As I mentioned in a blog post last month, I’m delving into nonprofit leadership and I promised to share my thoughts with you. Today, I’m pondering what skilled volunteers need from nonprofit leadership to be successful.
Volunteers Want More
If today’s volunteers are anything, they’re pragmatic. Just listen to those who were interviewed for this recent New York Times article. One of the key reasons they volunteer is because they want to use and expand their skill sets while they are making a difference in the world. In a struggling economy, volunteer experience makes applicants more marketable to employers. And, it’s a win-win for nonprofits who are ready to take advantage of the skills they have to offer. But what specific leadership skills are needed to inspire these kinds of volunteers?
Shared Leadership May Be a Solution
For many skilled volunteers, helping out with mundane tasks around the office isn’t going to add to their resume. It also won’t promote their own sense of accomplishment. Likewise, being assigned through a vertical, top down approach isn’t likely to appeal either. Skilled volunteers want a higher level of responsibility. They want to be included in the decision-making, and they want to have a fair amount of autonomy as to how they complete their assignments.
Does our top-down management style really mesh well with this new reality? Perhaps a new model of shared leadership might help.
What is Shared Leadership?
In “Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership,” shared leadership is defined as a “dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of a group or organizational goals.” The distinction between more traditional hierarchical models of leadership and shared leadership, researcher and author Jay Conger explains lies in decentralization, “Leadership is broadly distributed among a set of individuals instead of centralized in hands of a single individual who acts in the role of superior.”
It’s a huge paradigm shift to be sure. It means transferring real power from the few to the many. And, it brings up all kinds of questions about accountability, productivity, and identity. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of case studies to choose from. Research literature about shared leadership is abundant in the education sector. Not so for nonprofits. But, I think it’s worth looking into. If we are interesting in transitioning to shared leadership, what best practices can we adapt from others? And, what new skills will our volunteer managers need to hone? Below are a few to get us started.
Shared Leadership Skills for Volunteer Managers
- Listening -- An oft overused term, listening isn’t just about individual conversations. How do we better “hear” our stakeholders at all levels, though a variety of media. If we learn to listen, we’ll be better able to make decisions that are best for the common good.
- Consulting Widely -- A second cousin to listening, consulting with a wide swath of sage experts and observant novices, can bring a tremendous amount of clarity to a decision. If consensus can’t be reached, in the end someone must decide, but if many ideas and solutions are aired, the decision can be said to be shared.
- Tolerating Ambiguity -- The more cooks in the kitchen, the more complicated the broth. Chaos is inherent in broad collaborations and has to be managed to some extent. At the same time, leaders have to develop the courage to live with ambiguity as issues are sorted out.
- Speaking for the Team as a Whole -- As the saying goes, there’s no “I” in Team. When authority is truly shared, team members are unlikely to defer responsibility to others. And, members share a group, versus individual identity. Items that affect the common good take precedence over individual priorities.
These are only a few skills that leaders throughout an organization would need to develop to be successful.
Do you think shared leadership is possible at your organization? Why or why not? Share your thoughts with us.
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