How to work with other teams (mainly for External Coordinators)

Why the External Coordinator role matters

The External Coordinator (EC) is crucial for integrating the work of your team with the wider movement. By bridging your team and external circles, you ensure that your team aligns with broader strategic goals and shares its insights, resources, and tensions with other circles. This alignment strengthens collective action, improves coordination, and promotes a regenerative culture across the movement.

Effective external coordination helps:

Overview of the role

The External Coordinator operates within the parameters of their team’s mandate to keep open lines of communication between their team and the broader movement. Specifically, the role entails:

While the EC does not have “power over” others, they play a pivotal role in helping resolve tensions between teams and aligning the circle’s work with movement-wide priorities.

EC Skills

Success in the EC role relies on several key skills:

Tips for keeping on top of your role

Cross-circle projects and project groups

For inter-circle and broader circle issues, it may sometimes be helpful to set up a Project Group to address the issue. It's important to understand the differences between creating a Project Group — which requires no changes to the distribution of power and authority (through mandates) — and a Working Group (or Circle) — which needs a mandate:

Proposing a Project: Proposing a project may not require a formal process. However, each project group should plan in a way that respects the group members' existing mandates. Considerations for project setup include defining objectives, aligning activities with roles based on mandates, coordination mechanisms and communication, and reviewing the project’s expected timeline.

Team boundaries and authority through mandates

Mandates as boundaries

A mandate defines the limits of your authority but also provides you with significant autonomy to take initiative within those limits. This balance supports decentralisation while ensuring that all actions align with the movement’s demands and values.

Collaborating across mandates

When your work affects another role’s mandate, collaborate rather than assume control over how that work is done. For instance, if you want to send an update to a group but it overlaps with someone else’s newsletter accountability, consult them first — ideally using the Advice Process. Their feedback may help tailor the communication to the group’s needs, ensuring it lands effectively without overloading members with too many updates.

Summary

By following these guidelines, an External Coordinator can support their team’s contribution to the movement, align their work with collective goals, and ensure productive cross-team collaborations.


Revision #3
Created 12 November 2024 17:26:43 by DavidJ
Updated 13 November 2024 14:31:50 by DavidJ