I’ve spent a lot of time with Cynthia D’Amour’s book The Lazy Leader’s Guide to Outrageous Results, as I used it as a resource in preparing training sessions and playbooks for the Society for Information Management’s chapter leaders. Cynthia offers suggestions to volunteer leaders on how to get the most out of your volunteers. She contends that if you want to move the mission of the organization forward, you must embrace a team effort, rather than doing all the work yourself. As a leader you should be focused on developing people, rather than doing the work.
This year my son is a freshman on his high school basketball team, so as any good parent and association professional would, I got involved in the parents basketball association. The group is led by two very dedicated parents who have the best of intentions.
However, from the first meeting it has been almost laughable how many of the “what not to do’s” from Cynthia’s book have occurred. I figured I’d use the experience as a case study and blog about it. Below are a few tips from the book and the “what not to do’s” from my experience
Celebrate The Work of Others
"Your success will be about the work of others; not about you." At the first meeting of the year (and the first meeting ever for me and my fellow freshman parents) the president and vice president spent a good 5 minutes talking about how much work it was for them last year. They ended with a plea for someone to serve as secretary/treasurer. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a mad dash to the front of the room to volunteer after hearing how much work it was.
Let Go of Determining All the Tiny Details
"When you personally do all the work, the tiny-detail decisions matter. When you work with a team, others will want to put their fingerprints on the results. This includes making some decisions about the little things. Collectively, identify the must-haves and agree on parameters. The rest can be open to the interpretation of team members, which increases their sense of ownership and commitment to the team."
This has been the challenge they have struggled with the most. The association’s goal is to raise scholarship funds for the graduating seniors. Two of the ways we do that are concession stands at the games and a silent auction. For the silent auction, they want each family to create a basket, but rather than let us be creative, we were given a list of 20 baskets that we could choose from with every detail figured out. I won’t bore you with the whole list, but here’s the first three so you get a taste of what we are working with:
1. Spa/bath — slippers, candles, bath products, loofah, relaxing music cd, lotion
2. Family movie night — movie, candy, cracker jax, popcorn bins, popcorn, blanket
3. School supplies — pencils, pens, crayons, markers, glue, construction paper, ruler, paint, etc.
Can’t they trust us to come up with our own ideas? This almost made me not want to do anything.
Infuse Energy into the Experience of Volunteering
"Potential volunteers have tons of options for where they can spend their time. Part of their decision will be based on what it feels like to work with you. Your goal is to create an experience where people have fun and feel they got a lot of work done too."
This is basketball, it should be fun right? For the most part it is, but the freshman parents’ first concession stand experience didn’t really set the stage for it to be so. Over the holiday break there were tournaments taking place in the two gyms at our high school. The freshman parents were all sent down to the gym that had almost no concession traffic. We basically sat around watching paint dry while the games were going on. I wonder how many of the parents didn’t sign-up again after this snooze-fest.
Resist Encouraging Martyrdom in Your Team Members
"Too often struggling leaders talk about how hard they are working and all the time it's taking, and they chase volunteers away with the impression it's 110% volunteer effort or nothing. Be willing to take help where you can get it and welcome even those who only have a few hours to help."
The list of gift baskets above came less than 24 hours after they were asking for someone to take on the daunting and complex (based on their explanation) task of coordinating the baskets. When no one immediately jumped on the task, they took it on themselves. We are all busy, working parents, give us a minute to figure out how we might be able to take on this huge task, or maybe don’t make it seem like such a huge task in the first place!
"There will always be a few people who are willing to say 'yes' to anything you ask. Resist the temptation to dump everything on them. More involvement means more people committed to moving the organization forward."
A few weeks ago, we got an email saying “we seem to have the same families helping week after week. It would be a great help if we had some new faces helping out. If everyone helped, we would have a larger rotation of families and it wouldn't seem like such a burden to the same faces week after week.” Yet, in that same email they went on to list the concession stand sign-ups with those same families. They would likely have more success in engaging others if they reached out to just those families that haven’t volunteered yet, versus sending out a blanket request to everyone because those of us that are involved feel compelled to sign-up again.
Hopefully, you’ve gotten a few tips on motivating volunteers. If you embrace Cynthia’s lazy leader concepts, you:
- Won’t have to do all the work
- Will have more time to be strategic
- Won’t have to have all the answers all the time
- Will be giving the gift of involvement
- Will grow your leadership legacy
