5.3: The Role of Leadership

Leadership is one of those words that people like to use all the time. In this section, we will examine what leadership is in the context of the kind of social movement that we need to address climate change.

Social movement leadership is a particular kind of leadership. Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer who is now a scholar, argues that leadership is “enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” There are three parts of his definition that are important to notice.

First, you need leadership when you face uncertainty. We don’t need leadership to do many ordinary things in our everyday lives, like getting up each morning, having breakfast, getting the kids to school, and going to work. At work, you might have an annual budget review, or a weekly meeting on Fridays. You don’t need leadership for those, either; you need managers. Someone has to manage the process of the annual budget review. But when you face a situation that is uncertain—like when you’re trying to make some kind of social change—that’s when you need leadership.

Second, leadership is not about doing something yourself. It’s about enabling others. Leaders are not people who do all the work themselves. Instead, they make it possible for others to do the work that they need to do.

And third, leadership helps others achieve their purpose. Leaders do not necessarily designate the end point or set the destination that the movement tries to reach. Rather, leadership is about figuring out how to enable others to achieve the purpose that they want and to navigate the uncertainty that they face.

Let’s make that broad but vague definition of leadership more concrete. In the last section, we said that leaders of social movements confront two main challenges: how to get people involved in sustained political activism and how to translate that activism into the political influence or power that can make change.

So, first, as a leader, how do you get people involved in sustained activism? Think of all the people out there that a social movement might want to engage, and then picture them as a tree with some low-hanging fruit and some high-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit are the people who, for whatever reason, have some kind of latent motivation to get involved. Maybe their parents are environmentalists, and they’re already on board with the idea that we need to create climate solutions. Or maybe someone took a class about bending the curve and decided to become a climate activist. These kinds of people know they want to do something, but they need an opportunity to get involved. They’re the low-hanging fruit because they’re the easiest to engage.

Other people, up near the top of the tree, are much harder to engage, sometimes for reasons unrelated to the movement itself. For example, at the very top of the tree, we might imagine that there are people who, even if they were motivated, don’t have the capacity to get involved. They might not have much free time because they have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Or maybe they have never even heard of climate change. Or maybe they have heard about it, but they don’t feel like they can act on it, because that would go against the social norms of their community.

About halfway up the tree, you might find some people who are motivated to get involved but don’t really know how. Maybe they don’t feel comfortable talking about their political views in front of other people. Maybe they don’t feel comfortable talking about science in front of other people. They need to develop some particular capacities and skills.

Leadership means figuring out how to engage both the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit. The most successful social movements in history not only grabbed that low-hanging fruit and pulled in people who were already motivated, but also figured out how to draw in the people who weren’t motivated at first.

How do the leaders of social movements do that? Social movement leaders push people up a ladder of engagement. In any kind of movement or organization, there are different tiers of involvement. At the very bottom of the ladder, there are people who say, “Hey, I think climate change is a problem, and I’m going to sign up for an email list so you can send me information about climate issues.” At the next tier of involvement are the people who say, “I’m not just going to sign up for your email list, I’m also going to give you 2 hours a week of my time to act on it. If you send me alerts, then I’ll call my legislators. If you send me petitions, I’ll sign the petitions. If you want, maybe I’ll even come into your office and I’ll stuff envelopes for 2 hours a week.” People at this level of involvement are willing to do certain kinds of tasks, but they don’t want to take any responsibility for outcomes.

As we continue up the ladder, we find people who not only are willing to give some time or be responsible for particular tasks, but also want to take responsibility for outcomes. Taking responsibility for an outcome might involve someone saying, “Hey, I’m not just going to come to your meeting on Friday; I’m going to be responsible for getting 20 other people to come to that meeting too. And if it takes me 5 minutes to send an email and get those 20 people, that’s great. But if it takes me 10 hours of knocking on doors, I’ll do the 10 hours.” Their commitment no longer depends on how much time something takes; instead, they are committed to achieving a particular outcome.

Social movements need people at all levels of that ladder of engagement. They need a lot of people at the bottom, but they also need people at the top. Scholars have found that social movement leaders push people up that ladder of engagement by cultivating what we call their agency. What is agency? Martin Luther King Jr. famously defined agency as a person’s own power, or their ability to achieve purpose. If I have the capacity to achieve the purpose that I want to achieve, then I have agency.

Often, we assume that agency is just a belief. But social psychologists have found that agency is not just about whether people believe they can achieve their purpose—and that it’s not just about competence either. It’s also about whether someone has the autonomy or the space to act. Agency requires both competence and autonomy.

Social movement leaders not only help activists cultivate that sense of competence, that sense that they can do what they’re trying to do, but also give them the autonomy and space to act on their goals. What does that look like?

This is a question that Hahrie Han, an author of this chapter, set out to study in her research lab. She asked: Why are some organizations and movements better than others at getting people involved, and keeping them involved, in ways that cultivate their sense of their own agency and push them up that ladder of engagement? After a multiyear, multimethod comparative study, Han’s lab found that the strongest movements understood that it is not just about getting people involved, but it is how you get them involved that matters. Not every form of participation is the same.

In fact, many movements make the distinction between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing involves trying to get as many people involved as possible by making it as easy as possible for them to take action. While that can build numbers, it often does not build agency. Organizing, on the other hand, is about constantly designing ways for people to take action that push them up that ladder of engagement by cultivating their sense of agency.

The difference between mobilizing and organizing is not simply semantic. In fact, Han’s research lab has found that organizers and mobilizers have different theories about how to do the work. On the one hand, mobilizers reach out to as many people as possible and ask them to take a simple, quick action, so that they can convince more and more people to do more and more things. On the other hand, organizers have a theory of building power that involves developing leaders who will, in turn, motivate others.

Han’s lab found that mobilizers only convinced the low-hanging fruit, the people who were already motivated, to do something quick and easy. We call this transactional mobilizing because the actions taken, such as sending an online petition or signing up for an email list, are a simple exchange of resources like a transaction—like going into a store and buying something. You give your money to the store and walk out with your ketchup and there are no strings attached.

Organizers, in contrast, asked people to do things that were not quick or easy but that would put them into relationships with other people. For example, instead of asking people to write letters to the editor by filling out a template online and pushing a button to send it, organizers asked people to join with others in their community, compose a letter together, and then send it off to the local newspaper. According to the organizers’ theory, by working with others, people develop both the motivation and the capacities that de Tocqueville identified many years ago as fundamental to making democracy work—and that are fundamental to making social movements work as well. Mobilizers and organizers differ not only in the kinds of things that they ask people to do, but also in how they structure their organizations.

Mobilizers tend to concentrate all the responsibility in the hands of just a few people, whereas organizers distribute that responsibility across a broad group of people. We found that by distributing that responsibility, organizers were more likely to create social movements that transformed people. Through this transformational organizing, social movement leaders are able to engage people in the sustained political activism that leads to the kind of change that they are seeking.

The challenge, of course, is that asking people to take small, transactional steps is a lot easier than asking people to transform themselves, take responsibility for outcomes, and become leaders. Leaders turn transaction into transformation and make it possible to build social movements and create change.