Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Volunteer Dilemma

Beyond Relevance picks up on a scenario which may be familiar to anyone working with volunteers, whether in church or not:

Standards are the greatest tool for training your team and they are, for the most part, missing in the church today.

Why? I think we feel so grateful for Bob (the guy who volunteers to do the PowerPoint), that on his first day, we do our best to make sure we do not upset him. After all, what if he stops coming? Then what are we going to do? No, what we will do is give him the least amount of information about his duty we can (as we do not have time to really train him) and then we will put up with him not doing it perfectly since he is so faithful (of course he has no real idea what perfection to us is), until one day we get fed up and fire him from his post and crush his spirit by telling how he "never" does it right, when we never trained him what right is.

Helpful piece, on how you raise the standard of what happens with your volunteers without imposing lots of rules, or everyone getting really frustrated.

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