A Leadership Conundrum on working with volunteers

I was asked once to lead the Mel. Pr. Missionary Committee in my ward, and I accepted only after telling the leaders that they would have to accept my unorthodox view on the committees and my unorthodox approach.

In the first meeting (the last 15 minutes of the third hour meeting), I started by saying to everyone:

Why are these committees generally such a failure?

After getting the initial stunned looks and a few comments, I told them that I thought it was because we didn’t spend enough time on them (because we didn’t have enough time in the first place), we tried to tackle too many things, we came up with grandiose plans (or, in the case of the Missionary Committee, we simply acted as a wing of the Ward Mission and ended up doing administrative things for the WML) and we didn’t establish any unique things to do that were simple enough to accomplish. Therefore, my focus would be on nothing but community service, not for the sake of conversion, but simply for the sake of service. I told them the Ward Mission Leader could focus on “missionary work”; we would be focusing on sharing the Gospel – that he could build the kingdom of God and we could work to establish Zion. Service was something we could do without any angst, without a huge time commitment and without feeling like failures.

Volunteers generally want to do something fairly simple that makes them happy without creating more burdens and responsibilities in their already busy lives. Many leaders want to change the world or, at least, have a major, visible impact – and it isn’t always ego-driven. They just have a bigger vision, if you will, and more confidence in their ability to enact a bigger vision, than the worker bees so. They also tend to forget that the worker bees still need to fly all over the place for most of their available time to gather the honey they need to survive.

My advice:

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Take longer to do what you envision doing.

Respect volunteers as volunteers.

Give them tasks they can do and, through doing, feel and experience success.

Dark Jedi and Ray (and everyone) — I would like to explore this further — if you went through an orientation that included the kinds of points I made above — would you react by choosing not to participate, or by participating somewhat and leaving the committed people with the loose ends, or really throwing yourself into the work?

Part of me feels that your answers may be affected by the acceptance of mediocrity I think prevails in parts of our church experience (such as MP Missionary Committees). Also, the fact that people agree to do things because they were “called”, not because they were invited.

Also, i have a couple quotes that perhaps you could respond to with perceptions. This is from Leading without Power by Max Dupree and it focuses on non-profit and volunteer organizations.

A critical input into a vital volunteer organization is “What does the organization expect from people in the way of work? What is it that we expect from each other? Has it been expressed? Nobody is a mind-reader

Of questions good leaders ask of volunteers

What are you going to bring in terms of competence, contributions, and commitment to this project? I would gladly follow a leader who asks that kind of question. If I’m going to be an authentic member of a team, I’d like to know what’s expected of me, and I’d really like to have a leader ask me what I’m bringing to the game

or this one, about individual responsibility

Are you able and willing to change and to own your share of the problem? If you are going to be a leader who communicates carefully, you may not avoid this kind of question

And this one about accountability….

The building of trust in organizations requires leaders to hold the group accountable. This obligation has a special connection to trust and has gone without much attention. Organizations must teach themselves what to measure and then periodically evaluate their performance. While some of this may be done among peers, in the end, only the leader can hold the entire group — as a group — accountable. As a matter of experience, the group looks only to the leader to do this. When a leader is unable, or unwilling ..to hold the group accountable, she is guilty of a major betrayal of trust. I know of few things in otherwise fine organizations that will so quickly wither the spirit as the leader’s failure to hold the organization accountable. (By holding accountable, I do not mean blame. True accountability belongs to everyone. Blame does not belong in places of realized potential)

SilentDawning,

I only have a few general points to share. You may want to consider researching the topic of project management and what makes projects succeed or fail.

In my experience failures occur for a few main reasons:

Lack of clarify around scope – or a too ambitious scope

Unclear roles and responsibilties

Minutes not taken during meetings and not distributed afterwards

Action items from meetings not documented in minutes and not follow-ed up on

The leader has control over the first three and to a good extent over the fourth item.

Roy said that when the org’s expect his goals to become HIS goals, he walks. But in my case, we set broad priorities and allow the volunteers to set their own goals and projects that support those goals, subject to an approval and consultative revision process for the charter. So, they are THEIR goals.

I’m curious what you have to say about this….Roy and Ray and Dark Jedi and everyone. I guess I’m not willing to simply accept there is nothing I can do but accept that people are volunteers and therefore there is little I can do.

I guess I should clarify. Specifically, we were trying to hit a membership goal and I didn’t feel like pushing any of my friends or coworkers into joining the club. Does the club need more members? Yes. Is it my job to get new members? not particularly.

I’m ok with a minimum expectations. For our club it might be that they attend one meeting a month or give one speech per quarter. But those would truly need to be minimums. I don’t think you can put time in which they should return phone calls on minimum requirements.

I support meeting minutes and action items, if someone says that they will complete a task then they can expect to give an accounting of that task – but I think there is a fine line where people are guilted or made to look incompetant or are told that their contribution isn’t welcome because it isn’t big enough.

Just my $.02

SD – I hear, I think, what you are asking. On paper and in utopian living it sounds great. Real life though is different.

In my experience with volunteers of any kind – it’s the carrot that drives the commitment. Whether from a board member to a peon. Sometimes when I sign up to do something, my heart really does want to support it, I start out great, then suddenly life gets in the way. Before I know it, my own commitment to something I believe in, has dropped out/off.

Even with orientations etc. There is no guarantee, I won’t get sidelined – unless the carrot is enticing enough for me to not postpone my commitment.

I don’t know what the organization is, but when kids can lose opportunities, or afterlife blessings can be revoked or not granted, or your life depends on it – then you keep volunteers. Otherwise they will only do what they want to do and no more.

Good luck. It sounds like you have high hopes and expectations. I hope you find joy in the process, also.

Fwiw, my approach has nothing, absolutely nothing, to so with accepting mediocrity. It has everything to do with respecting the reality of the lives volunteers live.

SD, you have direct experience as a volunteer in the Church who felt pushed to do more than you could and were willing to do – so you have “walked away” from that level of volunteer commitment. All I’m saying is that it’s important to know your people well enough to ask only what they can give – perhaps everything they can give, but not more than that. Personally, if I’m going to make a mistake in how much I ask of volunteers, I want to err on their side not mine.

First, I’m going to keep disagreeing until I find my own medium on this — so bear with me….this is very engaging for me. Usually when there is this much disagreement, something changes in my perspective.

fwiw, my approach has nothing, absolutely nothing, to so with accepting mediocrity. It has everything to do with respecting the reality of the lives volunteers live.

My quest is for respect for the reality of the lives volunteers live, and a commitment to excellence at the same time. That is what I am searching for. No one has yet responded to the quotes earlier that speak to this dual, and competing objective. Once acheived, there will be truth in it.

SD, you have direct experience as a volunteer in the Church who felt pushed to do more than you could and were willing to do – so you have “walked away” from that level of volunteer commitment. All I’m saying is that it’s important to know your people well enough to ask only what they can give – perhaps everything they can give, but not more than that. Personally, if I’m going to make a mistake in how much I ask of volunteers, I want to err on their side not mine

To clarify on that one — it wasn’t that they asked more than i could give — it was their indifference when I finally asked for a release, they granted it, and then left me in the position for several months while everything decayed around me….and I suffered from a number of peace-shattering mental phenomenon. After serving pretty diligently for three years….it was the indifference that really got me.

Anyway, I welcome more perspectives, but overwhelmingly, it seems people think that in volunteer contexts, leaders have to accept that a lack of commitment keeping, follow through etcetera is a way of life that one must just accept. I would love to learn to embed the kind of respect you refer to Ray, while still having expectations — so both are respected, the volunteer, the volunteer leader, and the organization too…

Comments are welcome — and by the way, I am finding joy.

You’re talking about transformational leadership…and I understand it. At different times in my life, I have succeeded in that form of leadership that generates high levels of commitment. But I have found there has to be at least a minimum level of commitment – or at least, tasks people assume that match the time they commit to provide up front.

I hope that what I described earlier, about getting to know people’s time commitment and willingness up front, is not perceived as overbearing.

I hope to create a paper-based and online orientation (1/2 hour, tops) that descibes what i consider to be minimal standards of courtesy.

Although I know volunteers are not students, I did a pre-test post-test on their satisfaction with teamwork. When we established basic norms about how everyone was to work together, the satisfaction score (a net promoter score) with teamwork went way up — and it did so across multiple classes in both graduate and undergraduate. And the graduates were working adults, wise to the world, etcetera. I( think it could be adapted to volunteer contexts.

I am also encouraged in what I’m writing here by the quotes from Max Dupree I quoted earlier in the thread. His style of leadership is similar to what I aspire to….I’m surprised no one in this thread chose to comment on them as they are all about setting up expectations up front, holding groups accountable, etcetera.