LEADERS RECOGNIZE THE POWER OF VOLUNTEERING
Many years ago, when I was 32 years old and living in Bethesda, Maryland, I started volunteering at the Montgomery County Community Crisis Center, which was five minutes from my house. After a rigorous 35-hour training course, I answered phones from 6:00 pm – midnight on Wednesdays. Sometimes I would accompany the staff social workers for interviews with walk-in Crisis Center clients.
This volunteering led to my eventually chairing the Crisis Center Advisory Board. During the next several decades, I was fortunate to serve on or chair many local advisory committees and boards and did the same thing at the state and national levels, especially within the legal education field.
I thought about my volunteering journey this week when I read an interesting daily reminder from the Harvard Business Review linking leadership with volunteering.
The article said that volunteering can provide meaning and fulfillment beyond our jobs or career. It offered several ways that leaders can get started and can make a positive difference in their communities. These were some of the tips from HBR:
-Focus on what you can influence
-Start small – and start now
-Find an organization that aligns with your values
-Begin in a way that fits your current capacity
-Ask your friends and work colleagues what organizations they are involved with to get ideas
-Stay open to where volunteering might lead – it could lead to a satisfying paying job and a new career path
All these advice tidbits are valid and worth considering. Additionally, I believe that volunteering offers us many more advantages – advantages that will aid us on our own leadership journeys.
Volunteering allows us to:
-Hone our own leadership skills,
-Accumulate more leadership experience outside our job
-Learn leadership practices from other accomplished volunteer leaders
-Try out fresh leadership behaviors
-Identify new leadership mentors
-Build a leadership network outside our traditional career network
-Discover new leadership resources in our community
-Burnish our leadership development skills when training new volunteers
-Use our own leadership skills to serve populations or clients who need help
Best of all, volunteering allows us to build and then sustain meaningful long-term relationships. Those relationships – and the pleasure they bring – can continue for years after a particular volunteering gig concludes. Just last year, I had dinner with two friends who I originally met at the Community Crisis Center back in 1982 – 43 years ago!
The friendships I cultivated on many other boards, committees and commissions continue to this day. And I continue to volunteer, serving on four non-profit boards in my community.
I can guarantee that when you step up to volunteer, you will get more out of it than you put into it.
-You will feel a sense of accomplishment.
-You will be helping other people.
-You will gain new knowledge and sharpen your skills.
And, at the same time, you will be able to grow into a more effective leader.
If you have not gone down the volunteering trail yet, please consider it. I highly recommend it. It can become a wonderful part of your life.
If you believe this content would resonate with a friend or colleague, please feel free to forward it along!
-Larry