It’s the people that make it for me.
What keeps me in Volunteer Management?
What is it about the career that I love so much? It’s the people for me. The volunteers. I’ll expand on that another day.
I speak often about management. In terms of moving forward with Volunteer Management I have often spoken about looking at leadership or examining leadership.
While I have argued and will continue to argue that we need to learn some lessons from HR Management I still believe that they, one day, will look towards Volunteer Management for tips and tactics and inspiration!
I want our sector to communicate more with managers from other sectors.
Shared wisdom can be a learning experience.
I had a good conversation with a volunteer recently...Which has inspired this blog.
How difficult must it be to manage people who dislike their paid job or the place wherein they are employed? How many of you have managed this situation or indeed those people?
When we translate this issue to volunteer management what do we get?
Can you picture a volunteer who doesn’t like their volunteering role or the place where they volunteer?
What are our assumed assumptions in regards to this scenario? Or our assumed constraints?
Do we assume that if they don’t like volunteering in our organisations that they will just up and go?
Do we make too many assumptions on the differences between paid and volunteer contributors?
Staff member – ‘I can’t stand this job, the people I work with, the manager and the organisation but I need the money to pay the bills”
Volunteer - ‘I can’t stand this role, the people I volunteer with, the manager and the organisation but I need … … … …”
When we take out the money equation as we must do then I ask if there is something we can add from a volunteering perspective to the volunteering statement.
Or do we believe that all of our volunteers are immensely happy in their roles, happy with us and our organisations simply because they are still with us?
Please discuss under 500 words!
Now speaking and working on Mindfulness, Mindful leadership and advanced volunteer leadership.
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ReplyDelete1. to feel needed.
2. the social interaction because this is the only contact that I have with other people.
3. to support my children’s school, sporting group etc because no one else is putting their hand up.
4. to do something to keep active both physically and mentally and to be challenged.
These are just a sample of some of the possible endings to the above statement.
I found myself in a situation where I was not enjoying the volunteering experience in my children’s sporting organization. I continued with my volunteering role to support my children and their teammates however, because of constant criticism and the negative culture of the organization I eventually withdrew my volunteer assistance. Despite the negative culture, I made associations with like minded parents and we supported each other in our volunteer roles.