If people buy-in to your mission enough, they will make time for you and your organization. One of the most difficult challenges in dealing with volunteers is them actually having the time to volunteer.
Many volunteers I know would volunteer full-time if their finances allowed them to do so. However, if a volunteer believes in the mission of you and your organization enough, he or she will always make the time to assist your efforts.
Steve Roesler, author of the All Things Workplace blog recently had a great post on People Building. Steve says the most important thing for an Executive Coach or Advisor is, "Seeing people for who they are, realizing what they can be, and helping to take them there."
For the last five weeks I’ve been working on a grant proposal to go to The Drucker Institute for A Day of Hope. One element of the grant requires that volunteers and I go interview some of the families who have received baskets from us in 2007. In order for me to train my volunteers on how to conduct these interviews, I first went out and performed a few interviews alone.
As I went out and interviewed these families, it was so refreshing to hear their stories of how our baskets helped them in times that they needed it. To see their faces light up when they talked about the idea of giving a basket to someone else someday was inspiring and rewarding.
Sometimes as the leaders of organizations and programs we get so detached from the great hands-on work that is happening, it’s easy to loose sight of what we are working so hard for and towards.
One my favorite days at United Way was when we took half a day to volunteer at one of the organizations that we provide funding for. We were able to see first hand what the programs we were funding were doing, and we had the pleasure of seeing lives changed.
As a leader set aside some time on your calendar to do some direct service. Whether it’s within your own organization, or direct service for another organization, it will be very beneficial for you. Get away from the emails and RFPs so you can see some of the great work going on in your own community. Not because you have to, because it’s so refreshing and energizing.
A topic that I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to lately is the topic of how to develop the people I lead into leaders. Basically I’m trying to find ways to turn everyday good-hearted volunteers into all-star leaders who can really grow and develop A Day of Hope.
What are your thoughts for this topic? I don’t have a lot to write and coach you on this, because I haven’t really mastered it yet myself. Any advice that you have on mentoring and developing other people as leaders would be greatly appreciated.
I had a random thought the other day that a blog is like a devotional. I guess it isn’t ‘like’ a devotional, I guess it ‘is’ a devotional. Most print devotionals contain between 200 and 400 hundred words for each day, which is the average amount of words for most blog posts.
Most devotionals are faith based, which I’m a big fan of, but with a blog it can be a devotional on anything from marketing, business networking, fundraising, information technology, leadership, or social networking.
Naturally, this blog is a devotional for the hard working nonprofit leaders who are in the trenches everyday making a difference. This is a devotional for you, and as a leader it’s my responsibility to show up and give 100 percent of my best effort to serve you.
One of my favorite presenters from this year’s Maximum Impact Simulcast (MIS) was Kevin Carroll. Mr. Carroll presented a great idea to have Olympic themed “game days” at organizations as a way to boost creativity and encourage play at work.
At our local United Way we already have Game Days once a month, so our COO and I worked together to create the United Way "Unique" Olympics. Below are some pictures of month one, from our three month long United Way "Unique" Olympics. I’m not in any of the pictures because I was holding the Camera (thanks Jason), but my teammate and I are in first place. Our team name is “Go for the Gold!”
Pictures are below, and I will keep you updated on what happens with next month’s Table Tennis Tournament!
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| United Way "Unique" Olympics - Month one |
In May I implemented a new principle with all volunteers who decide to dedicate their time to A Day of Hope. I always want to make sure I develop all my volunteers so that they have a great understanding and feel for what A Day of Hope has done in the past, and what we’re working towards in the future. I’ve also been looking for ways I can use our volunteers in areas that they can contribute and help the most. Areas where they can use their natural strengths and talents to help us feed as many families as possible.
So I started sitting down with all new volunteers for an Enter Interview. This is about a two hour process where I spend time with them one-to-one For the Enter Interview I have three objectives; 1) To get to know the person as a person; 2) Get to know their strengths and weaknesses, and; 3) To share with them my vision of A Day of Hope and how they fit into that vision.
