Chapter 4: Build A Team By Empowering People | Building YIMBYs of NoVA
If you want to go far, go together
84 people are receiving this post via email. Special thanks to my 3 paid subscribers.
Welcome to Chapter 4 of the Building YIMBYs of NoVA series, which covers:
Chapter 7: Recruit Like Crazy (Plus Thoughts on Social Media)
Chapter 8: Think And Talk About Opponents As Little As Possible
Whenever someone compliments me about housing advocacy, I reflexively reply, "It's a team sport.”
YIMBYs of Northern Virginia's biggest differentiator from other YIMBY groups is our large, talented leadership team. It comprises about a dozen leads who have signed a contract with our parent org YIMBY Action, plus a handful of “super volunteers.” Among YIMBY Action chapters, we have fairly high numbers of leads and paying members relative to the size of our email list. I think that shows we have cultivated a strong community and a healthy organizational culture.
Because we are all volunteers, I only have to worry about the coordination cost of a big team. (Side note, if you are successful enough, folks will assume YIMBY is your full-time job, even if it decidedly is not.) YIMBYs of NoVA until recently functioned as three YIMBY groups — in Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax — cheering each other on, but we are starting to perform tasks across jurisdictions.
How replicable is our team? It is hard for me to say. I admire my colleagues’ integrity, poise, professionalism, relevant skills, and experience with policy and politics. It surely helps that we are in Northern Virginia, a highly educated suburb of Washington, D.C. But to be fair, our team members come from a variety of backgrounds. One of them is a barista, for example, who gave many excellent interviews about the Missing Middle housing fight and the best public comment I have ever heard at the final community meeting. Exceptional talent does not fit a narrow profile. So you as a leader should be open-minded as you are deciding who to include in your team. Some local YIMBY groups apparently impose an ideological litmus test on joining their team. Suffice to say for now that is deeply wrong.
Recruiting the members of my team followed a couple of patterns. Typically, I would notice someone getting really active on the Facebook group or at in-person events, making salient points and demonstrating a big picture vision. At some point I would ask, ‘Do you want to be part of the team?’ Usually they said yes. They might add, ‘I have limited time,’ to manage expectations. But now I know, what we do is rewarding and exciting enough that people get hooked. Folks see the respect we garner from other players, and they want to invest in what we do. The other, less common type of recruit is a one-person army, a vocal housing advocate in their community with deep knowledge of the entitlement process and relationships with decision-makers. My pitch to that person is simple: ‘You are already doing this work. I want to help you be more effective. I created this thing. Let me toss you the keys. Tell us what to do.’ It has worked every time. Our president Jane Green was one such case. Gradually she became more involved with us, and finally joined our leadership team. She brought five years of experience in the trenches of local housing debates. I thanked her for leading us, and she replied, “Thank you for giving me something to lead.”
Team building does not end with recruitment. I really try to tailor how I communicate with each member of our team — including how I provide positive and constructive feedback — based on their personality, strengths, and weaknesses, rather than measuring them against each other. Assigning tasks is a balancing act between effective execution and giving someone room to grow and stretch a little, to build their skills, experience, and confidence. This is another way of slicing the tradeoff in Chapter 3 between control and scale. I rarely fret about execution because the stakes for a given task are usually low and the road ahead is long. And we have good people who follow through. I can really trust my team. Delegating aggressively has helped me avoid overloading myself. And by extension, empowering my team has helped them grow and be opportunistic. I play heavily to individuals’ strengths because people like being good at something. They enjoy exploiting their own unique abilities. This is fundamental to my theory of what motivates people.
My co-founder (and now friend!) Theo recently created and implemented an organizational structure which has been enormously helpful for us. Theo defined roles for vice presidents in charge of each locality we operate in, plus directors of events, communications, and other functions. This gave folks opportunities to specialize and focus on their strengths. Specific events like a press inquiry are no longer a jump ball, we have a basic idea of who is doing what. It also created room for rank and file members of our group to step up and take on new tasks.
The upshot is that if something happened to me, YIMBYs of Northern Virginia would now continue on and eventually be able to achieve its policy goals. That is the initial goal of any founder, and feeling like I have achieved it is uniquely gratifying.
If you enjoy this series or want to work together, I would love to hear from you at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I am glad to answer questions from readers, ideally in future blog posts. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia at yimbysofnova.org.