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How to achieve the purpose of your team (mainly for Internal Coordinators)

Why the Internal Coordinator role matters

Every role in a team plays a part in achieving the purpose of the team.

The Internal Coordinator (IC) role is there to keep everyone collaborating effectively, and healthily, towards this goal. This page gives you some suggestions for going about this role, and how to prioritise and coordinate the team’s activities.

Effective internal coordination helps XR:

  • rely on your team to play its part in achieving our demands;
  • embody the regenerative culture that we need;
  • respond to and deliver its strategy.

It helps your team:

  • align the work of its members without ‘power over’;
  • support each other, both within role definitions and as people, friends, collaborators;
  • support the movement, by being accountable to others for playing your part in our rebellion.

Overview of the role

The Internal Coordinator role is defined by its mandate and has these features :

Purpose:

Your role exists to ensure that the team is doing what the movement asks of it.

What you do:

You will need to keep in mind an overview of all the team’s work, how it fits together, and how it fits into the movement. That means things like

  • analysing how team roles and projects align with purpose, priorities, strategy;
  • identifying gaps and links between roles and projects, along with creative ways to address them;
  • making requests of roles to fill gaps and make links, within their mandates.

IC Skills

To fill the Internal Coordinator role you need to practise your skills in aligning people — each with their rich mix of motivations, skills and emotions — with roles — which are more formal.

Practise the art of balancing

  • what you ask of your fellow team members within existing mandates (the team’s and their individual roles), which might involve
  • coaching and mentoring them on specific activities within their accountabilities;
  • identifying the tensions they experience in the team and helping them to process those tensions;
  • signposting them to other forms of support.
  • what additional roles and mandates the team needs to fulfil its purpose.

Use existing mandates where you can. Create new ones where you see a need that is likely to be ongoing or recurrent, and where you want to ‘offload’ responsibility and accountability onto someone else.

It’s the IC’s role to hold all the parts of the team’s work. Usually that’s too much for one person. But mandates are a way of simplifying what the IC has to hold, because the details are someone else’s responsibility. So think of new roles as a way of lightening the load on you.

Tips for keeping on top of your role

  • Write down everything you think needs doing.
  • Sort each item into one of three lists:
    • stuff that’s in your mandate (do it yourself)
    • stuff that’s in other team members’ mandates (ask them to do it)
    • stuff that’s not in any mandate (if it’s a one-off, make up a one-off solution; if it’s going to keep coming up, consider creating a new role).
  • Keep the list ‘live’ — add things as they arise, delete them when done.

Prioritising your team’s work

How do you decide which parts of the work of the team are higher priority?

  • If an activity or project is a particularly effective and efficient way of achieving the team’s purpose, prioritise it.
  • If it helps work towards a strategy within the wider movement, prioritise it.

If you expect that team priorities are likely to stay the same for several months, consider writing a team strategy that explains the Whys, Whats and Hows of those priorities.

You — or other team members — can also set priorities for the team by defining a team project, with a particular objective. A project may draw on input from one or more roles (the project itself doesn’t have a mandate, but the project team members bring the authority to make decisions from their existing roles and mandates). By asking for project updates at team meetings, you can keep everyone focused on the objective.

How far your Internal Coordinator authority goes

As IC, you are yourself accountable for stewarding and overseeing the team’s priorities.

You may make requests of role holders or sub-circles to work towards those priorities, and, if the request is within the accountabilities of their mandate, then you can hold them accountable for fulfilling the request.

Then the role or sub-circle with the mandate can decide how, and when, they meet your request. As IC, you do not have ‘power over’ roles and sub-circles to decide these things for them.

Remember that every mandate gives authority to its holder to decide how the purpose is achieved, and how the accountabilities are approached. (This is one way we ensure that we are based in autonomy and decentralisation.)

The only exceptions to this would be, if, say, they are accountable for a certain task to prepare an action, and they say they won’t do it until after the action — then you could say they are not doing what they’re not fulfilling their mandate.

Working with your Group Admin

You will find it much easier to coordinate your team effectively if you’ve got solid records about who is definitely in the team, or in its sub-circles, with what roles mandates, and when their appointments run to.

  • Firstly it helps you know who you can ask to do what.
  • Secondly it helps the rest of the movement know these things, and that helps them to interact with your team without always having to go through you every time. So it reduces your risk of burnout.

The Group Admin role exists to help you with this. You can also work with the Group Admin to align your communication channels in the team, sub-circles and project teams. Sometimes they may be able to help you with storing and sharing team meeting minutes and other records.

Getting support from other teams and roles

It’s largely up to you, with the consent of your team, to decide what roles you have in your team and how they help you — as described above. Here are some examples.

  • External Coordinator — this is a role that every team should have and you can work with your EC to
    • find out about strategies and priorities in wider circles, and
    • inform those circles how your team are working towards those priorities;
    • raising tensions that originate outside your team and affect its ability to fulfil its mandate.
  • Integrator — some teams have a dedicated role for welcoming and onboarding new members, supporting them as they get to know our systems and Ways of Working.
  • Facilitator and/or support from Facilitation circle — to ensure that meetings successfully engage the talents of all team members.
  • Regen Advocate or circle — to strengthen the wellbeing of the team and the bonds between its member.

Summary

  • Coordinate activities: Prioritise and coordinate team activities effectively by aligning team roles and projects with the movement's goals.
  • Develop skills: Practice skills necessary for aligning people's motivations and formal role requirements to enhance team function.
  • Delegate responsibilities: Use existing mandates and create new ones as needed to distribute responsibilities and alleviate the coordinator's workload.
  • Organise projects and tasks: Maintain a dynamic list of tasks categorised by their mandates to manage team workload efficiently.
  • Set priorities: Determine the priority of team activities based on their impact on achieving team and movement goals.
  • Support team relationships: Ensure effective team coordination by maintaining clear records of team roles and mandates, and by working closely with the Group Admin to manage team communication and records.
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