favored guilting people. Guilt is a nasty, undermining emotion and is as likely to drive a person into the arms of relapse as to keep them sober -- unless, of course, they're really guilty of something. In my experience, guilt is not only nasty, it also doesn't work very well as a motivator. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Brand A Hospitals and Institutions committee (which presumably knows how to push the guilt buttons) has a very spotty record at providing Brand A volunteers to cover important meetings and presentations; at venues with which I'm personally familiar, where we also have LifeRing meetings, they've been no-shows time after time. Apparently their membership has developed a thick skin to guilt appeals, as would be only natural.
The psychologist Albert Bandura at Stanford, after much experiment and study, has come to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that people remember negative reinforcement for a long time, but it doesn't change their behavior. What changes behavior is positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement changes people's behavior even when they're not aware of it and don't remember it.
Positive reinforcement is built into the core of our usual meeting format. The How Was Your Week format, with its inclusion of feedback (crosstalk), incorporates positive reinforcement as a central element. The whole healing model behind the motto "Empower Your Sober Self" is built around positive reinforcement. When it comes to applying this moving force to people's recovery work in the meeting context, we know what we're doing.
But how and where do we expose our members to positive reinforcement that motivates them to step forward and do service work for the organization? I don't see that we've developed an effective enough channel for it.
Maybe it would help if we had a convenor testimonials page, similar to the general LifeRing kudos page, where convenors could talk about how their own service work has helped their recoveries and made them feel good. Idea?
I'll post my own list in a separate article here, excerpted from How Was Your Week? Anyone with affirmative experiences can post a comment. Maybe the string of comments, after a while, can be set to print and circulated more widely, in an expanded edition of the "Give Something Back" brochure. It's a start.
What do you think?
Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts
Monday, May 7, 2007
More leadership roles in LifeRing
When the founding members wrote the LifeRing bylaws back in 2000-2001, we wanted to create as "flat" an organization as possible, and would have provided for no officers at all if that were legally possible.
However, in order to operate on a sound businesslike footing, we had to form a corporation; and corporations have to at least three officers. That's how we arrived at the triumvirate of CEO, CFO, and Secretary -- the only official officers in LifeRing. If you add the nine seats on the Board of Directors, you get a maximum of 12 people with recognized leadership responsibilities.
Now, "flat" is good and there's much organizational research that validates this concept. You can scan the past decade of Harvard Business Review to find a string of learned, researched articles dissing the top-down hierarchical bureaucratic megalith corporation and lauding the horizontal network-type organization with its short communication lines and rapid response times.
We definitely want to stay flat ... but flat also has its dark side, at least in our implementation. Given our current setup, if you show leadership ability and interest, your options are severely limited. You're either convenor of a local meeting (or of a chat or list), or you're on the worldwide Board of Directors or an officer of the corporation. There's a huge gap of nothing in between.
Having no recognized intermediate leadership positions is bad. There's no ramp for people to move up on as their vision grows broader and their dedication to service becomes firmer. Because there's no transition, convenors may get stuck in a local perspective and may even isolate from the rest of the LifeRing network. I think we're infected with that malady in a number of places.
We do have a number of convenors who take on broader responsibilities than a single meeting. Whenever there's a problem in one of the meetings in their area, they help out. If somebody needs a substitute, they get the call. If there's a talk to be given, they take the lead in doing it. If a meeting is out of literature, they take care of it. When there's an area workshop, they're present. And so on. That's great. What's not good is that we have no express way of recognizing the role they play. We ought to have a formal title for them.
It's unrealistic to expect that literally every LifeRing participant will take on a leadership role at some time or other. But it's also unrealistic to expect that LifeRing can grow and prosper so long as we have a whole lot of nothing inbetween the local level and the worldwide level. That's why the Congress in Denver took up discussion of intermediate leadership. We made a start on it: Robert (Itchy) Bradley is now East Coast convenor. Kathleen Gargan is now Colorado convenor. When everybody gets home and has a chance to look at their local situation with new eyes, we'll undoubtedly define a series of additional intermediate roles, with responsibilities broader than a single meeting but smaller than the universe of the board member.
The ultimate guarantee of organizational "flatness" is our Delegates' Assembly. Each meeting has the power to send one person who has one vote in the DA, and the DA elects the Board of Directors. The meetings through their delegates are both the bottom of the organization, in the sense that they are its foundation, and the top of the organization, because they hold the ultimate power. So long as that remains the case -- and nobody is advocating a change in that -- we'll remain a flat, anti-hierarchical organization. But without creating a ramp of intermediate leadership, and granting formal recognition to the intermediate leaders who are active now, there's a danger that we'll get flat in the bad sense, like a soda with the bubbles gone, or like road kill.
Your thoughts?
However, in order to operate on a sound businesslike footing, we had to form a corporation; and corporations have to at least three officers. That's how we arrived at the triumvirate of CEO, CFO, and Secretary -- the only official officers in LifeRing. If you add the nine seats on the Board of Directors, you get a maximum of 12 people with recognized leadership responsibilities.
Now, "flat" is good and there's much organizational research that validates this concept. You can scan the past decade of Harvard Business Review to find a string of learned, researched articles dissing the top-down hierarchical bureaucratic megalith corporation and lauding the horizontal network-type organization with its short communication lines and rapid response times.
We definitely want to stay flat ... but flat also has its dark side, at least in our implementation. Given our current setup, if you show leadership ability and interest, your options are severely limited. You're either convenor of a local meeting (or of a chat or list), or you're on the worldwide Board of Directors or an officer of the corporation. There's a huge gap of nothing in between.
Having no recognized intermediate leadership positions is bad. There's no ramp for people to move up on as their vision grows broader and their dedication to service becomes firmer. Because there's no transition, convenors may get stuck in a local perspective and may even isolate from the rest of the LifeRing network. I think we're infected with that malady in a number of places.
We do have a number of convenors who take on broader responsibilities than a single meeting. Whenever there's a problem in one of the meetings in their area, they help out. If somebody needs a substitute, they get the call. If there's a talk to be given, they take the lead in doing it. If a meeting is out of literature, they take care of it. When there's an area workshop, they're present. And so on. That's great. What's not good is that we have no express way of recognizing the role they play. We ought to have a formal title for them.
It's unrealistic to expect that literally every LifeRing participant will take on a leadership role at some time or other. But it's also unrealistic to expect that LifeRing can grow and prosper so long as we have a whole lot of nothing inbetween the local level and the worldwide level. That's why the Congress in Denver took up discussion of intermediate leadership. We made a start on it: Robert (Itchy) Bradley is now East Coast convenor. Kathleen Gargan is now Colorado convenor. When everybody gets home and has a chance to look at their local situation with new eyes, we'll undoubtedly define a series of additional intermediate roles, with responsibilities broader than a single meeting but smaller than the universe of the board member.
The ultimate guarantee of organizational "flatness" is our Delegates' Assembly. Each meeting has the power to send one person who has one vote in the DA, and the DA elects the Board of Directors. The meetings through their delegates are both the bottom of the organization, in the sense that they are its foundation, and the top of the organization, because they hold the ultimate power. So long as that remains the case -- and nobody is advocating a change in that -- we'll remain a flat, anti-hierarchical organization. But without creating a ramp of intermediate leadership, and granting formal recognition to the intermediate leaders who are active now, there's a danger that we'll get flat in the bad sense, like a soda with the bubbles gone, or like road kill.
Your thoughts?
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