Sense in the
City Issue
3.3, July 11, 2008
Page
1
Sense in the
City Issue
3.3, July 11, 2008
Page
1
|
Leadership Rewards: Volunteer Route More Traveled for Leadership Frequent Flyer Points © Marilyn Hamilton, PhD CGA - All rights reserved How do leaders gain points in the Leadership “Frequent Flyers’ Club”? How can they build leadership muscle, accelerate their development and gain increased competency for the 21st century? Can they do it faster in school or is the most effective vehicle the community itself? How do leaders pay forward their leadership advantages? For the ninth year, I have spent a month at Royal Roads University, team-teaching the second residency of the MA Leadership program. My mind is full of leadership points measured by competency assessments, major project evaluations, learning laboratories and grading. Once again I have witnessed a remarkable cohort of 33 mid-career learners make major gains deepening their leadership capacities. However, this week I attended a volunteer awards evening in my home town, where I witnessed equally remarkable leadership performance, being recognized by a community appreciative of volunteer contributions. The span of the recipient’s ages embraced 15 years to 70 something. The youngest person had already served 5 years as a volunteer and the most senior person had contributed 50 years of service. It got me to thinking about the parallel tracks for gaining leadership development points: the formal one through school and the informal one through the community. I have written elsewhere about my experience with the formal track ADDIN EN.CITE ADDIN EN.CITE.DATA (Hamilton, 1999, 2001, 2008). Today I would like to explore a route that is more frequently being traveled because it offers so many rewards. People are drawn to volunteering for as many reasons as the life-spiral has values (Beck & Cowan, 1996): to survive, to belong, to be recognized, to be a hero, to become an authority, to demonstrate success, to give care, to collaborate with social networks, to serve the world. (People even volunteer for shadow reasons like bossing others around, gaining access to valuable information or associations, manipulating others, excluding others and exploiting situations. We will leave these considerations to another day.) While volunteering is generally considered a personal choice, perhaps you have had the experience of being “voluntold” – where someone else (a parent, a colleague, a friend) has volunteered your services for you? To the extent that you do not then willingly accept such referred assignments, you may not gain the full benefits of volunteering. But you may gain some advantages despite yourself. Although many embark on volunteering with a service motive in mind, and thereby engage an explicit moral intention, the side effects of volunteering can actually be life’s informal leadership development program. If one remains open to the possibilities, a lifetime of volunteering can offer a continuous supply of leadership stretches that are readily transferable into all other areas of your life – work, parenting, recreation, spiritual practise. When I look back at my history of volunteering, I can see an unfolding panorama of mentors, locations, motivations and roles. The motivations tell me what I valued and why I (and others) volunteered. The roles tell me what I (and others) actually did as volunteers. The continuity of the values and actions are marked by distinct levels of complexity that are essentially defined by the span of time, space and moral influence that I exercised in my volunteer experiences. When I was still at home my parents set the example of volunteering with daily chores in service to the household. On the most basic level our motivation was survival as a family unit. Like my grandchildren today, as I grew older, my chores became more complex and required more responsibility - I progressed from setting the table, to cooking food, to babysitting. On the whole all of these chores were accomplished in hours, within the home and affected the wellbeing of myself and my family. As teenagers or adults we still replicate this level of leadership competency when we help a neighbour in need, serve at the food bank, or on street missions. When I demonstrated enough responsibility for safe interaction outside the home, I assisted in church activities like singing in the choir and summer camp. This gave me a tremendous sense of belonging, introduced me to leaders outside my family and gave me my first taste of contributing to a larger group. At this second level of leadership my commitment was for a longer period of time – counted in weeks – with the influence of my behaviour affecting the equivalent of a clan gathering. As I moved into teenage hood, the desire came to demonstrate my individuality and independence and my volunteering became more self-centred. I was drawn to volunteer in competitive sports like tennis and performing arts. I volunteered where I could get the recognition for my achievements, even as a coach or stage manager of younger, less experienced players. For the satisfaction of being on centre stage, I was willing to commit to volunteer participation for a season within a league that spanned the breadth and population of the school district. The fourth stage of volunteering started for me in becoming a member of a professional association (in my case a Bed & Breakfast committee for Expo 86). For others this stage often starts with the shift into parenting, pseudo-parenting and/or home occupancy. Young parents naturally become volunteers in schools, recreation associations and other child development activities. All of these situations offer extensive leadership development opportunities in setting and maintaining standards, ethics and protocols. Frequently they get translated into coaching, refereeing and serving on committees, councils and associations of all kinds – professional, sports, ratepayers, renters, etc. Being a volunteer team leader at this level of complexity is probably more challenging than equivalent leadership experiences in paid employment (including for profit, not-for-profit, military and government as supervisors or managers) because the authority you must exercise must generally be accomplished with other volunteers (with a range of leadership capacities) who are bound only by personal commitment and not paid contract. In this stage your leadership capacity stretches to time spans of a year or more, city-wide or state-wide space spans, with the impacts of your decisions affecting hundreds of people directly (and thousands indirectly). The organizing and influencing muscles that emerge from volunteering at the fourth stage of complexity are necessary for success at the fifth level of volunteering. My experience at this level (for example in the Chamber of Commerce, Airport Authority and Arts Advisories) reflects the strong need in volunteer organizations for the capacities to plan, manage and produce results, working with both volunteers and staff. Bridging paid and unpaid workers and multiple stakeholders requires well developed political skills and provides endless leadership challenges for most volunteers. The motivations for moving into this level of volunteering may resonate strongly with the third level. However, while you may gain public profile for your activities, it will arise not from your personal performance alone, but from the success of the organization that you lead. The span of time, space and moral influence at this level can well be