You might be surprised to find out that I spend most of the time in the Enter Interviews listening. It’s not about me talking about how great I am, or what we have accomplished as a program. I believe it’s important for new volunteers to know about history, but it’s not the main reason for the Enter Interview. The Enter Interview consists mostly of me asking questions for awhile, listening to the volunteer’s responses, and then sharing my vision after I have the understanding of who they are.
Here is a list of questions that I ask new volunteers:
1. What are you passionate about?
2. What are your strengths?
3. What are you not passionate about?
4. What are your weaknesses?
5. What do you believe you can contribute to A Day of Hope?
6. How can I as a leader keep you in your area of passion and strength?
7. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Very simple stuff that takes a long time to discover. The Enter Interview is my time to learn about the new volunteer and see how he or she fits into the mission and goals of A Day of Hope. This is also my way of learning to put people in, and keep them in the areas that they are talented and strong in.
For me, I know my strengths are in leadership, teambuilding, relationships, and fundraising. I do everything I can to spend as much time as possible in these four areas. For one of our team leaders, John, he is great with accounting and numbers. He’s very organized and he does a great job of keeping track of our money and making sure it’s all deposited and accounted for. Sarah is great at being creative and developing marketing materials. She makes all the flyers, brochures, and pictures. Lydia is one of those people who has the ability to make things happen. She takes initiative and does what needs to be done to make sure the bottom line is met. If I have a task or job with a lot of responsibility, I can always count on Lydia to make sure that it gets done. Nasr is very tech savvy and is great at working with technology and adding fresh ideas for us. My newest volunteer Joelle, is great with creative thinking and branding. She is learning about marketing and how to craft messages to appeal to online readers and local people in our community.
As a leader, I didn’t learn these qualities and traits about my team from being a clairvoyant mind reader. I had to sit down with them one-to-one and ask them the questions that I’ve listed above.
Often times I feel leaders are so eager to share their vision and their goals with their team that they forget to listen to their team to find out their strengths and weaknesses. Taking time to learn about the new and experienced people of your organization is essential to your success as a leader when you want to find and discover the strengths and talents of the people you lead.
As a leader, you are responsible to:
While on my recent trip to LA for some training, a friend lent me her Garmin GPS to help me navigate there and back. Anxious to use the tool before my trip, I tested the GPS while driving to a my local church. When I headed towards church I noticed the GPS was taking me a different way than I usually go.
When I go to church I naturally take the route that I think is the fastest. When the GPS was guiding me to church it was naturally taking me the route it thought was the fastest.
So, I had a difficult decision to make. I could take the route I usually go which I thought was the fastest, or I could take the route that the GPS chose, which it thought was the fastest. Obviously, I chose the route the GPS picked based on the fact that it has more knowledge about traveling than I do (not mention that I’m terrible with directions).
I believe that a similar situation happens with leaders when they begin working at a new organization. When a new leader comes to an organization he brings a fresh perspective; often with fresh new ideas on new things to do, and new creative ways to do old things.
This often causes problems when a new leader joins an organization. Usually employees have been doing their job a certain way very repetitive for years, and a leader comes along side them and suggests a new and different way. I’ve found that the longer a person has been doing their job a specific way for the same organization, the longer and harder it will take for you to help them change.
There are many ways to solve the problems that this creates, but I wanted to point out what happens when new experienced leaders join organizations. How to solve this problem will probably be the topic of a future post, but for now I at least wanted to point out this principle for you to notice within your own organization.
I recently re-read one of my old books, The Winner Within written by basketball coach Pat Riley. Coach Riley will be hailed as one of the all-time greatest NBA coaches in history. He has led his teams to over 1,100 regular season wins, seven NBA Championship rings, five of which have been as a Head Coach.
