I’m often asked about the unique challenges of motivating a team of volunteers. How, in other words, do you get people to be fully engaged and accountable when you’re not dangling a paycheck in front of their noses? In a comment to an earlier post about Sleep Country USA, Michael Wagner gets it right when he says, “Even when people get paychecks they remain volunteers.”
Truth is, we’re all volunteers. If you’re my boss, you can command me to do my job. That’s your right. That’s what you’re paying for. But you can’t command me to love it.
In all situations public and private, paid or volunteered, salaried or hourly, we need to ask ourselves if we’re creating an environment where people “volunteer” their extra effort, heart, imagination, creativity, and passion to the “cause” at hand. Those are the “want-to’s” in a working relationship.
You can’t pay for those things; you can only inspire them.
I’m curious, then: what inspires you to love your work, to go the proverbial “beyond”? What inspires your own sense of volunteerism?
At our core, there is a desire to create – or help create – a difference, to count in a meaningful way.
As an individual volunteer, I look for opportunites to do just that. As a volunteer leader, I attempt to put others in a position to succeed in making such a difference.
Sometimes, that’s simply allowing them to use their imaginative thinking and share their ideas. For others, it’s getting their hands onto a project.
Find your/their passion. Develop the tools/space to quench the thirst. Allow the contagion to spread.
At our core, there is a desire to create – or help create – a difference, to count in a meaningful way.
As an individual volunteer, I look for opportunites to do just that. As a volunteer leader, I attempt to put others in a position to succeed in making such a difference.
Sometimes, that’s simply allowing them to use their imaginative thinking and share their ideas. For others, it’s getting their hands onto a project.
Find your/their passion. Develop the tools/space to quench the thirst. Allow the contagion to spread.
The caution on handling volunteers is slotting them into areas where they are talented (or where they want to develop talent) AND where their passions lie (as you put it in Radical Edge, their frequency). I’m active in church, and being raised in a church family, I’m very competent at many worship-related roles; however, just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I like to do it. Church leaders (and other volunteer leaders) will need to realize that they cannot burn out their volunteers on competence alone. Passion must also be there. Personally, as a board member of a professional association, I view my job as a “casting agent” of sorts: slotting the right person for the right role based on those two criteria. As you so adeptly put it, Steve: They can’t “amp” until they “tune.”
The caution on handling volunteers is slotting them into areas where they are talented (or where they want to develop talent) AND where their passions lie (as you put it in Radical Edge, their frequency). I’m active in church, and being raised in a church family, I’m very competent at many worship-related roles; however, just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I like to do it. Church leaders (and other volunteer leaders) will need to realize that they cannot burn out their volunteers on competence alone. Passion must also be there. Personally, as a board member of a professional association, I view my job as a “casting agent” of sorts: slotting the right person for the right role based on those two criteria. As you so adeptly put it, Steve: They can’t “amp” until they “tune.”