Leadership

What role can volunteering and leaders of volunteer engagement play in developing future leaders? This Research to Practice reviews a new instrument developed specifically to help volunteer resource managers identify future leaders in their volunteer base.

Recognizing that many of the qualities that prompt individuals to volunteer are also qualities of leaders, leadership development researchers Janina Fuller and Curtis Friedel set out to develop a way to identify volunteers who had the desire and potential to develop as leaders. To do so, they conducted two surveys with volunteers from HandsOn Network affiliates across the U.S. The first survey aimed to understand volunteers’ perceived advantages and disadvantages of developing leadership as volunteers. The second survey posed questions to volunteers to capture leadership behaviors and intentions. As the authors write, “Organizations that purposefully recognize their volunteers’ leadership skills generate positive consequences not only for themselves and their volunteers, but also for the clients and the communities they serve.”

Good governance is the foundation of all successful nonprofit and membership organizations, and much has been written to help boards of directors do their work well. But most of the literature and available training about how to develop an effective volunteer board focuses only on groups large enough to have paid staff who handle day-to-day responsibilities. What about the thousands of all-volunteer organizations (AVOs), where the board is in charge of everything and paid employees are rare if nonexistent?

AVOs depend entirely on volunteers to be workers and board members. These leadership volunteers must ensure that by-laws are followed, money is well managed, and legal requirements are met—and also have to plan projects and motivate their many members! One familiar AVO category is friends groups—also known as auxiliaries, depending on the setting—that support hospitals, libraries, museums, parks, and cultural heritage institutions. And though these friends groups serve different institutions, many face the same struggles as they deal with organization management and leadership needed to guide and govern their associations.

This edition of Along the Web focuses on resources to help AVO board members deal with the fundamental issues facing AVO boards. While a few of these resources were developed for specific groups, such as libraries or museums, most deal with challenges that impact all AVOs, and can be useful regardless of your organization’s focus. 

When it comes to volunteer leadership, experienced volunteer manager Meridian Swift believes that two models dominate: reactive or proactive. But in this e-Volunteerism feature, Swift argues that it’s time to break the cycle of being a reactive volunteer manager – someone who waits for volunteer requests and then works hard to fulfill them – and ease into proactive volunteer management that anticipates needs and consistently networks with the decision-making staff.

“While reactive volunteer management will get the job done, proactive volunteer management frees us to take control and responsibility for volunteer services, to become creative, expand our circle of influence, have a hand in decision making and ultimately elevate ourselves within our organizations,” writes Swift. Through examples and additional insights, Swift outlines the way to proactive leadership for current and future volunteer leaders.

 

Think of how meaningful and useful it would be to peer inside the heart of every one of your volunteers – to understand what is important to them, what inspires them, what gets them excited, what taps into their passion, and what keeps them dedicated to your mission. Or you could gain insight into the factors that may diminish their enthusiasm or make them feel a little less jazzed about serving the cause. 

Sound like some crystal ball fantasy? It doesn’t have to be. Leaders in high-performing organizations are already doing this through what is called coaching, a form of leadership that sounds deceptively simple yet takes skill to do effectively and some practice to master.

In this feature article, author Barry Altland shows how dedicating time to engage in scheduled, ongoing, and meaningful conversations with longer-term volunteers reveals what is in their hearts that drives their choice to continue to serve. The key? Ask the right questions. Listen intently. Probe a little deeper than the occasional, casual hallway conversation allows. As Altland explains, this strategic, purposeful, and proactive time investment can and will make the difference in sustaining the engagement of more volunteers.       

In this Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews a study examining factors that influence volunteer satisfaction and volunteer contributions, defined as a combination of the number of programs involved in and the number of hours served. Specifically, the study looked at leadership style and volunteer motivations. Mook explains that motives that predicted volunteer satisfaction were different from those that predicted contributions, and that transformational leadership impacted satisfaction but not contributions. In other words, the most satisfied volunteers are not necessarily the ones making the most contributions to an organization’s mission.

Mook also reviews the implications of these findings for organizational administrators who are looking to increase the contributions of their volunteers.  

 

One of the most powerful things a volunteer can do is see a need and start trying to meet it. With enough passion and hard work, that initial maverick will attract other volunteers to the cause and a worthy organization will emerge and grow. That evolution might expand over time to raising money, hiring staff, and moving volunteers to governing boards and service-assisting positions. That’s the history of most of the institutions and organizations we take for granted today.

In this article, we introduce Stephanie Myers, a recent MPA (Masters in Public Administration) graduate at Villanova University in Villanova, PA. As readers soon learn, Myers is a decidedly determined young woman who is taking steps to try and change the world through her role as a volunteer and her dedication to a cause: the unrecognized – and therefore untreated – mental health issues among student athletes. To address these issues, Myers founded Mind4Athletes, Inc. (M4A), an organization so new that it doesn’t even have a Web site yet. In this article, we get to know Myers and her work, and discuss why and how she decided to form M4A.

In future stories published over the next months and years, we’ll revisit Myers and M4A to see how things are going. We hope this shared journey will give our volunteer management readers insight into how to support mavericks, Millennials, and dreamers like Myers.   

In this issue, guest author Emma Corrigan shares resources that enable volunteers to summarize meaningful information about their volunteering experience – and turn it into great material for their CVs or résumés. Corrigan, a Volunteer Coordinator for the housing and homelessness charity called Shelter in England and Scotland, presents this step-by-step activity as a way to support, thank and provide development for volunteers.

Granted, many volunteer resources managers do not necessarily see the daily, frontline work of volunteers – a reality that makes Corrigan’s training design all the more useful. Corrigan’s simple yet innovative design highlights how easily others in the organization can share responsibility for recognizing volunteers' contributions. And by helping volunteers turn their experiences into résumé-building narratives, Corrigan shows how an organization can provide a very individual "thank you" to each volunteer.