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DEF has a Leadership Team (LT) with 7 core positions that run 6 different teams.
DEF has a Leadership Team (LT) with 7 core positions that run 6 different teams.
Leadership Team (Team Leads)
Leadership Team (Team Leads)
You can see who is in what role in the Team Directory and more about each time by clicking the team name below:
Executive Director, leads the team with strategic vision and oversight, interfaces with the Board of Directors.
Operations Team, executes internally-focused processes and makes sure other teams have the right tools and platforms to go fast.
Communications Team, tells the DEF story with social media, the DEF Dispatch, multimedia content, and more.
Community Team, promotes a culture of connecting across the community, from local Agora events to individual contributions and ideas.
Engagement Team, intensifies the impact of DEF by creating strategic partnerships to enable diversity and collaboration. Partnerships can include companies, academic institutions, government organizations, Congressional entities and other non-profits.
Finance Team, plans and oversees the budget, ensuring accountability with respect to DEF’s financial resources.
Giving Team, facilitates donations and charitable financial contributions from both individuals and organizations.
Each of these Team Leads has an amazing team of volunteers working on specific issues and processes. Look for updates on the volunteers and things happening inside each particular team in the near future! Most of these positions periodically rotate every one to three years.
Team Guidance from the Executive Director
Team Guidance from the Executive Director
I know that agile and scrum are super buzzword-y, and I would typically stay away from them. However, I do genuinely believe in the real definitions and ideas behind these concepts, and I think they are powerful when applied correctly.
When I use the word agile, I am adapting the values straight from the Agile Manifesto. When I use the word scrum, I am referencing the elements and principles of scrum methodology that help a team go fast (without attempting to force each particular detail on the LT, since every team is unique and must work in its own way).
I got the framework for Individual Traits from The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, a book that Morgan Plummer (the previous Executive Director, and now Chairman of the Board) recommended I read when preparing to transition into this role, and which I highly recommend to everyone. I define them in this context as follows:
Competence: Are you good at your job?
Judgment: Can you make wise, thoughtful calls on your own, and can you judiciously defer a decision when necessary?
Energy: Do you bring motivation, passion, and excitement to the team?
Focus: Do you have the availability and the bandwidth to follow through on your commitment to show up for the team?
Relationships: Do you work well with your teammates?
Trust: Can you be relied upon, and do you keep your word?
A threshold trait, also a concept I got from the book, refers to one which is a critical gating factor: If you can’t meet the mark on this trait, then it won’t matter how great you are at the other traits. Which trait is the threshold trait depends on the situation and the leader, and often depends on what the leader assumes he can train or inspire in people versus what they must have intrinsically when they show up to work.
I chose to make Focus (availability, bandwidth) the threshold trait, which is a tough one for an all-volunteer organization like DEF. I believe experience has proven that no matter the skills and good intentions of an individual, there’s nothing that can quite compensate for showing up and doing work. To be clear, a threshold trait does not make up for all others; for example, an individual cannot succeed on the team if they have no Judgment and no Trustworthiness, simply because they have a lot of Focus.
The DEF community is built on the premise that transparency helps everyone and there are no secrets to how we operate. The rest should hopefully be fairly self-explanatory, but I welcome any questions you may have!
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