While re-reading his book a couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a great story that illustrates the servanthood of great leaders. Pat talks about how he used to make every effort possible to serve the needs of his players while they were on the road traveling to basketball games. Many of the players had families that they missed very much, and Pat wanted to make them feel comfortable and relaxed in an effort for the players to play their very best basketball.
He would have his staff purchase colored towels for his players to use in hotel rooms (instead of the boring white towels), arrange for private catered buffets so the players wouldn’t have to leave the hotel, and he would have many movies available for the players to watch when they weren’t playing in games, practicing, or exercising.
After telling the story Coach Riley commented, “Some people may think that this should be the work of a social director, but for me it’s a touch of leadership with a clear goal. And it isn’t blackmail or bribery. It’s giving the warriors everything that they need to go into battle, because that is what the warriors deserve.”
When I first started to study leadership I would hear great leaders say, “The essence of leadership is servanthood” or “Leadership is nothing but servanthood.” For a long time I never really understood that statement and it wasn’t until I started serving the basic needs of my team that I felt the true effect of servanthood and it’s power to improve me as a leader.
I learned that serving is a great catalyst to set an example for the people you lead. When you focusing on serving their basic needs, they are naturally going to start to serve you in return.
OK, after a lot of hard work and even more learning my first ebook is finished (well, almost finished).
I'm still playing with ways to post the content online, and I need to find better software to convert Microsoft Word documents to PDFs. This is the link for now, Young Leadership: How a young person can make a differenece in his organization and community.
Sometime in July I'm probably going to start selling the ebook, but for now it's offered to you for free. So print it out, make copies, or email it to colleagues.
The Favor Bank is an account that leaders use to ask other people for favors. It’s something they have to invest in over time, and withdraw from when they need favors from other people.
It’s when you have a key meeting that your organization needs to attend, but you’re unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict, so you ask someone else to attend for you (also known as a proxy). Or when you ask a friend to introduce you to a wealthy person who has the potential to support your organization. Those are both examples of times I’ve used the Favor Bank as a leader.
Here are three tips for adding to the favor bank:
written by John C. Maxwell and Dr. Les Perrott. The rule says to give someone a sincere and genuine compliment within 30 seconds of meeting with or seeing that person. This is my all-time favorite and most effective relationship building principle that I practice every single day.I want to point out that it takes a lot more time and effort to add to the favor bank than it takes to make withdrawals. There have been times when I spent eight months adding to someone’s favor bank, only to ask for a big favor that he was able to help me with.
Make a note of this invisible principle, and use it to your advantage in the future.
A friend recently emailed me the following questions to help him with some marketing he's doing for me. I figured I would share the answers with my readers.
Writing this has inspired me to interview other leaders, so if you feel that you're worthy of an interview on my Nonprofit Leadership Blog, drop me a note and we can make it happen.
Most of the leadership experience that I have is based in the nonprofit sector working with volunteers. A majority of these individuals have had a sincere and caring heart who want to help people and are always glad to offer their time for free.
This has been the filter that all my leadership experience, knowledge, and teaching has come through. I will be honest and admit that this past January I was given a wake up call to different styles of leadership because I had to learn to lead different people differently.
A major element in our Maximum Impact seminar in April was selling tickets for the event. In order to make the event happen, we needed to sell a certain amount of tickets to pay for the food, sodas, hosting fee, electricity, equipment, and other stuff that had to be paid for. So I recruited six business professionals from the community for one specific task: To sell tickets.
I had these six professionals do nothing else but sell tickets, and I made that very clear to them several times. There were two additional teams working on the audio/visual set-up equipment, and working on the food for the event. However, I let these business professionals know that they didn’t need to worry about what those other two teams were doing. Their job was to sell tickets to the event, and nothing else.
As I spent four months preparing for the event I learned about the major differences in leading the business professionals, versus leading volunteers. Their reasons for helping with the event and their motivation was very different. They were motivated by recognition, feelings of significance, money, and wanting to fulfill their self interests. Very different from the volunteers I lead on a day-to-day basis who simply want to make a small difference in the world.
