218 – The Nonprofit Volunteer Management Skills I Wish I Had When I Started

Episode #218 – The Nonprofit Volunteer Management Skills I Wish I Had When I Started

Tobi Johnson: Hey friends, Tobi here. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I am really excited because I’ve been thinking about, or reflecting on, my career in nonprofit volunteer management and nonprofit management.

You know, I’ve been in the field for a really long time. I started my career in nonprofits right out of college (actually before graduate school) and worked in the field for 25 years, working in different organizations and cause impact areas and starting up programs. And always I had volunteers involved in some way, or community members, or coalitions, or some type of group I was working with to help support either our program or our organization.

Through the years, three plus decades, I’ve gained a few skills here and there. I was reflecting because I’m working on our Volunteer Management Fundamentals course, our live cohort, which starts June 17th. We’re going to release the new format of the course, as well as offer some coaching calls (five coaching calls and a pop‑up community). So we’re doing the Volunteer Management Fundamentals Live.

I have been really thinking about the curriculum a lot. I’m going to release each new module once a week as we work through the curriculum, as we work through the lessons, and as we talk about how we apply these to our organization so that we can have a more impactful volunteer strategy.

Volunteer management and nonprofit management have a lot of overlap. Sometimes we don’t think that; we think volunteer management is a sort of set‑aside, a separate set of skills, but there is a lot of transferable skills between the two.

I have done such a wide range of jobs in the nonprofit sector. I’ve seen it happen in my own career. I worked as a Marcoms director, as an outreach coordinator, as a program manager, program director, as a trainer of volunteers. There are so many different roles I had in nonprofits, as well as public sector organizations. I’ve had a chance to grow a lot of skills, a very diverse skill set. It’s been really wonderful.

I’ve also had the benefit of a lot of professional development and training throughout my career. I’ve had the pleasure of working also in mastermind groups with entrepreneurs like myself who do work online. So I’ve had the opportunity to really grow a solid set of skills. Of course, in any given course, I can’t share every single one of those, it would just be too overwhelming, and the content would be too long. So I’ve really been thinking about culling it down.

By the way, if you’re already a Volunteer Management Fundamentals student, you will also (because you have lifetime access) get access to this new rollout. So I’m excited for all of our students. We have nearly a thousand people who’ve taken the course over the years. So I’m really excited to roll this out. If you’re a current student you’ve enrolled in the past at some point, we’re going to give you the opportunity to join us inside VMF Live. So you’ll be able to sign up and attend our coaching calls as well as our pop‑up community. It should be a lot of fun. Starts in mid‑June.

But let’s get back to the topic of the day, which is nonprofit volunteer management skills. I wanted to reflect on the top — I think I pulled out about four or five (I think it’s five, actually) of the top nonprofit volunteer management skills that I’ve learned over the years. I’ve just thought I’d share these with you because I’m really thinking about how I can incorporate these into the Volunteer Management Fundamentals course so that you also have this opportunity to have access to this leadership development.

You’ll see that none of these skills are “how to write a volunteer position description.” None of them. It’s really more about the leadership side, because I think that’s the most important. Your ability to influence, your ability to self‑regulate, your ability to budget- some of the things that you don’t always hear about in the basics around volunteer management, but they’re so essential. I feel like the curriculum needs a shakeup. So I’m shaking it up in our Volunteer Management Fundamentals.

Let’s go through this. You know, I want to start with a personal confession, actually. If you’ve ever given the “what for” from a volunteer or received the “what for” from a volunteer in a public meeting, has that ever happened to you? You’re rolling out something new, and you feel like there are pitchforks with burning straw on the top of them in the back of the room because people are so upset about this change. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that type of change management. I have. It’s stressful.

But it’s also part of being a leader. When we innovate, we often; I heard this saying once: “Tall trees get the wind.” When I was a program director, I really felt that. Sometimes I felt like I was really alone at the top of the mountain. As leaders of volunteers, I often hear that people feel alone, or nonprofit leaders feel alone.

By the time I left my nonprofit career, I was leading a three‑and‑a‑half‑million‑dollar program. I had about 15 staff, I had 20‑some sub‑grantees. It was a big deal. It was also really stressful. I was so burned out and so stressed that I started losing my hair. I mean, it was really bad. By the time I left my career, I wished I never would have started. And I don’t want you to get there.

