I've got a question for you... Do the same rules for leading volunteers apply when leading employees?
We pay people to come to work but can we buy their enthusiasm and creativity? What about their passion and excitement? Maybe we need to consider applying the same or similar leadership principles in our businesses that we've discussed for our volunteer organizations? Do we need to modify our list for business and employees? Let me know your thoughts and what's working for you.
Here's a link to my original post on Leading Volunteers:
http://www.leadingagile.com/2008/02/leading-volunteers.html
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
An Afterthought
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Mike, you raise a great point here, and I feel strongly that the performance of our teams is directly related to the level of energy, passion, and commitment volunteered by team members. Passion cannot be purchased. It can only be volunteered. One of the most important roles of a leader is the ability to ignite that sort of emotional energy. I like the way Mike Griffiths puts it in his post "How many volunteers do you have working on your project?":
ReplyDelete"The real key in comparing paid team members to volunteers is recognizing that the level of team member contribution to the project is always voluntary. We can pay them a salary so they turn up but where team members choose to operate on the scale from Undermining to Passionate Innovation is largely up to them. We can fire the poor performers and reward the hire performers, but these are clumsy tools, to achieve a general rightwards shift we should better understand what’s in it for them to want to volunteer more effort.
Let's get out there and create more volunteers!
Brian
blog.softwarearchitecture.com