The Challenge of Managing Volunteers

Managing a team of people is challenging, fun and rewarding. You need to give them guidance, set goals and deliverables, provide feedback and foster a top notch culture. If someone on the team isn’t living up to the expectations of their role, they risk losing their job and income. Losing the income from a job is key… many people fear it and this sometimes helps motivate them to perform. But what happens when we take money out of the equation… what about managing volunteers?

Volunteers are likely choosing to be a part of the organization, but many times they do not NEED to be there. They have other commitments to balance and sometimes your team doesn’t get first priority. This requires creativity from the manager to motivate their team to be as loyal to the volunteer opportunity as they are to a paid position. Below are some strategies I use at the NU Entrepreneurs Club:

1. Foster the passion

People are motivated to perform when they are passionate about what they are doing. From a management perspective, this means having a deep understanding of the people on your team and finding roles and responsibilities that align with their passions. Asking the computer wiz to volunteer to take on customer service activities might not work too well. 

2. Pay in experience

This holds true especially for student volunteers. Students are constantly looking for new experiences to add to their resume and have as success stories to share during interviews. Provide your volunteer teammates with valuable experience and real responsibility so they can learn. Education and training is highly valuable and in the right scenario can be an excellent form of compensation.

3. Rock the culture

People want to be in an organization with a culture that fits their values. At the Entrepreneurs Club, that culture is based around open doors, transparency, dedication and accountability, among others. Each organization will have its own unique culture, but it must be comfortable and supportive for your team if you want them to keep coming back.

4. Make it fun and interesting

Volunteering is on my own time, so I will likely opt to do something that I actually enjoy. Consider how you can blend the lines between work and fun in your organization. At marketing firm Influences@, my friend Spencer Bramson conducts meetings in a McDonald’s style ball pit and has an entire wall of Nerf guns. Needless to say, I enjoyed my meeting in his office. Perhaps for other organizations it is trips or getting to interact with really interesting customers, or free stuff.

5. Enable ownership

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people care more about their own stuff then they do about yours. When a person owns something, they feel a deeper attachment to it and are more likely to put in the effort necessary to make it great. This translates to having your volunteers take real ownership over projects or facets of the organization.

CEO is a Lonely Title

Last year, I served as the Director of our largest program at the Entrepreneurs Club, the Husky Startup Challenge, in addition to being the interim Vice President of the organization. I had the honor of working directly under Aaron Gerry, who was President last year and graduated in May 2011. During that year, Aaron served as a mentor and guide for me. I looked up to him and depended on him when I needed help or got stuck with a problem… and he was always there for me.

Having someone there for you is the key here - you get that privilege as a VP, a manager, an assistant or as an employee. You have a boss that you can defer to for big decisions, and who is responsible for you if you make a mistake. 

Well fast forward a year and I was promoted to President. I was beside myself with joy and excitement. Finally, I got to set the vision, lead a group of my peers and architect the building of something great at Northeastern. As I settled into the role, I suddenly realized, “Oh wow, Aaron isn’t here anymore.” And it was then that I realized how much I leaned on Aaron the year before. Because if I messed up, it was Aaron’s problem. If I missed a deadline or couldn’t figure something out, it was Aaron who had to pick up the slack. Now, things are very different. If I mess up, it is my problem. And if any single person on my team messes up, it is my problem. If something doesn’t get done, guess who has to do it? 

I didn’t understand it at all until this year, and I couldn’t understand it until I had the honor of being in the top role in an organization. As the President or CEO, you have to worry about everything, because you are ultimately responsible for everything. Instead of a budget for one business unit, you might oversee 6 different budgets. You go from managing assistants and team members in your division to managing the managers who manage the assistants and team members. That’s a tongue twister. 

So what is the big takeaway?

I have a lot of respect for anyone in the CEO role.

Especially in large organizations, these folks have a tough job. They really are alone in their role. They can (and should) ask their team for plenty of input. But ultimately, they are the ones that have to make the big decisions. And they are the ones that are ultimately responsible for the outcome of those decisions.

Managing Managers

As my organization has grown over the past couple of quarters, I started implementing something I had never touched much before… a reporting structure. We have Directors, who have assistants, and managers who work on the Director’s teams. PR and Social Media report up to Marketing. Video production is a part of Media, while Accounting comes under Operations. As an organization grows, having a structure like this becomes important, otherwise you’ll start to see a lot chaos, really fast.

I was first exposed to a real reporting structure during my co-op at Digitalsmiths as a Project Manager. There, I reported to the VP of Client Services who handled Project Management. However, sometimes I’d interface with the COO, but it was usually going through the VP of Client Services. Why couldn’t I work directly with the COO when it seemed convenient? Well it turns out that policy actually makes a whole lot of sense, because the COO is responsible for managing the VP of Client Services, not me. If he had to manage both of us, he’d go nuts. 

