Mission Driven Mozillians - Leadership Principle 5

Mozillians
#1

This is the discussion section for Mozilla’s Volunteer Leadership Principles & Practices. Please read the original post before participating.

Principle 5. Leadership should be consistent

  • Leadership roles are valued the same across the org/areas (recognition, access to resources, opportunities etc. )
  • All leaders should have clarity in their roles and expectations
  • All leaders should have a shared foundational knowledge base & skills (i.e. Community Participation Guidelines)
  • Follow a shared framework for decision making
  • We should create clear definitions for roles and avoid the generic term “leader”
  • Tools should be consistent and coherent where possible

Please respond to the following question:

What would implementation of this principle & practices look like in your community or area?

Here are a few more questions to help you think about implementation:

  • How do we make equivalent “titles” or ”levels” across functional areas?
  • Should we limit or standardize the tools that we use?
  • Do we need leadership specific agreements in addition to the Community Participation Guidelines?

Stay connected to this project by subscribing to the mission-mozillians tag.

Mission Driven Mozillians - Volunteer Leadership Principles & Practices
#2

I’m absolutely convinced that different groups and different topics need different leadership roles and styles.

1 Like
#3

I have to agree with @KaiRo. Any leadership and decision making should follow the needs of people involved, not any framework we share across different communities with different needs and backgrounds.

#4

The agreement was that we need consistency across all areas. That doesn’t mean that on top of these standardized practices, each group or area couldn’t add additional requirements.

#5

Consistency is good and I think that some of these can be implemented. I want to understand where the flexibility lies for cross-cultural leadership. Power dynamics, trust-building, and general leadership perceptions vary widely from culture to culture. Are we sure that these principles respect that and enable communities to adjust where needed to best fit their cultural needs? I struggle to see that with the way point one and four are phrased. Any thoughts? I think this is also relevant to the first question you ask about “titles” or “levels” across functional areas. Many times these roles don’t have 1:1 equivalents across functional areas (e.g., there’s no “translator” level in Reps, but there is in l10n).

As for tools, I need examples of what tools you’re referring to here. Do you have examples in mind?

#6

Do we even need these? Is “Mozillian” not good enough? I’m still happy just stating “I’m a Mozillian” at 1st and then go into explaining I wear many hats such as Rep, l10n translator, SuMo forum and social support helper, Tech Speaker, etc…

I believe there’s really no need to do this, different tools work for different use cases. As long as a new contributor can clearly see at a central place where to go for said tools it is all good. I do believe more of an effort should be done to bridge instant communications given there are lots of bridges currently available at https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#other for example.

I believe I sort of answered this at Mission Driven Mozillians - Leadership Principle 3

#7

I’m not sure we can make like global titles or levels across all areas, maybe similar regions because this is dependent on the nature of the country, culture… an opportunity in one country could be different from others I think, so local considerations have to be taken into account and also local situations and limitations.

Limit or standardize the tools, I’m not sure this if can be done as I’m still thinking of local and regional possibilities and limitations. However, a set of what do we want from these tools should well defined, their objectives and results to expect from them. Based on that, each community can suggest tools based on what they have. So basically we standardize the results not the tools.

For leadership roles, yes as they at some point represent the organization, and this is a key founder of it we must ensure that leaders respect it at maximum and agreements should be signed.