Acronym

In an earlier post, Peggy talked about how c-sixes are different from c-threes when it comes to the issue of volunteer management. C-threes are much more apt to have a thought-out process for volunteer management, and to discuss volunteer management explicitly among staff and leadership. C-sixes are less likely to have a plan, even though trade and professional groups are equally dependent on the work products of members donating their time. I’ve looked at a lot of leadership training programs in my tenure as a chapter relations person and the issue is generally in the background, left for people to infer.

This is a complicated issue: leaders don’t like to think about themselves as just “volunteers.” Although staff people see the value in this word as a term of art, people in most industries think it means something you do in a soup kitchen—not in a boardroom. So, for political reasons staff might beat around the bush as a shortcut for the education and persuasion they’d have to do otherwise.

You also have to sell volunteer leaders on the importance of leadership development. As leadership progresses through the ranks, they may forget their days when they were lower down on the totem pole. They forget to put themselves in the shoes of the newer leaders. A conscientious staff can help with this problem, but with limited success unless the volunteer leadership truly gets it.

Another problem is the audience. In a national or other parent organization’s efforts to develop its leaders, we’re training the trainer—training volunteers who will then train other volunteers at the component or local level. Sometimes when preparing leadership development programs, we forget that at headquarters we’re teaching our folks to go out and lead others, not necessarily how to do everything themselves. Staff, committees, leadership and so forth sometimes make a hash out of their chance to communicate with this group by coming at leaders with information that is clearly out of context for their interlocutors.

My take is that we should be explicitly talking about volunteer management to our leaders and future leaders. We should work through the challenges and figure out how to meet them and still get the job done. We should contextualize our training to help volunteer leaders help other volunteers. (Some principles can be found here in the seminal article by yours truly.)

How does your organization handle this? If you are a national organization, are you in a position to help volunteers help other volunteers? If so, how? Let me know in the comments, I’m interested …