Now that I am in a managerial role, I understand why I can’t answer every question for our Assistant Directors. I’d go nuts. Instead, they work with the Directors of each division of our organization, and I step in when necessary. In short, I am responsible for directly managing the managers (and responsibly for indirectly managing everyone).

So how do you do this well?

1. Give managers the tools they need to succeed

I constantly check in with all of my Directors to ensure that things are running smoothly in their division. Whether it is a budget issue, people problem, etc, you should get there before they even have to ask for help.

2. Don’t be a stranger to anyone in the company

Having a reporting structure doesn’t mean I don’t talk to Assistant Directors. On the contrary, I talk to everyone, a lot. I value everyone’s ideas and input, regardless of role, and I ask for them constantly. I gladly step in and work with anyone on my team. But at the same time, I try to defer the details in each division to the Director leading it. Part of my job is to make everyone better and more effective at doing their own jobs, so my Directors need opportunities to figure things out on their own, make mistakes and learn. As a leader, you are there to guide them along the way.

3. Respect managers authority

Don’t hesitate to override one of your managers if you feel that are making a bad call. BUT, do so with courtesy in a one-on-one environment. Calling out a manager in front of their team is never acceptable and can create way bigger problems in your organization.

4. Be a mentor to the team

As a manager of managers, your team is going to be learning a lot of management techniques from you. That means you need to lead by example, give lots of feedback, support and ultimately act as a mentor for everyone on your team.

5. As people learn, give them more responsibility

I give younger members of my team leadership opportunities as soon as they prove themselves capable of doing quality work and collaborating effectively in a team environment. The more opportunities that you give your team to manage, the better managers that you will have to work with. 

Bureaucracy Sucks… 5 Ways to do it Well

Let’s face it, bureaucracy sucks. It’s annoying, it impedes creativity and hinders workflow efficiency. It pisses off members of a team and can stunt progress. Yet, as organizations get larger, having defined processes and policies becomes more important. I’ll explain why with a story:

Last quarter my team at the NU Entrepreneurs Club was putting on a large event. We use a web application to send out email blasts to our members, Madmimi, and we deal with lists of thousands of email addresses weekly. A Director on my team wanted to attract more attendees to our event, so he loaded thousands of additional email addresses into our system and sent out a massive email blast. Unfortunately, this resulted in many of the emails being marked as spam and I had to explain to the folks at Madmimi that we did not mean to send “spam” and were not violating the terms of service of the product.

The issue was that when our organization was much smaller, it was ok for anyone on the team to send out blast emails since the lists were a lot smaller and it didn’t make much of a difference either way. But now we have grown into a well known brand on campus with thousands of dollars in funding and hundreds of members. We need to have strict control on our brand and how we interact with our members.  So I took the following actions:

I created clear, easy to understand policies governing how we send emails.

I wrote a brief 1 page document that spelled out very concisely who was allowed to access our email program (and re-distributed the login credentials accordingly), and what specific lists could be accessed by each person.

I wrote a brief email to my entire team notifying them of the policy.

I made sure that everyone understood the new simple policy, and I also transparently stated why we had to institute the policy: our organization has grown and we need to make sure we send only the right emails to the right lists and not make a mistake.

How do you create an effective policy?

1. Make it short and simple: No confusing language.

2. Share it with everyone: Nobody can follow a policy they don’t know about.

3. Use common sense: Only make a policy when the alternative of not having a policy is a worse headache than the policy itself.

4. Don’t make policy for the sake of policy: Do it when necessary, don’t touch anything if you don’t have to.

5. Get everyone’s input: People are more likely to respect a policy that they feel ownership of. Get their insight and have them help create it.

Clarity as Clear as Glass

“Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.”

I make it a point to focus on clarity with my team. This plays off the old saying that “assuming makes an ass out of you and me.” I may have an idea for a project, or a specific deliverable that I need someone on my team to take care of. If you want something done right, you need to be explicitly clear with exactly what you need, the format you need it in and the deadline. I use bulleted lists, bold things and use key words like “action items” and “deliverables.”

If I am on a team and get these kinds of instructions from the project manager, there is no excuse to get it wrong, because it is so drop dead obvious, and everyone knows it. 

It’s really easy to be clear. Use the following guidelines when outlining instructions:

1. No big words.

Use simple language that is easy to read and digest.

2. Don’t write long paragraphs.

Bulleted lists are your best friend.

3. Bold what is important.

People’s eyes will go right to it.

4. Format documents.

Use tables, use visuals. My professor and serial entrepreneur, Bruce Russell, explained it best that the important stuff should jump right off the page.

5. Be careful with acronyms.

I only use acronyms when my team either knows them, or I want my team to learn them by searching on Google.

6. No extra information.

Tell people what they need to know. Nothing less, nothing more.

What are the advantages of clarity?

• Less mistakes
• Less frustration
• Faster delivery times
• Things get done right the first time
• Happier team

So, next time you are writing a Goliath email that seems more like a Harry Potter novel, take a step back and ensure that things are concise and the important information is abundantly clear.