So some of these skills are about this. We’ve got to name this gap. We’ve got to call this out in our sector because it’s so easy to get burned out. Passion gets us into these roles passion keeps us in these different roles in our work.

But nobody, in general, hands you an operating manual. Most of what I learned, of course, as I said, I went through a lot of training. I’ve had the opportunity to be coached by some really smart people. But I didn’t really get an operating manual. So I felt like I was building things while I was flying most of the time.

I want to share in this particular episode things that I wish I would have known early in my career that might have prevented me from getting to that point. This was back in the late 2000s, 2008, 2007, when I started my consulting practice. I was really done working in the sector, at least as an employee. But there are things I could have done to prevent this, but I didn’t know at the time. Because again, no one gives us an operating manual. So consider this your operating manual.

I was able to gain insights and accelerate knowledge through professional development courses and mastermind coaching that I’m still involved with. The other thing I think it’s really important to acknowledge is that you don’t just arrive and it’s all done, because the world is changing all the time. It’s been so revolutionary in the last few years with AI and tech. It’s a whole new ball game. The global pandemic has changed the world forever. And our leadership skills have to evolve.

That kind of leads me into my first skill; the things that I think will help you if you decide to learn them well and incorporate them. These are my biggest suggestions of what it takes to do nonprofit volunteer management well: the core skill sets. I’m not going to cover them all. I’m going to cover what I believe are the top ones that keep you from burnout, that keep you with passion and vigor for your job, that keep you interested, and that keep you in the game. And we need you to stay in the game, right? We need you to stay in the game because this is not an easy job. Anyone who said leading volunteers is an easy job has never done it for very long, right? It’s not an easy job at all.

So let’s talk about the first skill. My nonprofit volunteer management skill number one is self‑regulation. Self‑regulation. You’re like, “What? What is that?” It’s about your emotions. Being able to regulate your emotions is a skill that no one ever mentions when you get hired into a leadership role. Nobody ever says it; it’s never on your job description. You don’t get trained on it usually. If you do, you’re really lucky. Nobody even talks about regulating your emotions.

Here’s the thing about emotional regulation. First of all, not every situation deserves the same amount of attention and emotional energy that we give it. We often think everything is a fire, everything needs to be on critical zone, and everything needs us to be stressed out all the time. And it’s just not the case. Some things are more important than others.

The other thing to note around this self‑regulation is you can also buffer yourself and help yourself self‑regulate if you distance or set boundaries around people who are messing with your self‑regulation, people who are drama queens. You know what? I got a job to do here. I can’t have a drama queen around me. It’s messing with my vibe.

If you’re like me, I’m very intuitive with other people’s energies. I feel that’s why I’m a good trainer. I can be in a ballroom and I can figure out who in the ballroom is not with me, and I will walk over by them and stand by them and lecture and present because I know they’re not with me yet. I can read a room like that. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bad thing because we feel other people’s emotions. So if you’re one of those kinds of people, you’ve got to do this really well.

People emotionally dumping on you; that doesn’t help you with your self‑regulation. Self‑regulation is really about when something upsetting happens to you, you’re able to get back to a baseline fairly quickly. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel emotions, and it doesn’t mean you cut yourself off from emotions. But you’re giving the situation the right level of emotional investment.

The ability to self‑regulate often comes from self‑care. If we have a full tank, we can self‑regulate much more easily. When I’m completely depleted, and I still get completely depleted from time to time, if you haven’t listened to my episode on long COVID (I’ll find it and link to it), I talk about total burnout. I had long COVID. I’m still dealing with it, but it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. It’ll probably be something I live with for the rest of my life.

I’ve learned that if I deplete myself completely, then I have no ability to regulate emotion and I start feeling very crispy and grumpy. And I can’t talk myself out of those emotions. Again, self‑regulation isn’t about not feeling emotions or being an automaton; it’s about being able to get back to ground zero, back to baseline, when something upsetting happens. Because we can’t have our whole day ruined by other people, right?

Okay, second skill. Nonprofit volunteer management skill number two. (By the way, if you’re interested in all my other favorite leadership wins — today I’m talking about things I’ve struggled with, but I’ve talked in the past about what’s gone well. Volunteer Nation episode 22: my favorite six nonprofit leadership and management wins. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.)

Okay, nonprofit volunteer management leadership skill number two. This I have to say, I haven’t struggled as much with because I think it’s in my DNA. I’m a planner by nature. So it’s strategic planning.