I had to take a step back to listen to each of their individual needs and desires. Then it was my job as a leader to serve them in a way that met those needs, and in a way that motivated them to sell tickets.
Many of the leadership principles I used on the business professionals were the same as what I use for volunteers, but how I used them was the difference.
When leading people you need to realize that different people need to be led differently. They need to be led in a way that fulfills their needs and makes them feel good.
In 2007 at the Maximum Impact seminar I had the pleasure of watching Tim Sanders speak. I still remember Tim saying his mission was to, "Participate in the end of suffering" which I felt was very inspiring.
Today on his blog he has some great insight into what he calls the "Cash Cow." The Cash Cow is something that pays the bills and makes money.
After reading I could easily relate the Cash Cow to nonprofit fundraising. I feel that it's a nonprofit leader's job to recognize what area the Cash Cow is for her organization, and make sure that area is sufficiently invested in by both time and resources.
For A Day of Hope our cash cow is small grant money from the local Rotary, Kiwanis Club, and groups at the local University. It's my job to make sure I develop relationships with members of those groups (which I failed to do one year) to ensure we have the best chance of receiving a donation every year.
What's your Cash Cow?
Today at 9am PST (June 16th, 2008), Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate will be playing head-to-head for our nations most prestigious golf title, the United States Open (also known as the U.S. Open).
I've been a fan of golf since about 1996 and I've enjoyed watching Tiger Woods grow up and develop as a golfer. Some readers might already know that I played golf on scholarship while in college. I won't have too many people argue with me when I say Tiger is the greatest golfer to have ever lived.
I also want to point out that Tiger is truly a leader for his sport. He was one of the first players to begin exercising to improve his game. Golf was always seen as a "sissy sport" by many spectators and athletes of other sports in the early 1990s. If you take a look at Tiger's body, I would put his strength against many NFL Wide Receivers, Baseball Outfielders, and NBA Forwards. His dedication to strength and endurance training has influenced hundreds of his fellow professional golfers to begin exercising in an effort to improve their golf game.
He was the first player to sign a sports contract with a non-golf industry company you might have heard of called, Nike. At the time Nike didn't even really make golf shoes, now they make shoes, clubs, balls, and gloves. Not to mention several other players who also use Nike equipment now that Tiger was the first to start using it.
Many of the new golf courses being built are now longer than ever. This is due to Tiger's influence of driving the ball extremely long off the tee, but with less accuracy. Many golfers would spend hours on the practice range working to hit their drives straight, but Tiger changed that into focusing on more distance and less accuracy.
As Tiger chases down history today to win his third U.S. Open Championship and fourteenth major, take a moment to think about how you as a leader can be someone who is first to try new things and generate new ideas about how to do what you do.
Photo credit to Minds Eye.
Currently I have two official mentors in my life. One is a mentor for achievement and life skills, the other is a mentor for me specifically on leadership. Both relationships have been extremely valuable in my growth as a leader.
In an effort to help young leaders who want the benefits of a mentoring relationship, I’ve put together a list of four things I believe will help people who want to be mentored:
Mentors often can help us get where we want to go faster because they have already been there. They have their map for success that will help us in our journey.
To learn more on mentoring, take a look at my post, Who Needs a Mentor?
I'm very thankful for a kind reader who sent me this link, http://www.jobprofiles.org/library/guidance/managers-handbook-80-opencourseware-collections.htm.
The site has links to many great leadership slide shows, videos, and MIT classes.
Enjoy. . .
If you're a regular reader of this blog you probably noticed that the frequency of my new posts slowed down over the last two weeks.
The truth is that I had a small injury to my arm that kept me from working for about two weeks.
After a lot of rest I'm back to working hard and I have some great new content that I can't wait to share with you very soon.
