January 2012 Everyone Ready Volunteer Management topic: Building and Sustaining Strong Volunteer Leadership

From AFSWiki

Learning Objectives:

After completing the seminar and discussing its content, participants will be able to:

  * Understand the competition for your potential leader's time and talent.
  * Design a process for nurturing leaders to keep moving up.
  * Develop realistic position descriptions for volunteer leaders.
  * Find leaders from your membership ranks and get them active.
  * Create a leadership program to meet the needs of your organization that also meets the needs of your potential volunteer pool.
  * Create a stewardship program to nurture, sustain and reinforce great leadership.

Ideal Audience:

Anyone who doesn't have a long line of talented folks willing to joyfully accept leadership positions in their organization. Content Overview It isn't enough just to have live bodies in the room or on your membership roster. Organizations need to have skilled leaders who are willing to take on the responsibilities for chairing everything from a one-time committee meeting to a multi-year assignment – which can involve literately thousands of hours of service and supervision of many hundreds of volunteers plus coordination with dozens of paid staff. Years ago, people aspired to many of these leadership roles. More and more, we find that to get anyone to take such roles involves major arm-twisting and negotiation. What has changed? How can we make this a win-win so that potential leaders will joyfully accept a volunteer position and leave happy and fulfilled? This session will examine how to deal with the new reality for nonprofit leadership development.

The central question of this online seminar is: How can we encourage, support and train potential leaders to take on positions of authority in today's nonprofits? This includes everything from board and advisory council members, coordinators of special events, chairs of various committees, special project managers, and team/shift leaders.

Topics to be covered include:

   * What stops volunteers from seeking or accepting leadership roles?     
   * What benefits do they gain from accepting them?
   * Realistic expectations on all sides: defining roles, lines of authority, and relationships with paid staff.
   * Identifying leadership potential.
   * Creating a volunteer leader support and recognition plan that works.