Leadership with Volunteers

In many organizations, volunteers provide much of the day-to-day work towards the group’s goals. Managing volunteers is different from managing staff in important ways. The most obvious is that there are economic promises and threats either explicit or implicit in employment situations.

In too many organizations, tolerating poor performance from volunteers is the norm. Those who are in paid and unpaid positions managing volunteers tend to think that if those doing the tasks are volunteers, there’s literally “nothing we can do” to improve volunteer performance because we have to “keep them happy.”

On the contrary: learning how to manage volunteers will result not only in more effective progress towards the group’s goals, but happier volunteers. Nobody really is happy about doing a poor job, are they?

And, as a bonus: in organizations with staff, many of the same lessons about developing and managing volunteers translates into better staff performance. Why? Because when leaders treat staff as if they had a choice about doing their work, leaders are more likely to elicit enthusiasm and effectiveness voluntarily. And besides, in many job markets today, staff members can leave jobs with lousy, arbitrary, authoritarian managers, and look for other jobs — just like volunteers can say “no, thanks.”

One key aspect of managing volunteers is helping them develop the skills to do their tasks well. This works in the obvious and direct way. There’s also an indirect benefit: if volunteering in your organization can also translate to more effective work skills in paid employment, being a volunteer for your group becomes very attractive!

Here’s one book I’ve found that has good ideas for helping volunteers to develop the skills they need for their volunteer work: Leadership Skills: Developing Volunteers for Organizational Success