We’ve been doing our Vision Week strategic planning boot camp every fall/winter (depends, sometimes December, sometimes October, sometimes November). Every year I’ve been doing it, I think we’re on our third or fourth year this year. The reason I do it is because I see that so many people really need to flex this strategic planning muscle.

Your strategic planning muscle is your ability to forecast and set a plan to reach specific goals. In Vision Week, we create a strategic plan for a single year. I’m not a big fan; when I say strategic planning, I’m not talking about three to five years out, broad brush strokes, expensive consultants. I’m talking about focused: what are we doing in the next year? We need a plan, not just a calendar or a list of to‑dos, especially for leaders of volunteers.

The mistake we make is being responsive and reactive versus proactive, filling shifts, putting out fires, versus building a program with a purpose that’s aligned with our organization’s goals. All your volunteer roles, for example, should be mapped to your mission outcomes, not just tasks. I think we get too far in the weeds and we’re not up above looking down, going, “Okay, where are we headed and how are we contributing to the bottom line?”

Strategic planning is really essential. Not only calendaring things, but understanding what are our goals, objectives, tasks, success factors, and where we’re going to get that data from. It’s a planning muscle that is really important to develop because you’ll be more successful in the long run, and you will stand out above other people. So many people don’t have the planning skill set yet.

Can you figure out even a one‑page strategic plan that has capacity goals, role design, retention targets? Those are things that are really important. And the plan will only work if you fund it as well, resources. I’m talking about funding, your time, everybody else’s time, and any budget line items that go into helping you drive your plan.

That leads me to my third skill, which I kind of figured out on my own. I don’t remember ever going to school for this or taking any professional development courses on it. I don’t think I was offered this. But all of a sudden, especially when I was promoted to program director, I had a huge budget to manage.

I did have opportunities along the way. There were a few programs that I built from scratch. There was no program until we got some seed funding. I built these programs from scratch, given a certain amount of seed money, and then I had to build the budget around it. I had to figure out how much staff cost, fringe benefits, software we needed. I went out and found facilities and bought furniture for those facilities. I’m talking about building from scratch, y’all. There was nothing except something on a piece of paper and a part of the organization’s budget that had money in it.

I’ve built, I think, two nonprofit programs entirely from scratch, and then renovated a lot, and of course built my business from scratch as well. That’s how I learned budgeting: it was necessary for me to move forward. I didn’t know what I was going to spend on what. I also had to figure out how to monitor it because I would be given a big printout of activity in my account, and then I’d have to go through it and make sure everything was coded correctly with my fiscal folks.

Here’s the thing about budgeting. You may think, “Well, I don’t have anything to do with the budget.” Well, you could have something to do with the budget, as in recommending how the budget gets spent, since you’re the person who is (if you’re a leader of volunteers, if you’re executive level, you already know). But for leaders of volunteers, it’s such a great skill to have as a volunteer management skill.

So this is volunteer management skill number three: budgeting. Volunteer labor isn’t free, and pretending it does costs you in terms of underfunding. The mistake is when we treat volunteers as a cost‑free resource and underinvest in their experience. There are so many things that belong in a volunteer budget: recognition items, software, coordination hours, your coordination hours if you’re a leader of volunteers.

If you’re a nonprofit executive, I am certain there are a certain amount of hours that you spend on volunteers, whether it’s attending a volunteer recognition event or working with your own volunteers in your department. There are also all the folks in different departments who work with volunteers. If part of their full‑time equivalent salary (their FTE) is not somehow allocated to leading volunteers, and leading volunteers is not in their position description, then what do you think happens when they’re asked to lead volunteers? Pretty low on the priority level.

Budgets tell you what is really happening, whether it’s a planned budget (a forecast) or after what your profit‑loss statement looks like. If different departments have staff who are supposed to be supervising volunteers, then whatever percent of their total FTE should be dedicated to your budget as the volunteer budget or the program budget; but earmarked for volunteers. See what I’m saying? Budgets are really integral to any of our programs and nonprofits.

There’s also overhead. Do you know how much of your budget actually is taken in overhead? Do you have a say in grants that include volunteers? Are they charging an overhead amount for volunteer services? There are lots of different ways to fund volunteer services. Budgets are numbers, but they’re also justification narratives; explanations about what the calculations mean.

If you wanted to start really small, you could start with just a simple three‑line budget: what’s the investment into volunteers, what’s the value out that volunteers give, and what’s the gap you’re asking the organization to bridge. You could use the dollar value of volunteer time from Independent Sector (a new number just came out; I’ll put a link to that in the show notes).

