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by Penny Kern

I subscribe to an e-Newsletter called CharityChannel and one of the articles caught my eye and I saved it - March 28, 2007. When we started this blog, I emailed the author, Scott Martin, and asked permission to use parts of one of his pieces for a topic of discussion and he agreed.

The piece was on THE PARTICIPATIVE REVOLUTION and it was about changes organizations are going to have to make to attract and keep volunteers today.

He quoted Judith E. Glaser’s books “Creating We” and “The DNA of Leadership”, (both books I just have to order - they sound great), on the language most organizations and companies use that is turning off today’s volunteers. I never noticed it before but, now that I’ve read his piece, I see these words everywhere and they DO make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I just thought it was I, but I guess not.

Martin blames “scarcity” for the tight hold most staff people have on the organizations because we all live in a world of needing more - more people, more funding, more security. He said, “Perhaps this is one reason why nonprofits, which you would think would be models of democracy, are so often closed systems, resistant to change and risk averse.” Could be, right?

The paragraph is entitled “Language and Unintended Messages.” This hit home particularly because I, too, worked for the Girl Scouts and have seen this for myself. A CEO of a Girl Scout council took their 4-page recruitment brochure and counted 84 words like “must,” “mandatory,” or “required.” She said that in their zeal to promote the health and safety of girls, they had unknowingly used command-and-control language that implicitly communicated that they did not trust volunteers to make their own decisions in the best interests of the girls. When they further examined their organizational practices and training curricula, they realized they had assumed that the behavior of the volunteers and staff could be controlled through the use of rulemaking, mandatory, training, rigid boundary-setting and organizational authority distributed through a positional hierarchy. Over time, these practices had begun to generate unintended consequences in the organization’s culture.

What kinds of messages, intended and unintended, are you sending out to volunteers? Try a simple experiment. Review your volunteer manual. What words predominate? Are you using a vocabulary of control or one of empowerment?

Words of Control: No, Not, Can’t, Never, Must, Ought, Shouldn’t, Required, Mandatory, Prohibited, Grounds for Dismissal, Chain of Command.

Words of Empowerment: Yes, May, Can, Welcomed, Encouraged, Invited, Empowered, Authorized, Collaboration, We, Us

He continues his discussion with a paragraph or two on trust and distrust. “At the heart of the issue of organizational culture is a question of trust. Can other people be trusted most of the time or can you never be too careful? Are volunteers basically good people who want to contribute to the greater good? Or are they walking time bombs that need to be closely monitored and controlled?

It’s a great article - I’d be happy to share the entire piece with anyone, if you’d like. Scott Martin has managed small nonprofits, a United Way, a national service programs and a state office of volunteerism in his 15-years of professional work. He lives in New Jersey and is currently a consultant providing training and one-on-one assistance to volunteer programs on topics related to engaging Baby Boomers in volunteerism.

Penny Kern is a retired volunteer manager from Aroostook County.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 6:34 am and is filed under Managing Performance, Recognition, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.