Managing Volunteers

I was just recalling an incident some years ago when I volunteered with an open source project to help productize a portion of their codebase that was previously prototyped. I asked the lead if I could help, and when he suggested this project I was excited – not because of the subject matter (it was actually boring in a way), but because I was a part of their team. Once I agreed, he told me he would setup my access to their source control and email me back shortly.

After several weeks of not hearing back, I did a follow-up and his response was similiar to the following: “Go ahead and start working on it, and when you have something, let me know and we’ll get you setup with team access”. That was the last time I contacted them. Now, I’m a self-motivated person, but when someone says “do our work and then we’ll consider if you are a part of the team or not”, here is what I hear: “We really want you to work hard for us, but we don’t care about you enough to spend the time to bring you into our team”. Now, this might be an unfair statement, but then the saying goes:

“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care”

So, what is the lesson here? When managing volunteers:

1. Be willing to accept help, even when it might not be regarding immediate needs
2. Be willing to treat a new volunteer the same, or better, than the rest of your volunteers or paid staff
3. Make a place for anyone, no matter what their skillset is: a willing heart is many times better than a skilled hand
4. Be willing to say “no” to a volunteer that wants to impose their own agenda or won’t humbly accept a role outside their current interest or skillset

If the lead of this group had been willing to bring me into the team by trusting me with a portion of their codebase, or establishing a process by which new recruits are given access to only a portion of their codebase to reduce risk and still allow a new member to have read/write access to some code, I may have been more willing to meet them half way and help them out. Instead, they continue to grapple with the need for more volunteers.

Applying these principles to the IT Ministry I used to lead, I was able to make room for electricians, lawyers, contractors, technical, and non-technical folks to serve in a technical ministry. This allowed me to grow the team to a number that allowed partitioning the ministry into smaller teams, and raising up leaders that I then transitioned the ministry leadership, allowing me to follow God’s next calling in my life.

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