Just a quick note to let you know my ebook, Young Leadership: How a young person can make a difference in his organization and community is almost finished. Right now I'm working to find the easiest way to host the document on the internet.
Leadership is a choice. It’s a choice that you don’t have control over. The people you lead chose whether they want to follow you and support your vision, or they chose to not follow your vision.
If a leader demands that his people follow him and support his vision, that’s not leadership-that’s dictatorship.
Be a leader who is someone that makes it easy for other people to choose to follow and support you. Make it easy for them to make that choice.
Recently I was given the Community Services Award from the United Way of Stanislaus County for outstanding community service supporting United Way and it’s partner agencies.
I’ve never been someone who is big on trophies and awards, but being recognized every once in a while feels good. When you put your head down, work hard, and only worry about your outcome, sometimes it can be frustrating and challenging.
Every once in a while it’s nice to know that people appreciate and recognize your hard work.
After this event I learned a lot about how I need to recognize the people in my own organization for their hard work. I suggest you do the same. You don’t have to give them a big fancy award in front of 300 people. Take five minutes, ask the person to come into your office, shut the door, and let the person know how much you appreciate him and acknowledge his hard work.
I know I will be doing this more in the future, and hope you find the time to do the same.
In Dr. Normal Vincent Peale's best-selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking
As a leader you already know that problems are a normal part of every day life.
Leadership expert Mark Sanborn has a great perspective on problems that he recently shared on his blog.
It's worth a read.
A leader is needed during difficult times. He’s needed when the road gets bumpy and people start getting off the bus.
I’ve been involved the last several months with the local homeless shelter crisis that’s happened in our city of Turlock. After hours and hours of meetings, I realized what we needed was a strong leader with the following characteristics:
To be honest with you, I would love to have been the leader who led the effort dealing with our homeless shelter issue.
However, I don’t have item #2 mastered, so I was disqualified from being that leader. When it comes to nonprofit leaders, they’ve got to have the whole package—you can’t have one part and not the other.
There are thousands of books and research studies on negotiations. I have only read a few, but I want to tell you the negotiation story for our Maximum Impact seminar last month.
If you’re a regular reader you know Maximum Impact is a one day leadership seminar that I led our church back in April. I didn’t speak at the event but we had nine other speakers who talked about about leadership, teamwork, motivation, and attitude.
For almost three weeks I had been working and communicating with the local Christian radio station to do some promotion on air. While going through the negotiation process of how we would work out the promotion, the topic came up that they might not be able to promote the event on their radio station because of their licensing agreements.
To be honest, it was bad news. This is one of the most popular radio stations in our area, and it would have given us a large amount of exposure for the event.
If any other person would have been given this bad news, they would have tried to convince the radio station why they should still promote the event, tell them their reasons, and maybe even suggest that they bend the rules a little bit.
My response was, “Well Ken, I only want to do this event if it’s beneficial for both of us. And I definitely don’t want to promote this event on your radio station if it’s something that’s going to get you in trouble.” Basically, I gave him permission to tell me “no.”
But he didn’t. After I said expressed my opinion he realized I was on his side, that I wanted what was best for him, and that I wasn’t going to do something to manipulate him in any way. He knew that we were on the same team.
As a result, he approached his manager and went-to-bat for me. He made my argument to his manager explaining why he believed this promotion was beneficial for their radio station.
So, what happened? I ended up going on the air with him on his morning show to talk about the event, and they ran public service announcements for us every hour for five days before the seminar.
In the negotiations that I’ve been involved in before, I’ve learned that as a leader the most important and successful negotiation tactic is to let the other person know that you want what is best for him. When you communicate with him that you only want to make a deal if it’s going to benefit both of you; you open up the communication lines to find an agreement beneficial for both of you.
I recently spent three hours with one of my mentors, Dorothy Ann Skarles
While at our meeting I learned two principles of writing that also apply to leadership. Let me explain:
