My Tip of the Week: Are You Choosing Efficiency Over New Volunteers?
Can I give you a growing leadership trend to watch out for? I call it "efficiency," and it can lead to bad things for your group. Yes, I'm recommending some inefficiency.
Once you've been doing the PTO thing for a while, it's very likely that you could do most PTO jobs more quickly (and perhaps even more effectively) than a newbie volunteer. Why send an email asking for help (and then spend time responding to the emails that come back) when you could do the actual task in less time than that?
The answer: growing involvement and avoiding the "clique" reputation.
The easiest way to stymie your growth and turn away new volunteers is to not take them up on their interest in helping out. But if you want them to get started, you have to tolerate some inefficiency. Nearly every new volunteer is going to be slower than you. You are going to have to repeat the same answers to this year's newbies as you did with last year's. And doing that does slow you down and make you somewhat inefficient.
But it also makes you a group with more volunteers and a much more welcoming reputation in the long run. Try to slow down your desire to always fix or be the best or fastest. It's worth it.
We have lots of good resources on dealing with newbies and welcoming volunteers effectively. Check out:
