SHW Volunteer Teams

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Advice for Team Leads

Introduction

Congratulations on being selected as a team lead at schoolhouse.world! In this position, you’ll be managing volunteers from all over the world to work towards our mission: connecting the world through learning.

In this handbook, we’ll be going over some key strategies for bringing your team to the next level during your term as a team lead.

Reflect: how do you define your success as a team lead? What do you aim to put in, and what do you want to get out of it?

5 Traits of a Strong Leader

Here are some of helpful traits traits to work on developing as a team lead:

Compassionate. Show your team members you care. Focus on helping others grow and develop skills. By doing this, you’re actually developing your skills as a leader—real leaders create leaders.

Solution-oriented. Criticizing is easy; developing solutions is the real challenge.

Proactive. Don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do; take initiative to solve problems and take your team to the next level.

Adaptable. Things rarely go according to plan—be the first to help the team adapt to unexpected roadblocks.

Consistent. When you commit to something, follow through. Track your tasks carefully and finish things in a timely way to build trust with your team, co-lead and supervisor.

Take a minute to consider these traits. Which do you think are already strengths for you? What do you want to improve on?

Getting off the Ground

Building your relationship with the existing team

As you start your role, there’s a lot to learn! We recommend that in your first week or two, you prioritize listening and observing, rather than trying to overhaul the systems and processes that are in place. This is important for two reasons:

By listening and talking to the team, you earn their trust. Everyone wants to be listened to!

By observing what’s currently happening, you can start to evaluate what is and isn’t working well, and make guesses on why. Be sure to observe respectfully: no process or team is perfect. Your job is to strengthen your team, not to overrule it.

If your team has a co-lead, spend some time getting to know them and learning from their experience so far. Set up a regular time to meet with them to stay coordinated.

Coordinating with your supervisor

Your supervisor is not there to tell you what to do, but to support you and your co-lead(s) to move in the right direction. They’re a resource to you, so be intentional about how you solicit and leverage their input.

There are three main ways you can stay coordinated with your supervisor:

Regular check-ins (MANDATORY). If you haven’t already, you and your co-lead should set up a regular touch-point with your supervisor to give them an update on how things are going and to solicit their input on your current work. This can be over Slack or on a live call.

Asynchronous feedback requests. Share an idea or proposal with your supervisor to get their feedback.

1:1 calls. Ask your supervisor for 1:1 calls to get their feedback on your contribution to the team, and to talk through anything you’re struggling with.

Whenever you’re planning to reach out to or meet with your supervisor, think through your goals with the conversation. Knowing what you want to discuss is a good way to signal to them that you respect their time.

Setting goals for your term

After you’ve had some time to evaluate what’s happening on the team, you can start to set goals for the next 3 months. Think about things like:

What purpose does your team serve in the context of the organizational goals outlined in the Schoolhouse

roadmap⁠

What are the main things your team is responsible for? What processes are already in place to achieve those goals?

Does our team like our current processes? How can we make them better? (Ask the team!)

What do we want to start improving first and why?

How can we make these improvements with the resources and time that we have?

Talk to your co-lead about what these goals are, and work together on a list of goals that you can share with your supervisor. Remember that because this is a startup, things move fast and your goals may need to change.

Tracking success metrics

Once you know what your high level goals are, it’s important to work with your supervisor to come up with a 1-3 metrics that will show you whether you’ve achieved these goals. Here are some example of what these metrics could look like:

We want to increase from our current 200 daily active users on Slack, to 300 daily active users

We want to ensure an application response time of less than 48 hours by the end of my term

We want to build the capacity in our team to be able to monitor up to 200 sessions per week

Developing a game plan

Once you’re clear about your high level goals and success metrics, you can work with your co-lead and the rest of your team to break your goal down into a few main projects that you guys want to work on during the next three months.

Be careful not to get too stuck in creating the perfect game plan—you want to set goals and make sure your team is on the same page, but it’s actually taking action that is going to make your leadership meaningful.

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When you have a tentative plan for who will do what and when, run it past your supervisor for feedback and you’re off to the races!

Building systems that scale

At the end of the day, your central goal as a team lead should be to build systems that work at scale.

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Day-to-day Management

Setting expectations for your team members

As the team managers, it’s you and your co-lead’s responsibility to ensure that you have enough committed volunteers to reach your team’s goals. This means not only recruiting new members, but making sure that existing team members are committed to a certain level of responsibility.

In your onboarding process for new members, make sure to communicate what the minimum work required of them is, as well as how they might choose to go above and beyond the minimum. Make it clear that they will be held accountable to this commitment, and that if life stuff prevents them from being able to keep their commitment it’s fine, but that they’ll need to let you know as much in advance as possible.

Here’s Mariah’s tip for setting expectations that stick:

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Motivating the team

As amazing as our volunteer community is, sometimes other commitments come up and volunteers aren’t able to fit Schoolhouse into their schedules. As a team lead, spend time considering how you can motivate and rally your volunteer team to prioritize their involvement on your team. Motivating your team is often the most important part of your success as a team lead, and it’s an invaluable skill to learn for future leadership roles!

Here are some top strategies for keeping your team motivated:

Build trust with your team members by listening to them and soliciting their input. This can be done through surveys, or even better, through personal conversations & DMs.

Find ways to lift up your team members—show that you care about them as people! When you notice someone struggling, ask how you can support them. When you notice someone excelling, give them positive feedback.

Respect your team’s time. Avoid setting meetings that are unnecessary, and make sure there are ways for volunteers to reduce their load when things come up in their life.

Keep your team in the loop. Make sure everyone has an idea of what your team goals & metrics are, how close you are to reaching those goals, and what projects are being worked on.

Empower your team to innovate. No-one wants to be a mindless machine. Make sure that whatever task you give your team members, there is room for excellence and creativity. Give shoutouts to team members who are positive examples, such as:

“Varun really went above and beyond to help this user find a session. Nice work!”

“Raina’s writing style is super friendly but professional at the same time. I also like how she keeps her chats short so there’s a lot of back and forth between her and the user.”

“Quinn’s feedback for Ada’s physics sessions was awesome! He started with the positives, then shared some really specific things to improve. I loved his suggestions for examples she can use to help learners understand the difference between speed and velocity.”

Remind your team of the big picture and the impact they’re having. How does your team contribute to the mission? What would SHW be without your team? Ideally, give them statistics to back it up.

Provide growth opportunities. Give members of your team who have a good track record opportunities to lead small projects or proposals. This can help you identify strong leaders to replace you at the end of your term.

Optional: Schedule fun team events. The more your team feels like a community, the more people will want to engage. Set up optional team-bonding events or working sessions.

At the end of the day, your goal is to make being a part of your team a fun, memorable, positive experience for everyone.

Communication

We all get a lot of Slack messages, so it’s smart to keep communication with your team and supervisor as clear and concise as possible. Here are a few tips to keep your communication readable:

If you have multiple points of information to convey, use bullet points :)

When communicating with your team, try to keep paragraphs down to a few sentences or less. This makes them easier to read.

Announcements you make to your team will typically have at least one “action item”—something you want everyone to do after reading your post (e.g., “Please check out this training by the end of the week.) Make it very clear what these actions are, and avoid having more than two action items in a single post.

Think about how the language you can use can encourage a sense of shared ownership over your team responsibilities. Use “we” instead of “I” when you can, and avoid drawing attention to your authority as a team lead.

For practice, try to make the following slack post more readable! Feel free to make judgement calls on what isn’t so important and remove it entirely.

Hey team! Thanks to everyone who joined the meeting yesterday. As we talked about, I’m thinking to try some new platforms for building a community for learners—circle, tribe and discourse. I’m not sure which once is the best yet, so it’d be great if you can check out all three and share your thoughts (if you weren’t in the meeting yesterday). We like tribe the most right now because it seems like it is the easiest to integrate, but we also kind of feel like discourse has better features. We also talked about the idea of game nights, which Sachin is working on. He has a coda doc with his ideas, here. Try to get this done by Friday if you can. Finally, we’re thinking about hiring a few new team members, what do you think?

Improved slack message (don’t look until you’ve tried rewriting it yourself!)

Hey team! As a recap from yesterday’s meeting, here are the two things we all need to complete before this Friday:

Evaluate circle, tribe and discourse for our community platform. Here is a doc with some of the considerations in our research so far, please look at each platform and add your thoughts there.

Check out Sachin’s doc on game night ideas and give your feedback.

Excited to get everyone’s feedback and make this learner community come to life next week! 🎉

Scheduling Meetings

Because our team is global, it can be really tricky to arrange synchronous meetings. Tools like When2Meet usually fail because they’re tedious to fill out, and often when everyone does, there is no overlap. We highly recommend making most (if not all) meetings optional, and use them for bonding, brainstorming or co-working rather than for practical announcements, which can be made through Slack instead.

To schedule a meeting, propose a time that should be reasonable for most timezones that your team members are calling in from (pro tip: late Saturday or Sunday morning tends to work well!). Unless the majority of your team can’t make that time, go ahead and create the event.

When you schedule meetings, be sure to create a google calendar invite to help everyone remember! As a team lead, you’re authorized to ask everyone for their email address for this purpose.

Giving & Receiving feedback

Feedback is crucial for us all to grow in our roles at Schoolhouse, no matter what our role is. Learning to give effective feedback is an invaluable skill.

Feedback is a tool for lifting people up and helping them grow, not for bringing them down. If you feel emotional towards someone about something they did, make sure you give yourself time for your emotions to cool before you share feedback so you can make sure the feedback is constructive. Feel free to reach out to your supervisor for support with this!

Feedback for your team members

You might need to give feedback to a member of your team for a variety of reasons. For example:

They aren’t keeping up with their work

They didn’t properly follow instructions

The way they’re completing a task is not up to the team standard

In these types of cases, don’t hesitate to reach out and gently let them know about the issue you’re seeing. Be very specific about what you think is problematic and why, and give them plenty of space to share their perception of the situation. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, or if you reached out and the issue persists, talk to your co-lead and supervisor about what to do next.

Feedback for your supervisor and co-lead

If you notice an issue with your co-lead or supervisor that’s keeping the team from being successful, reach out and share your concerns! It’s much better to be vocal than to silently hold something against them. We’re all learning.

Feedback for you

This role is an awesome opportunity for you to improve your management and leadership skills—make sure to take full advantage of it by reaching out to your co-lead, supervisor and team members to ask how you can improve.

Advice from the team

“Being co-lead is an opportunity to help a growing start-up achieve an important goal. You will work with talented people across the globe. Make the most of it. Give it your best effort. Try to leave SHW in a better place than where you found it.”

- Elliot, Policy Team Lead

“Be proactive. Make sure your team members are engaged and are not confused. Ask for feedback from your members in order to make your team grow.”

- Varun, User Support Team Lead

“Remember to prioritize the team’s well-being. Communication is such an essential factor in virtual teams running efficiently. Also, lead with kindness and compassion.”

- Angel, Social Media Team Lead

“Being a team lead doesn't mean you'll do everything. I believe that as a team lead, the most important thing to keep in mind is structuring your team in a way so that they could get things done if you are unavailable for vacation/other obligations. This will happen through having transparency with the team; be sure everyone your team knows of everything going on within the team. Finally, don't be so tight on team obligations! After all, a lot of members are students that are busy with their lives outside of SHW.”

- Raymond, Social Media Team Lead

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