multiple years, regional in scope and directly affect tens of thousands or more people. Like many others, my leadership journey through Level 5 brought me face to face with my own limits as a leader. Serving as a VP of 6000 Volunteers for a national sporting event, precipitated the re-calibration of my systematic and strategic skills into the service of social networks. I realized my organizing and results orientation was necessary but not sufficient to embrace the diversity in a community of people’s values, cultures and worldviews. I was invited to become a co-chair of the city’s Healthy Community Project, which resulted in my meeting the huge network of care-giving agencies that formed the web of pan-community support. This experience required that I learn how to bridge across multiple organizations with a myriad of purposes and governance systems. At the same time I started my career of cross-pollinating capacities between profit, not-for-profit (NFP), government and agency organizations. Once again the leadership stretch transcended any book learning or classroom instruction, and plunged me into a new arena of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The leadership span of time increased beyond three years of Board service, the space span became regional and the moral influence expanded in tandem. Eventually the effectiveness of social networking, called forth another leadership stretch in my life. The post-modern practise of social inclusiveness, strongly influential in many NFP organizations, became insufficient to the challenges facing the city, such as homelessness, affordable housing, and cultural tensions. At the same time systematic and strategic approaches were not equal to the tasks, so I found my volunteer leadership reaching outward to a seventh level of complexity that embraced systemic thinking, theory and practise. As has often happened in my volunteering, Life invited me to contribute in a way that exceeded prior experience, requiring the bridging of worldviews, expectations, financial management capacities and ethical frameworks. In universities, community foundations and city-wide dialogues I found the need to create new combinations of engagement (eg. appreciative inquiry, action research) and commitment. The span of space and moral influence flexed and flowed across the country and time spans had to be measured in decades, generations and even centuries. Finally, with the practise of volunteering at the 7th level still emerging, I am finding myself in situations which are calling forth volunteering at the 8th level – the global time, space and moral span scale. Anthropologist Margaret Meade’s observation -- to never doubt the influence of a small group of committed people to change the world; they are the only ones who ever have – comes to mind. With growing evidence of the systemic approaches that volunteers are bringing to regions all over the world, networks of systems thinking volunteers (eg. who have responded to natural and man-made disasters) are merging and linking their network capacities. My connections to a global mesh of volunteer networks thinking and acting together range from environmentalists in the BC Rainforest, to cultural catalysts in Africa’s deserts, to water activists in Australia, to urban planners in Europe, to bio-security experts in Indonesia, to spiritual directors in the USA. Together we are meshworking our volunteer efforts, so that we can gain alignment, resonance and coherence across a global span of space, time and moral influence. Interestingly, when I look back at my volunteer experience, at each level of complexity, I can see that my mentors demonstrated the qualities of leadership that came from the next level of leadership to which I aspired. Although, I am by no means a fully developed Level 7 or 8 leader, whatever qualities I can demonstrate at those levels, I would say unequivocally, that I owe to the exemplars and experiences engaged on the route of volunteering. My next natural steps of learning have always been guided by an mentor who invited, acted and encouraged me to gain the skills for the role I was volunteering. When I think about my volunteer journey in terms of Kolb’s model of learning (Kolb, 1984) or Graves levels of existence (Graves, 1974), I can clearly see a series of volunteer experiences that exceeded my previous level of leadership capacity. Each challenge caused the required dissonance to shift me out of my comfort zone to learn. This was followed by insight, integration and eventually consolidation into other domains of my life. Without the volunteer experience, I am certain I would not have grown the leadership capacities I rely on today. (Table 1 summarizes leadership development through the volunteer’s journey.) Table 1: Summary of Leadership Development Through Volunteer Opportunities and Spans
As a result of my own experience and observing the experience of others (both in community and at awards ceremonies) I would propose that a leadership development process could be entirely designed via the volunteer track. If I were counseling a young person today, I would introduce them to the volunteer leadership proposition, by helping them discover their natural motivation. Then I would introduce them to volunteers who demonstrate the variety of ways that volunteer life and leadership can be full of promise, challenge and satisfaction. A volunteer leader can be a specialist at any level of leadership complexity or a designer for the full spectrum of leadership possibilities. It is surely a never ending quest with multiple rewards. Research is showing that volunteering is a positive influence in people’s lives, not just because it fulfills positive values and behaviours, but because volunteering de-stresses the practitioner and expands their social interactions. It appears that people who volunteer even live longer. So leaders who want to build leadership muscle, accelerate their development and gain increased competency for the 21st century can gain substantial frequent leadership flying points, by choosing the route of volunteering. Of course, many volunteer leaders intertwine their volunteer path with more formal leadership training on the job, online or in the classroom. But volunteer leaders can be confident that they will get to valuable leadership destinations that may even exceed their expectations. Then their only dilemma may be how to pay forward the rewards of volunteer leadership to others in their sphere(s) of influence and induct them into the Volunteer Leadeship Frequent Flyers’ Club. References: ADDIN EN.REFLIST Beck, D., & Cowan, C. (1996). Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Graves, C. (1974). Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap The Futurist. Hamilton, M. (1999). The Berkana Community of Conversations: A Study of Leadership Skill Development and Organizational Leadership Practices in a Self-Organizing Online Microworld. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia Pacific University, Novato, California. Hamilton, M. (2001). Review, revise, reframe, MALT program design review: Discussion paper. Royal Roads University. Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral Methods from the Margins: Finding Myself in the Research - A Retrospective of Integral Leadership Development Methods Using Online Dialogue Analysis, a Competency Development Framework and Action Research. Paper presented at the Integral Theory in Action Conference. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. . . . |