I’ve developed a lot of budgets. When I was starting as a program director, building a program from scratch, I got a budget: planned expenses, who I was going to hire, where we were going to have space, what software we needed. Then I had the program design: how we were going to run it, what activities we were going to do, even the outcome metrics. I was really lucky that when I would do these program designs, I would work closely with the funder on developing the outcome metrics. I love figuring out the logic model and outcomes and all that good stuff.

But what I didn’t realize is I could develop this lovely, perfectly designed program that had a budget, a program model, outcome metrics, KPIs aligned with the organization; and I could try to lead it, but then nothing would happen. People would be resistant because they couldn’t see my vision.

That brings me to my next nonprofit volunteer management skill number four: change management and influence, which I had to learn the hard way, y’all. I’m telling you, this was not natural for me.

So let’s take a quick pause from my list of nonprofit volunteer management skills I wish I had when I started. After this, I’ll talk about change management and influence. We’ll be right back. Stay with me. Okay, we’re back with my list of nonprofit volunteer management skills I wish I had when I started. I was teasing before the break that I was going to talk about change management and influence as a skill that I highly recommend folks have.

As I’m going through these, these skills are not what you see in normal, or I wouldn’t say normal, I would say common, volunteer management training. But y’all, these are the key levers of whether or not you’re going to be successful. You could not be very good at writing a volunteer position description, but if you don’t know how to influence and manage change, you’re not going to get very far. Do you see what I’m saying? I really feel like our field needs a little shake‑up about what the core competencies are. So I’m proposing during this podcast an entirely new set.

All right, so the first one was nonprofit volunteer management skill number one: emotional self‑regulation. Absolutely essential for any leader, especially a person who is in dotted‑line relationships with people and doesn’t get to supervise very many people. It’s very frustrating sometimes. So you’ve got to be able to do that.

Volunteer management skill number two: strategic planning; making sure you can create a vision and the roadmap to get there. Volunteer management skill number three: budgeting, knowing your numbers, including the FTEs. And nonprofit volunteer management skill number four: change management and influence.

The reason I think this is so important is often we’re trying to, we’ve done so much hard work to ideate and think about a design or a direction or a new initiative or change. We’re forging ahead, and we look behind us and there’s nobody behind us. Or there are people in front of us blocking us from progress because they’re like, “Wait a minute, we’re not going to let this happen. Not on our watch.”

It’s really important. Volunteers leave when change feels done to them, not with them. Similarly with paid staff and coworkers; they’re pretty much just going to ignore you and not answer your emails because they don’t feel like doing this. I know this is a difficult area for folks. A lot of students and also members in our Impact Lab struggle with internal communications, change management, influence. So we do a lot of training about this because it’s such an important skill.

The big mistake is announcing change: “We’re making this wonderful change. It’s going to make everybody’s life better.” But we haven’t managed that change; we’ve just announced it. Especially for volunteers who can just simply walk away — they’re like, “No, this is not how we do things around here.” So we want to make sure we build the skills to influence without authority. How to get buy‑in from staff, board members, community partners, volunteers- even those you don’t manage directly.

When you’re doing change management, there are a couple things I learned over the years that I didn’t do when I started but I wish I would have known. One was to create teams. Even when I’m doing consulting, I’ll build an advisory team of volunteers and staff to help guide the project. Because, first of all, they’re smarter than me — they’ve been doing the work directly and I haven’t. I’m there to be an expert facilitator and best‑practice advisor. I have some tools and tricks up my sleeves, but they really know and can push back on things when they don’t make sense. I’m never building in a bubble anymore. I’m never building in a hermetically sealed bubble with just my own ideas.

I also start to lead with the why. Why is this important? And what’s not going to change? That’s another thing people don’t do: they don’t talk about what’s not going to change. “These are the things we’re going to keep because they’re important or because they’re part of our legacy. And these are the things we’re going to change. And these are the people who helped advise us as we developed these changes.” Going out and getting feedback from folks before you make final decisions, getting reactions beforehand, inviting people to be part of the process always makes a difference.

All of this- the planning, the budget, the change navigation, lands different when you’re leading with teams, co‑producing with folks. Change management and influence is a big topic. Part of inside the Impact Lab and even in our Fundamentals course is about this: leadership and influence is learned through conversation. That’s why in VMF Live we do live coaching calls. It’s my favorite thing to talk through with people some of their challenges, because it helps when I can model how to have that conversation. It’s not something that goes well in a webinar, but it’s at the foundation of everything.

As I’m building the new Volunteer Management Fundamentals course, the baseline, the on‑demand lessons, I’m thinking about change management and how I can incorporate it more into the whole thing. How is it part of it at every step?

Then I want to share my fifth and final nonprofit volunteer management skill, which is aligned with what I was just talking about: participatory leadership. Again, this is not a muscle I knew how to use when I started as a leader. It was basically my way or the highway. I designed things. I was hired to make this happen. There was a lot of pressure on my shoulders to be successful. So get on the bus. But that doesn’t really work. It took me a few tries and a few stumbles to learn that lesson.

If you’re feeling like you’re not a perfect leader, guess what? Welcome to the club. The doors are wide open; we’re having a party over here. None of us are perfect leaders. It’s a constant process to develop ourselves.

The people doing the work know things you don’t know. When I work with advisory teams, volunteers who are doing frontline work know things you don’t know. I used to work with volunteers who did health insurance counseling. They were highly trained — in fact, I was one of the people who trained them, hours and hours of training. So I was technically very knowledgeable about the core knowledge set they needed to know. But they had all kinds of really interesting ways they would work with clients one‑on‑one. They started creating cheat sheets, shortcuts, tools that worked better at that volunteer‑client interface, where I was rarely at, unless I was backing somebody up.

We started to figure out: who has a good idea, a tool you created for yourself that we could duplicate and replicate across the program because it’s that good? That’s why we think about participatory leadership: we’re not as smart as everybody. We may be very smart, but we don’t know everything everyone knows. People know things we don’t because they’re working in those things every day.

So we co‑design with folks. We offer feedback loops for volunteers to share what’s going well, what’s not, what are you doing differently, what’s a tool you’re developing or a process that works really well. Share decision‑making in anything that affects volunteers directly. That might be having an advisory group, polling everybody, doing listening sessions. Participatory leadership is about grassroots to grasstops.

When you’re meeting with volunteers, you might just make it a practice of asking people: “What’s one thing that would make volunteering easier for you?” Every single time you meet with volunteers. It’s a really good habit to be in.

You’re probably wondering, let me land this plane. Let’s review these five skills before I let you go. You might be thinking, “Wow, this is really overwhelming. I’m not sure I’m ready for all these skills.” Check out Volunteer Nation episode 205: my top time management tips for overwhelmed volunteer managers. I have learned a thing about time management, but I didn’t put it in this list because these are the top ones.

So let me give you the rundown:

• Nonprofit volunteer management skill number one: Emotional self‑regulation

• Number two: Strategic planning

• Number three: Budgeting

• Number four: Change management and influence

• Number five: Participatory leadership

Strategic planning gives you the direction. Budgeting gives you credibility and power. Change management gives you staying power. Participatory leadership gives you trust. And self‑regulation gives you the ability to fly through some pretty turbulent storms as a leader. You don’t need to do all of these perfectly. Some of us are better at some than others, but you need to be honest about where you need to work on improving. In my mind, these are the most important.

I’ve got a quick challenge for you. The clearer you are about your values as a leader, the more credible you are to those you lead. One of the things you can do as you start pinpointing where you want to work on developing your leadership skills is to get clear on what you stand for, because that’s the fuel that keeps you going. Develop your own leadership philosophy. I’ve got a tool that can help you.

It’s a free worksheet to brainstorm and hone in on the personal values that drive your work and describe what you stand for. It’s a fun process. Go to volpro.net (I’ll link to it in the show notes). It’s a free values clarification and leadership philosophy worksheet. This tip sheet will help you focus on your personal values and how they will drive the way you approach leadership and your own work as a leader of volunteers.

I hope this has been helpful for you to think about differently, the skill sets you want to develop as a nonprofit volunteer manager. The mindsets, like emotional self‑regulation; when you do that, you get into the right mindset. These are all baselines that help you do other things. That’s why I think they’re so important and powerful.

I hope this has been helpful, hearing me talk a little bit about my experiences as a leader in nonprofits. If you think somebody might benefit from this, I hope you’ll share it with them. We always like ratings and reviews. If you give us a five‑star rating, I would love it. It helps us find other people like you who are interested in our topics.

I hope you’ll join me next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation.