Launching a Team: Purpose, Roles, Norms

*The need:* 'Everyone helps with everything' feels friendly and quietly kills groups.

Teams matter in organizing because relationships deepen commitment — and because a team can hold more than the sum of its members. Effective teams share three elements:

Shared purpose. A team must be able to say what it exists to do and with whom — clear, challenging, and significant to the members themselves. A compelling organizing purpose is a response to a real injustice, and it should be measurable so the team can see progress. (Your story of now is a good first draft of purpose.)

Interdependent roles. Every member holds a real piece of work that the others depend on — canvass captain, welcome lead, data keeper — matched to their skills and stretching them slightly. No silos, and no ghosts: a role nobody depends on is a role nobody keeps.

Explicit norms. Decide out loud: how often we meet, how we decide, how we communicate, what happens when someone drops a commitment — and how we correct norm violations so the norms stay real. Teams with explicit ground rules outperform teams running on vibes, because norms make it possible to talk about how things are going.

In the snowflake model, teams interconnect: a core team keeps the whole coherent while local teams adapt strategy to their ground and feed back what they learn. Accountability points both ways. Leadership is distributed — and every member shares the deepest norm of all: developing new leaders, so the team can grow without burning out its founders.

Details

• ingredients: 3-8 people who've had 1:1s with each other, a purpose worth saying out loud, roles with names, norms written where everyone can see them
• source note: From 'Organizing: People, Power, Change' (2014), Structuring Teams. The shared purpose / interdependent roles / explicit norms triad follows team-effectiveness research by Wageman & Hackman cited in the Ganz tradition.
• how it works: Draft shared purpose together — who we are, what we're here to do, how we'll know., Name interdependent roles; every member holds work others depend on., Set explicit norms: meetings, decisions, communication, and how we repair dropped commitments., Connect to the wider snowflake: what does this team adapt locally, and what does it feed back?, Revisit norms openly as the team grows — updating them is a sign of health, not failure.
• min resources: Free.
• practice kind: recipe
• success signals: members can recite the purpose, work continues when any one person is sick, norm violations get named and repaired without drama