At the end of last year, several of my coaching clients asked me to help them come up with a work plan for 2025. Whenever that request comes, I ask folks to send me their department plan, or if they’re an executive director, their organizational strategic plan. All too often, the response I get is, “I can’t make a department work plan till I have my own work plan!” or “I can’t make an organizational plan until I know what our campaign work is going to be next year!”
Friend, you’re doing it backwards.
If you are holding a role in a movement organization, this is the time of year where you get to take back some control of your own life, but if you develop your work plan in a reactive way, you’re giving up that control before you get to making it.
I want to give an example about how we go about making work plans at New Working Majority, in the hopes that it will be helpful to others.
Step one: Identify Organizational Growth Goals
Several years ago, our team decided that we were going to expand our service offerings to include recruitment. We’d started doing some recruitment for existing coaching and organizational design clients–and when other people heard we were doing recruitment, they reached out for help with that. Because recruitment was becoming a stand-alone service, we needed to decide which of us, internally, was going to drive that growth–and we settled on Alina.
Step two: Identify Buckets of Work Around that Growth and Assign Them
Alina became our Recruitment and Data Manager, and her work plan for 2023 included things like doing a deep dive on the alumni offices of universities with labor studies programs, to find out if they had listservs to send out information to alumni about early career organizing jobs. This led to us participating in our first job fair (shout out to Rutgers SMLR!) in 2024, a practice we are planning to continue in 2025.
Other people on the team had responsibilities around recruiting as well. Dani, in her role as our Social Media & Marketing Manager is responsible for helping to recruit new clients, and also runs our weekly jobs newsletter and sells job ads. We knew that both of those things would be easier if we were able to connect with our own expanded professional networks on Linked In–so in 2024, Dani’s work plan involved a lot of learning about how LinkedIn marketing works.
Finally, after we had a first successful year in recruitment in 2023, we decided we needed to hire a Recruitment Director, which then went on Kati’s work plan for 2024. While Matthew ended up with the title of Senior Consultant instead, we never would have found him if we hadn’t done all the work that built that successful part of our business.
In the NWM example that I cited above, the work plan tasks were focused on effort, and in the first year, did not include specific outcomes. In other words–Alina had to do the work to figure out if any listservs existed before she could actively work with alumni offices to do recruitment. Her goal for that year was to do the research, and the end product was just a list of ways to get in touch with alumni offices. Later, we were able to set goals that involved metrics, but if we are in the research & experiment phase of growth, we want to have tasks that are experimental and may fail–because that’s how we learn things.
Step three: Mostly Don’t Focus on Specific Campaigns
It’s my pretty firm belief that most organizations should put less of their planning energy into campaigns, and more into planning staff development. I have developed a work planning template that generally asks people to limit their campaign & program work in one bucket. That’s counterintuitive to most people–mostly, people think the campaign work is the primary thing they need to get done in a year. And it’s true that most campaigns have external deadlines that drive us.
That’s why it is so important to have one’s work plan focused on the things that have internal or no deadlines. Your work plan is not a task list of things that you need to get done for OTHER people, it is a plan to do YOUR WORK.
In thinking about your work for the year, you need to think about your self-development goals (what do I want/need to learn?), your staff development goals (if you are a supervisor), your member leadership development goals, and crucial organizational goals like board development, fundraising, and teamwork and inclusion. Start putting those things on the calendar BEFORE you add in your campaign goals, so that you can develop a plan to use campaigns to develop leaders and staff.
What’s Next?
For 2025, New Working Majority’s major organizational goal is to fully launch a set of new training offerings. If you’re on our email list and reading our emails, you’ve probably seen announcements of some of our early efforts–look forward to more of that under Matthew’s oversight next year. He’s taking the lead on making sure that work moves forward–but all of us on our four-person team have a role to play in making our growth a success, as outlined clearly in all of our work plans!
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