Common Obstacles to Trust and How to Overcome Them: Part One

We’re going to explore the common obstacles to trust and how to overcome them.

Regular grassroots and PAC underperformance

Success motivates. People want to be on a winning team. When successful grassroots leaders are asked why they volunteer so much of their time to their organization’s cause, they often respond with the following: “I thought we could win,” “I saw our victories and wanted to be on a winning team,” or “I heard the organization has a good reputation.”

If your organization usually fails to meet its grassroots and PAC goals, your potential volunteers likely won’t want to join that team and won’t be motivated to act when you need them.

In life and business, it’s important to mind the pattern. If your PAC or grassroots community has a pattern of sporadic results in recruiting, calls to action, and attendance at meetings, you should seek answers from your volunteers and get outside help to objectively assess your plans and regroup.

Misplaced loyalty

Whether it’s defending your advocates to badly behaving legislators or helping advocates navigate internal organizational land mines, we must demonstrate loyalty to engender trust.

Unfortunately, I still hear stories of legislators who treat grassroots advocates worse than their mothers-in-law. Condescending behavior and overt animus have been witnessed by many of us during our Capitol Hill and State House lobby day events.

We can’t prevent lousy legislator behavior, but we can defend our advocates when we witness the behavior or when we hear of an offending legislator repeatedly misplacing his or her anger on our well-meaning grassroots volunteers. Though lobbyists may be obligated to placate the offending legislator, grassroots or PAC managers have no compelling reason to do that. Their loyalty must be to their volunteers.

We must pay attention to this dynamic. My four-year research project with active grassroots and PAC advocates revealed that the number-one reason these individuals disengage from advocacy is “legislators behaving badly.” If your organization is luxuriating in an abundance of motivated advocates, don’t take my advice. If you want to retain your productive advocates longer, defend and protect them against badly behaving lawmakers.

Jim Lorimer, former vice president of government relations at my grassroots boot camp, Nationwide Insurance, exemplified appropriate loyalty. On a couple of occasions, our state grassroots team captains’ immediate supervisors tried to prohibit their attendance at our annual Washington, D.C., Civic Action Program (CAP) Chairperson Conference. Without hesitation, Lorimer would call or write the manager and “bring the situation to the manager’s way of understanding.” The CAP leaders always made it to D.C.

They knew that we would support them. Out of more than 30 state CAP chairpersons with whom I worked, only one refused to cooperate with action call requests or similar activities. I attribute this to the solid loyalty we exhibited. They trusted us to go to bat for them and they, in turn, advocated for themselves and the company.

We must protect and defend our advocates to surly legislators. It’s almost as if we are the co-dependent enablers, aware of the negative interaction, but encouraging people to come back and try again at the next lobby day event. Our advocates are busy people. Why would they sign up for that duty?

In part two, we’ll discuss direction changes, failure to trust, and inconsistent messages.