Liberty for All: Situational Leadership with Volunteer Groups

Rebecca Eastwood

Background

Liberty For All is an organization that is working to legalize marijuana in all fifty states. Their current strategy is based in passing state-level legislation. In order to do this in the state of Iowa, Liberty For All has developed a plan to involve local-level volunteers to build citizen lobby groups in order to influence key state legislators to support their bill. They have hired two staff at the statewide level who are responsible for recruiting, training, and mobilizing these volunteer teams. The teams are expected to meet with their state legislators at least once before the beginning of the state legislative session in six months and then continue to organize locally to build influence throughout the session.

The two staff members divide up the state for their recruitment. They successfully recruit local volunteer teams in 3 key locations.

The Dilemma

Each volunteer team approaches their goal a little differently. One team is comprised of college students who have not lobbied before, another team is medical professionals with some lobbying experience, and a third is industry members such as medical marijuana dispensers. One staff member is responsible for training, managing, and mobilizing all of these teams. This staff member has extensive lobbying experience but has not worked on this issue before. Once they have recruited these teams, they begin a training process which includes required lobbying trainings and issue education workshops. The staff member is very hands on and directive with their teams as they prioritize the importance of maintaining positive relationships with state legislators.

The team of college students responds well at first but their engagement starts to drop midway through the training program. The team of medical professionals is very engaged and starts to make their own plans to train even more community members. And the team of industry members starts to disengage and becomes burnt out during the training process due to past failures in advancing legalization legislation.

Decision-Making Process

With these three different team dynamics and outcomes, the staff member must balance a hard timeline with the beginning of the legislative session with the development of each team. They are receiving guidance from organizational leadership that they are expected to have each team prepared to meet with their legislators before the start of the session.

The Decision

The staff member doubles down on the training program by adding a requirement that each volunteer must attend every session or they will be unable to participate in the legislator meeting. The staff member starts to get nervous about the type of communication from volunteer teams to their legislators (i.e. more aggressive than the approach of the organization, no communication at all, etc) so they begin to take over communication from the volunteer teams to the legislators.

Outcomes

The college student team starts to re-engage due to the new requirements but end up losing motivation due to a lack of control in the process. The medical professionals team ends up breaking away from the organization but continuing in their own training process, even growing their local advocacy work. The industry member group does stay with Liberty For All and ends up having a meeting with their legislator before the session. Without the other two teams, however, the impact of the lobbying is limited as they only met with one key legislator. 

Discussion Questions

Applying the situational leadership model, at what stage was each volunteer team?

What are ways the staff member could have adapted their leadership style to respond to the needs of each group while balancing the goals of the organization?

License

This case study is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.