Of special relevance within the context of movement-building organizations

We must be able to live by the principles that we set for others and for the society that we are in the process of transforming. If we are to help everyday people come into greater activity, leadership and collectivity then we must cultivate the utmost integrity individually and collectively, we must be trustworthy and cultivate mastery of “movement-building” practices while minimizing “movement-killing” practices. Otherwise we follow in the footsteps of all that have abused their power and applied a double standard to their own behavior while harming others.

Shared principles:

• Our behaviors are not “who we are”.
• We all make mistakes – the key is admitting, correcting and repairing harm.
• Movement love does not look like co-dependence. We have an obligation to hold each other accountable.
• Good practice can help build relationships. Bad practice can help destroy relationships.
• Good process can help build relationships. Bad process can help destroy relationships.
• We’re not always going to be happy with each other. Conflict and contradictions are a natural part of our process.
• Your goal is not to avoid anyone ever being mad at you.
• Regular feedback is an important part of our process.
• Feedback is very different from attack.
• We are all on a learning and healing journey.
• We take responsibility for resolving our own conflicts as a leadership task whenever possible.
• We all deserve patience, respect and care in how we are treated and talked to. That doesn’t mean sugarcoating just as it doesn’t mean being vicious.
• Intention is not the same as impact. Assume best intention but attend to impact.
• There is no basis for working with those who are not doing so in good faith.
• The fact that you may be dealing with the impact of trauma and mental health issues does not place you outside the realm of accountability.
• Everything changes – including our emotions.

Movement-Killing Behaviors

• Shit-talking – speaking disparagingly of people when they are not present
  • How to interrupt: “Have you shared any feedback with this person?” “Please don’t talk negatively about this person in front of me, I don’t want to hear it.”
  • Alternatives to shit-talking: Incorporating regular feedback sessions into your meetings. Tell people what you appreciate about them and what you see as their areas for growth.
  • Talking about members and their growth and development in the context of base building and leadership development without them present does not constitute gossip.
• Untruthfulness
  • Outright lying cannot be tolerated.
  • Some people live by exaggeration. It’s been a survival mechanism to help them to be heard or to get what they want.
    • Additionally, some people are not rigorous with their word or the truth. They have a pattern of intentional or subconscious laziness about how to portray what happened or what was said, constantly stretching the boundaries of reality like silly putty, adding to, omitting or changing parts of the story as they go along. We all need to be held to account for striving to be as accurate as possible in our representations of meetings, conversations, processes, plans, etc. If you know this is an issue for you please make a note that it’s something that you need to work on.
  • Don’t tell two different people two different things based on what you think they want to hear. Tell both people the same thing. Telling everyone a different version of the same events keeps people off kilter and is a mechanism to sow confusion and manipulation. If you find yourself telling many people a slightly different version of the same events or if you feel like you are hearing a different version than what was told to someone else, you’re likely participating in gossip, please see that section.
• Accusation and attack
  • Making vague or general accusations instead of giving direct feedback
    • Don’t say “people do this”. Give feedback to specific individuals in an appropriate time and place (ie not in front of a group or when they are leading something). Do not generalize and suggest that the organization does something or has a policy that in reality happened with one individual inside the organization, or in a social setting.
  • Attacking the organization/enlisting others to attack the organization on social media, ie tagging the organization’s name on Facebook or Twitter with slanderous remarks
  • Blowing up a shared space, taking the opportunity in front of a group to air your grievances with a particular person or situation in ways that are unaccountable, not related to the matter at hand, and target particular individuals while they’re trying to facilitate or lead a group process.
• Defensiveness
  • Refusing all constructive critique; repeated defensiveness + playing the victim when you are called to account
  • Defensiveness is the enemy of leadership. If you find yourself on the defensive, ask “what did I do to co-create this situation?” Go through this list and see if you have participated in any of these behaviors. Ask yourself about your follow through. For all of the ways that you want to lash out, question every justification that you’re providing for your own behavior. Do those justifications really stand up to the light of day?
• Rugged individualism
  • Using the organization’s name and credibility to take action on your own rather than acting collectively with the organization, misleading others into thinking that you’re representing the organization when you’re only representing yourself.
  • It’s fine to have other organizational affiliations or roles! However, please be transparent about your intentions. If you’re running for office or leading another organization and you want to use the organization’s energy and work to bolster your visibility and win more allies (for example), you must make clear what your intentions are before embarking on any process so that everyone in the situation can make clear informed choices about how to proceed.
• Refusing to participate collaboratively or to work with others on the basis of their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, age, religion, documentation status.
• Refusing to acknowledge the realities of power and oppression, to listen openly to others’ experiences and to acknowledge when you’ve contributed to harm.
• Refusing to participate in political education and leadership development processes and studies.
• Constant negativity. Consider that never being able to find the good in any situation and constantly thinking of what went wrong or what people didn’t do well is a reflection on how you feel, not on the process or other people. Please be careful that you don’t project the ways you may have been conditioned to be hyper-critical of yourself onto other people or to the organization.
• Manipulation
  • Trying to operationalize or manipulate another member for your ends
    • If you see a situation in which a current member or someone who has already left the organization has attached themselves to you or to another member and is constantly “in their ear” about what they should be doing, and trying to use that member as a conduit to have influence in the organization without the operator’s explicit participation and accountability, this is a problematic situation that should be avoided. By the same token, don’t allow yourself to be operationalized by someone who is seeking to be outside the boundaries of community and accountability.
• Being a “people-pleaser”. Telling everyone what they want to hear so as to avoid conflict. Never making tough calls or holding people accountable so that they won’t be mad at you.
• Abuse or harassment whether verbal, physical, or sexual of any member.
• Reactivity – reacting, responding, writing, posting before you breathe and check in with yourself. How is my response going to benefit myself, the other person and the organization as a whole? Reactivity is another enemy of leadership. It takes strength, resolve and courage to pause before reacting. It takes patience and wisdom to not always say the first thing that pops into your head. Reactivity is flawed practice. It is not the same as speaking your mind, being true to yourself, or being honest. It is possible to do all of those things – and do them well – without being reactive. Being reactive is responding with a lack of self and community awareness, defaulting to conditioned patterns rather than being in our choice, agency and power. Reactivity damages trust.
• Stuck in place, refusing to accept that things change. A month ago, you may have been dismayed that another person wouldn’t step up and do their fair share. A month later, they are stepping up! Isn’t that what you wanted? It’s what you said you wanted, but you’re still harboring resentment for this person instead of appreciating the shift that has occurred. Holding onto past grievances as if reality is static as opposed to ever-changing is counter-productive. Go with the flow.
• Fomenting conflict, ill will, troubles, and problems through any of the above means

Steven Covey, author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about our “Emotional Bank Accounts”. Despite the fact that it’s weird to talk about banking in this context,  I think the concept of making investments in our relationships – actions that demonstrate trust, understanding and support – is a good one. He takes the metaphor further to suggest that when we violate trust or make a mistake, it’s akin to making a “withdrawal” against the investments that we’ve already made. I have often thought of this metaphor when I think about building trust with movement colleagues.

The more that I work with this metaphor the more I become aware that this grounding is only useful when it is broadly understood and reciprocal. There is much that gets in the way of us treating each other with deep respect, including ego, competition, lack of self-awareness, and oppressive conditioning.

At times the lack of respect that I experience make the work almost unbearable. I also have said and done things that I’ve regretted, made lots of mistakes and treated people with less respect than they deserved. I am in no way saying that I do not exhibit problematic behaviors.

I am also working on improving my practice.

I think the thing that I’ve been most harmed by is that people that I’ve invested in heavily – that I’ve given jobs, provided opportunities, supported, mentored, helped, not over the course of months, but over the course of years, have been able to turn on me as a result of a real or perceived “withdrawal” that feels so asymmetrical – especially in light of our history of multiple, sustained investments of trust. That kind of betrayal really pains me. There has to be a way to understand, overcome and avoid it outside of simply not trusting anyone ever again, or being made to feel ashamed for being taken advantage of – like I’m the one at fault for “having it happen to me”. Also seems important to note here that every single person who has ever behaved this way toward me was a man.

Relatedly, I’ve recently been reflecting on the things that are getting increasingly difficult for me in the course of doing this work. There are a lot of narratives out there about how we are supposed to expect that movement work is a hard and never-ending slog through shit. However, I am very much interested in improving our practice and not having the work produce a lot of collateral damage. If the work that we are doing serves to re-traumatize ourselves and others, how exactly are we getting free? We are already situated within an economic, political and social system that prevents us from being our fullest selves. We have no choice but to transform it. However as we do that, the ends don’t actually justify the means when the means are bullshit. We all have to make sacrifices and compromises, and our hands aren’t clean. We can’t stand outside the system to do our work. However, as we make the road by walking, we have to clear the path through our actions, and act – create systems, structures and processes – in ways that liberate instead of oppressing, for ourselves and others.

As I’ve been doing these reflections, here are some places that feel like they are becoming untenable for me in terms of the emotional labor that I’m doing on top of the intellectual and physical labor of movement work.  It’s not any one of these that’s untenable, it’s the fact that sometimes it feels like I am doing all of these things, all of the time. No single one of these is a deal-breaker, but taken together, and when performing these tasks of emotional labor actually crowds out my ability to be well myself, and do the things that I really love, like strategy, base building, and study, they become unbearable.

• Constantly mediating conflict between people for the good of the work
• Absorbing people’s emotional outbursts, when targeted mistakenly at me or others; being expected to de-escalate and mend the situation even when it is re-traumatizing
• Anticipating and troubleshooting problems and providing extra support proactively in order to avoid re-traumatizing other people – ie trying to solve problems before they happen
• Accepting people being impatient, judgmental, negative or demanding in ways that are very challenging to deal with because of where they are in their leadership development process
• Cleaning up after other people’s bad behavior, playing a reassuring or ameliorating role to calm people’s feelings because of someone’s unaware or intentional bad actions
• Being someone that people come to when they have problems, being someone that is expected to fix people’s problems and make them feel better, rather than them fixing their problem on their own, or offering to help fix my problems
• Constantly being expected to absorb negativity, people unawarely not balancing their critiques, complaints and problems with affirmation and appreciation
• Making issues personal instead of understanding them as part of the process, organizational, and co-created (ie acknowledging their own role)
• Being the object of the assumption that I am able to do a tremendous amount of work without strain, stress or pain
• My ideas being repeated as if they were the original ideas of others who then get credit and recognition for them
• Despite fighting for people, helping them and defending them, being treated as if I am not worthy of the same, being turned on quickly for the convenience and benefit of others
• Having a position of non-conflict and nonviolent communication used as an excuse to be an “easy target” or scapegoat as needed because I won’t make the kind of scene that others will
• Perceiving my work and my ability as a threat rather than an asset because of ego and behaving in ways that lack integrity as a result
• Working with people who are afraid of conflict, therefore if conflict arises, quickly exit the scenario rather than take a principled stand for the sake of no one “being mad at them”; can’t distinguish between reasonable or justified accountability and unprincipled attacks
• To not have the role of oppression acknowledged in situations, to have people around me not acknowledge power when being treated badly by someone that society imbues as more deserving of respect and dignity than I am. To have the oppressive component of the mistreatment ignored or minimized, to exhibit a complete unwillingness to assist the person doing the behavior to achieve greater awareness.
• Being a constant cheerleader, having to maintain hope and continue to be inspirational during moments when others are lost or feel hopeless. Having to maintain discipline around hope and a clarity of vision that carries other people through difficult times.
• People who use their privilege to step on you, using your emotional and intellectual labor for their own benefit and using it to maneuver themselves into positions of power or influence without giving credit or assistance to help better your situation.
• Constantly getting the unaware and oppressive feedback that I’m aggressive, threatening and intimidating simply as a reaction to my natural way of speaking and being.
• Not being allowed to express anger or frustration at the above treatment, expected to always appear to be okay with whatever is happening even when it is unacceptable, receiving reactions of anger and frustration for my reactions because they are seen as a distraction and an inconvenience when none was given for what caused them.