We know that social impact leaders tend to be risk adverse. Boards are cautious with budgets and policies; EDs are careful around screening and communication. It can sometimes feel that all our leaders are scared of “rocking the boat.” Which leads to the question: when was the last time you did?
Complacency is dangerous. Maintaining the status quo means that we aren’t evolving. All of our programs could be better if we took some risks and shook things up a bit. Below is a handful of ways you could do that.
-
Refuse well-meaning but ineffective corporate partnership offers.
There can be significant drawbacks to having a corporate team come in to help for a day. If you don’t already have mission-driven work that an untrained team can do, having them there simply means spending valuable time and resources giving a for-profit company a free team-building experience. If you wouldn’t have recruited a regular volunteer to do the task, don’t accept the extra work of having an outside team do it.
-
Fire unreliable or toxic volunteers.
Many organisations tolerate poor volunteer behaviour because they feel that it’s better to have a poor volunteer in a role than no one at all. And that is flat out wrong. A volunteer who regularly shows up late – or not at all – gives permission to other volunteers to do the same. Bigoted volunteers, or those who are rude, drive other volunteers away, meaning you end up with fewer volunteers than you would if you’d fired the bad apple. Rocking the boat means holding volunteers to appropriately high standards. Check out this previous blog post if you want to know how to go about it.
-
Give volunteers real decision-making power.
Even after numerous articles by highly-respected practitioners in the field, too many organisations still treat volunteers as nothing more than menial labour. Hate to tell you, but most of them are experienced, intelligent adults, who may hold or have held powerful, decision-making roles in their professional careers. Harness that! Have volunteers help co-design mission initiatives, give suggestions for improving the volunteer program, even lead programs themselves. In Dan Pink’s TED talk, “The Puzzle of Motivation” he shows that one of the key drivers to motivation is autonomy. So give them some! You might be surprised at what they come up with.
- Let
volunteers fire the organisation’s leaders (360 feedback with teeth).
Okay, maybe not fire, but certainly it can be a good idea to flip the power dynamic and provide volunteers with the opportunity to formally evaluate the organisation’s leadership, with specific, documented consequences for poor performance. This gives you and your higher-ups the opportunity to see how leadership decisions are landing with the people that are affected by them. This, obviously, would need to be set up carefully to ensure objectivity, and to ensure that consequences are actually enforced. A ED who cuts the volunteer budget might have to fill a shift for a while??
-
Eliminate your “volunteer of the year” award.
This one takes a real mind shift. I first started thinking about this when I was listening to Faiza Venzant on Rob Jackson’s podcast, Advancing the Profession (Season 1, Episode 8), who made a comment that in colonialised countries “volunteerism is based on values of individualism and recognition … so right away you are valuing one over the community”. Now, this may be an unpopular comment, but volunteers aren’t the heart of our organisations. The cause is. We recruit volunteers to support the mission, not to improve their well-being. That’s a wonderful byproduct, but it’s not why they’re there. And when you highlight a single volunteer as “better” than the others, even if you don’t mean it that way, it can make some volunteers feel that they will never live up to the standard that you seem to have set. Start rocking the boat in your volunteer program by focusing recognition on team impact rather than individual contributions.
-
Stop measuring success by retention.
Question the assumption that the longer a volunteer sticks around the more valuable they are. The fact is that some long-tenured volunteers are more hassle than they’re worth (see #2). “Old guard” volunteers are notorious for thinking that they own the mission, and lording it over other, newer, volunteers. Also, some causes are better served by high-intensity, short-term engagement. It shouldn’t surprise you that I say that; you all know I’m a fan of micro-volunteering! It’s okay, and sometimes actually better, to have volunteers come and go. That’s part of the reason why boards often (should!) have term limits. We need to bring in new ideas and perspectives to keep growing.
So. Those are a few of my ideas for rocking the boat in your volunteer program.
I understand, none of these are easy, and certainly none of them are comfortable. If we’re asking our executives and boards to start taking risks, though, we should be willing to do the same. Have fun!
