of approval of council decisions. James would not attempt any service initiatives but would leave those responsibilities with the council members.
In taking that stand, James showed his trust of the council and relegated his role to mainly a coach. He provided a balanced sense of responsibility and caring in his leadership.
After five years, James was posted elsewhere. At the time of his leaving, that congregation was known for having the strongest lay leadership in the denomination.
Paul became the new church leader—a dear man who took his clerical responsibilities very seriously. This led him into a very active role in all aspects of the congregation. His style was micro management. Within a matter of months, leadership activities of the council had diminished to their earlier dormant state.
The essence of leadership is enabling others to serve at their full potential.
A balance must be achieved between the human relations and performance sides of others.
Leaders come with motivation, knowledge and skills from their previous service and training. In most cases the leader instinctively favors the human relations side of leadership. Within the voluntary organization, however, these instincts must operate within a common leadership framework. That framework includes such processes as delegation, supervision and teamwork. People working together for a common purpose must appreciate each other’s interpersonal and organizational styles.
It is no small task for a leader trained in one profession to adjust to other professions in order to achieve common organizational styles. This knowledge cannot come from books and courses. The leader must learn as she goes with a new focus on the best combination of professional and organizational practices, rather than those from her own profession. This learning and transition comes from experience on the job.
On the performance side, the adjustments to organization frameworks are even more demanding. Just imagine the steps needed to arrive at a common understanding of recording and statistical methods of performance and accountability for both a social worker and an information systems person. Yet the client needs to experience consistency of practices from the organization.
Fortunately, the voluntary human service organization has an acid test for its definitions of good human relations and helpful performance styles. As with any question, the answer is found in the mission.
What shapes the nature and character of the organization is what works for the client. Human relations styles for the client shape the human relations styles of the organization. Performance styles helpful to clients shape the performance practices of the organization.
If Paul had pondered his best counseling styles with his new parishioners, he could then have seen how he should have led.
Keys to Leadership
The leader is a coach who:
• Encourages working together with a common vision.
• Helps direct individual accomplishments toward organization objectives.
• Enables common people to attain uncommon results.
Chapter 2 - The Challenges of Voluntary Service Leadership
Some think that the voluntary organization is simpler than the business corporation. Not so. The voluntary organization is at least twice as complicated. The business corporation has a single bottom line: profit. The voluntary organization has at least two: efficiency and effectiveness.
Given the number of big challenges, one wonders why we take on leadership.
Here is a list of big challenges facing every human services leader:
1. Suffering is inseparable from helpfulness. Who says so? Leaders from as far back as 2,000 years. No good deed goes unpunished.
A retired nurse supervisor was asked about her leader’s job. Her answer was, “The worst job I ever had—95 percent suffering and 5 percent satisfaction.”
How could this be for a caring, sensitive leader? Her suffering could have multiple sources: difficult clients, the upset counselor, critical colleagues and the administration. Apparently these combined to make her life miserable.
There is another side to this story. This nurse was one leader of six different family services of an agency. Her program was home care. From the continuous data from all services, this home care service proved to be the most effective. This program was known for its strong integrated team.
So, the whole story is that this nurse did her job well despite the suffering.
For some leaders, the suffering is too much—they withdraw. Others decide to grow a thick skin. The most effective leaders accept suffering as part of the process of helping.
2. What could be more complex than volunteers holding important roles at every level of the organization?
Volunteers at the level of the board of directors constitute the ultimate authority for the organization’s operation.
Volunteers at the service level assist in the processes with the client.
Imagine a volunteer who believes her role is to be a direct conduit between the board and the frontline services to the clients. Without clearly written role definitions and training, such frightening prospects can occur.
3. Next on the complexity list is efficiency. The simple definition of efficiency is the ratio of services provided to the resources used. Cost per case is an excellent example of an efficiency indicator. The most commonly used standard of measurement is “total served.” The first use of cost per 27 case can come as a great shock to an organization, with few realizing things like the actual cost of a team meeting.
Those in the helping professions are usually resistant to efficiency measures. They claim their work is humane, not statistical. This resistance is usually overcome with well-placed attention to indicators of effectiveness.
4. Effectiveness indicators measure outcomes for clients —a more popular indicator. That popularity shrinks with the necessity of measurement methods. An example of an effectiveness measure is “percentage of goals achieved.” Not many human service professionals have the experience of continuous outcome measures of their service. Not many welcome such measurements.
These bottom lines require a discipline of common measures acceptable to all staff. Their indicators are more a matter of relationships and trust than the mechanics of measurement.
It should be apparent that these two bottom lines of human services offer solid evidence of the organization’s helpfulness. In more blunt language, without such indicators, the organization does not know what it is doing.
5. Quality assurance. This refers to a continuous process of monitoring service practices based on written standards of practice. Standards must be selected with full participation by all practitioners. A monitoring system acceptable to all must be designed.
Imagine asking local clergy to meet to develop standards for their ministry roles. Then, try to imagine these clergy serving with a monitoring system that reviews logs of their actual practices.
However complex quality assurance is, no claim for quality is justified without a
