There are Nine Kinds of Great Organizers. You Don’t Have to Be Them All.

My first stint as a professional organizer was a dream. Four years on Chicago’s high pressure, high energy streets. Surrounded by brilliant comrades and generous mentors. Given the freedom, and support, to build a new young people’s organization. We even won a few minor victories on health care, higher education, policing, and voting. 

Yet at the end of those four years, I was convinced that I wasn’t cut out to be an organizer. My mentors taught me to revere organizing, and I did. Being a master organizer meant being a fighter, a strategist, a researcher, a counselor, a perfectionist, and so on. The calculation for me was pretty simple: I was maybe a couple of those things, but not all of them. I left the profession for a few years, never losing my admiration for these godlike organizers. I just believed I wasn’t special enough to join their ranks.

In a culture that venerates individual greatness, organizers remind us that what makes us human are the families, tribes, and organizations we belong to.

This article is for anybody who has ever felt like they are not enough to be a good organizer. You are wrong. And if someone is making you feel that way, they are wrong too. 

I eventually ignored my insecurities long enough to give organizing another shot. Now 24 years into this career, I’m afraid that much of what I learned (and unfortunately taught others) about being a good organizer was not only wrong, but harmful—to new organizers, to veteran organizers, and to the organizations we love.

It’s Not You, It’s Us

To start, there simply isn’t one way to be a good organizer. There are at least nine.

That’s because an organizer’s job is not to be good at everything; it is to find other people who, together, can be more than any one of us could hope to be alone. This is a revolutionary idea. In a culture that venerates individual greatness, organizers remind us that what makes us human are the families, tribes, and organizations we belong to.

Here’s one take on nine organizing styles that I have seen build power and move mountains. They come from personal experience, and with considerable inspiration from (but not authorization by) scholars of the Enneagram. For each one, I share where the style tends to be particularly gifted, where they may struggle, and a few things that drive them nuts.

When we sanctify and valorize our organizers, we dehumanize them.

Maybe you see yourself in one of the descriptions below. Maybe another description helps you see a comrade in a more generous light. Maybe it occurs to you that your crew could use a few more Peacemakers or Artists or Mama Bears, and you stay on the lookout for those folks. Maybe you even come up with two or three other styles you would add to the list.

Any personality type system is inherently flawed (we contain multitudes!). The below is offered not as gospel, but as an excuse to see ourselves as unique and important and incomplete parts of a whole.

The Nine Types of Great Organizers

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The Perfectionist

Gifts: protecting the integrity of the organization, editing a plan to its essential parts, going deep with individual leaders, developing and maintaining structures, doing the right thing, attracting new people with their wisdom.

Struggles: experimentation, compromising when they see an issue as black-and-white, opening up to their comrades, dealing with organizational crises, freezing people out who don’t “meet their standards.” 

Pet Peeves: a messy spreadsheet, someone not doing the thing they said they were going to do, the Fixers (whom the Perfectionist might view as too interested in compromise), mission creep.

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The Mama Bear

Gifts: saying yes to new people and possibilities, mentoring and coaching, caring for their comrades, being a good confidante or host, one-on-one meetings, attracting new people with their generosity. 

Struggles: saying no, becoming overwhelmed or manipulative, being candid about their own needs, being loose with the facts, wanting to be liked too much, letting folks fail and learn on their own, their gifts may come wrapped in unspoken expectations or resentments.

Pet Peeves: being underestimated, cruelty and meanness, the Artists (whom the Mama Bear might view as self-involved), being challenged.

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The Winner

Gifts: crafting a perfect role for someone or cutting a perfect issue for the organization, zeroing in on what’s possible, grant writing, celebrating victories, public relations (PR), being “professional,” garnering and maintaining respect, attracting new people with their competence.

Struggles: losing, moving slowly, giving others space to make mistakes and learn from them, admitting their own mistakes, being overly image-conscious, genuine conflict.

Pet Peeves: slowness, abandoning the plan, not getting proper credit, PR missteps, Warriors (who might make things a little messy) and Perfectionists (who might be impatient with the Winner’s incrementalist instincts).

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The Artist

Gifts: emotional honesty, true strategic insight, public art and action planning, communicating the cruelty or beauty of a situation with moral clarity, seeing their own faults, attracting new people with their insight and charisma.

Struggles: their own sadness and other big feelings, repetitive activity, compromising for the sake of the group, paralyzing self-criticism that might cause them to step away from the work.

Pet Peeves: feeling hemmed in, plans moving too fast, people they perceive as being fake (like Winners and Peacemakers at times).

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The Brain

Gifts: researching an issue or a target, campaign planning, crafting arguments for writing or public testimony, knowing how things fit together, attracting new people by making sense.

Struggles: creative action planning, overestimating what people can contribute, one-to-one meetings, becoming a news junkie or feeling like they need to know everything, becoming reclusive or isolated as if no one understands them.

Pet Peeves: people they perceive to be unconcerned with facts, interactions they perceive as dramatic or touchy-feely (like they may get from Mama Bears).

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The Rock

Gifts: orienting and managing volunteers, operations, getting shit done, avoiding drama, willingness to sacrifice, protecting the integrity of an organization’s processes and traditions, leading with their heart and body (not just the head), doing what they say they will do, attracting people with their loyalty. 

Struggles: strategy planning, shifting gears in the middle of a plan, working with unlikely allies, indecisiveness, suspiciousness, may have a hard time acting alone.

Pet Peeves: betrayal or disloyalty, a messy office or spreadsheet, what they perceive as needless rule-breaking (like sometimes from Artists and Warriors).

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The Fixer

Gifts: gaining inside information, understanding and navigating a complex web of relationships, throwing parties, cultivating unlikely allies, fundraising, being a jack-of-all-trades, finding out what matters to people, understanding what is possible, attracting new people with charm and curiosity. 

Struggles: getting too cozy with the establishment, staff or systems management, becoming untethered or going off on their own too much, being attracted to drama. 

Pet Peeves: what they perceive as inflexibility or sanctimoniousness (from Perfectionists or Brains), people whose work ends at 5pm.

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The Warrior

Gifts: conflict, courage, candor, standing up to powerful interests inside an organization and out in the world, being unafraid in the moment, scouting out potential threats, deep reservoirs of vulnerability and loyalty, bringing humor and insight to moments of crisis, attracting new people through confidence and will. 

Struggles: sticking to a plan over time, sometimes finding or sparking conflict when it’s not necessary, lashing out or getting stuck when they feel cornered. 

Pet Peeves: people they perceive as sellouts (sometimes the Fixers), or people they perceive as invulnerable (like the Perfectionists, Winners, and Peacemakers)… there’s a lot that drives a Warrior nuts.

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The Peacemaker

Gifts: building and sustaining coalitions, absorbing conflict, code-switching, having a wide range of relationships across differences; navigating an organization through a moment of transition or crisis; serving as a referee or negotiator; sensitivity about who might be harmed or affected by a particular action.

Struggles: becoming anxious or worried—which can lead to complacency or freezing; wanting to be liked; can be a daydreamer.

Pet Peeves: conflict, tension, or criticism that they see as unnecessary; pissing off someone in power; anyone they see as being careless with their words or actions (like Warriors may be at times).

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The Poison

There are many ways to be a great organizer, but each way is also incomplete. When some internal struggle takes over our organizations, it often stems from the attempts organizers make to be all of these styles at once. It’s understandable. Our capitalist, bureaucratic culture wants every organization to have one primary leader: a CEO or executive director. Many professional organizers then feel the pressure of being the sole person responsible for the success (or failure) of a campaign or strategy. 

Likewise, volunteer organizers who lead local party committees and Pride groups and mutual aid programs fall into the same trap of believing that they are ultimately responsible for holding all the strengths (and none of the weaknesses) listed above.

Trying to be more than one person is bad for everybody—not just the organizer.

This understandable tendency is poison to our movement. You simply can’t be more than one person. Yet we have a whole language to justify and valorize this sick behavior: “Our lead organizer is a superhero.” “At the end of the day, it’s up to me.” “My leaders have so much on their plates already. I can’t add anything.” “Do you even sleep?” Worst of all (and unsurprisingly), the brunt of these impossible expectations rest disproportionately on the shoulders of women, people of color, poor and working class people, and LGBTQ folks.

A good organizer is to an organization as a foot is to a body. If we’re lucky, each of us has what it takes to play a crucial role in an organizational body. From there, we can then choose to burn ourselves out or beat ourselves up for not also being a knee and a heart and a torso and a face… Or we can have fun seeking out that which will actually make us whole: other people, with other talents.

The Antidote

When COVID hit during the 2020 election season, our newly formed political machine called WV Can’t Wait was brought to its knees. We simply couldn’t safely execute the field strategy we had spent 18 months building.

Our field director (a Warrior) got on the phone to troubleshoot with me (a Mama Bear) and our campaign manager (a Perfectionist).

What emerged was a groundbreaking voter turnout model that combined mutual aid with careful, direct voter contact.

• I wondered aloud about how we could tap into our volunteers’ desires to be of service during the pandemic.
• Our campaign manager put up guardrails to keep volunteers safe, and sketched out a system for how our team could actually pull it off. 
• Our field director brought a sense of purpose and fight to the implementation.

We ultimately made history with a project that would have been too broad if it had been held by me, too narrow if it had been held by our campaign manager, and too bureaucratic if not for our field director. More likely than not, without the three of us leaning on one another, it just wouldn’t have happened at all.

The organizer’s calling is not to do everything ourselves; it is to find everyone we need.

Furthermore, trying to be more than one person is bad for everybody—not just the organizer. 

Every time I act like I am the single most important person—ultimately responsible for the group’s success or failure—I send a message that there isn’t room for the leadership, experimentation, or styles of other people in our organization. This, in turn, is bad for our organizations as a whole: they become less sturdy, vulnerable to an attack on (or the illness or departure of) one person. 

Worst of all, this practice is bad for our movement. When we sanctify and valorize our organizers, we dehumanize them. We make organizing seem like a job for high achievers only; “superheroes” who can manage the staff and run the campaigns and raise the money and dream big and plan small and pick a fight and stop that same fight and so on.

Pretending like this model is both desirable and possible robs us of the one key advantage we have over the rich and powerful: the fact that anyone can find a meaningful place in our movement. We also rob ourselves of the joy of organizing: being one part of a funky crew of comrades that’s capable of way more than we would be individually.

This is an invitation to see every one of our faults and gaps and weaknesses as a job description for our next comrade. It is an invitation to give ourselves permission to be nothing more than one magnificent, flawed, wild person.

The organizer’s calling is not to do everything ourselves; it is to find everyone we need. 

These are particularly cruel and unsettling times. Every single one of us is going to feel overwhelmed at some point; like we just aren’t enough. When that happens, we can choose to embrace that fact.

Of course each of us is not enough.

That is why we organize.

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Stephen Smith is a co-founder of WV Can’t Wait and the Rural Defenders Union, and teaches high school in West Virginia. Shout out to Celina Culver, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), who helped inspire this piece and contributed to early drafts.