communication department

By Rahel Bailie, Associate Fellow, Canada West Coast Chapter

Each spring, we go through the same ritual: put away our winter wardrobes, plant our gardens, and recruit a new STC administrative council. While there is no silver bullet that will guarantee a smooth transition, some sound principles will increase your likelihood of success.

Making Strategic Choices

Make strategic choices about incoming volunteers. Each community wants the best: someone who knows the industry and the issues, and has great leadership skills. What happens when you have to make choices between industry experience but no leadership, or leadership skills but lack of industry experience? The council will undoubtedly need people for various roles, and needs to find the best match between personalities and roles.

Put people with leadership skills at the helm; they can get industry information from the people on their teams. Those with more industry experience can hone their leadership skills by serving under a role model. As their leadership potential increases, they can take on more responsibility and make more strategic decisions.

Coping with Trends in Volunteerism

There has been a swing in the attitudes toward how people volunteer, which affects how much time they devote and how much emotional investment they make in their commitment. The change has gone from long-term civic duty to taking on shorter-term, project-based efforts. As well, volunteers are more likely to take on projects that have more relevance to their work lives. This can be a struggle for chapters—or an opportunity, if you can find ways to match volunteer opportunities to a volunteer’s desire to list a project on a résumé or try something they’d never get to do at work.

Developing a Strategic Plan

Update your strategic plan. A strategic plan is the cornerstone of any organization’s operational effectiveness. It acts as a roadmap for the incoming volunteers, and ultimately helps make the transition an easier one. The ideal is a three-year rolling plan. Develop the activities and concepts for three years. Then, each spring, examine the plan, add a year to it, and tweak the existing plan to respond to market conditions.

An easy-to-use and effective format for the rolling plan is a grid, shown in Figure 1, that serves as a cheat sheet to help the incoming council. It lists volunteer activities, and decreases the learning curve for new volunteers.

Figure 1. The volunteer activities listed in the chart below represent duties that can be identified in a community’s three-year strategic plan.

The plan may appear to have a lot of work for each team, but in reality, it’s not that much, as the matrix of items shows the intersection between, and dependency on, the work of other teams. In the plan, each team has three to six initiatives from which to choose. It’s important to have a mix of short-term and long-term initiatives. Short-term initiatives build a team’s momentum and help the team feel good about completing an accomplishment or two right away. That gives the teams enough stamina to tackle the long-term initiatives that will have a larger impact on the community’s health.

Setting a Plan for Council Turnover

Turn over a third of your council at a time. Nothing is more devastating to an organization than losing all the history, experience, and wisdom in one fell swoop. When an entire administrative council leaves, the learning curve of the incoming team is that much harder, as are their jobs, and the health of the community suffers. The best transition is to have a third of the council coming in for their first year (a learning year), a third of the council in their second year (when volunteers operate at their best performance), and a third of the council in their third year (where the voices of experience act as mentors for newer volunteers). If your situation is such that volunteers can’t commit to three years on council, compress the schedule. Keep new people coming on board and learning so that the inevitable attrition doesn’t hurt your council—or chapter —in the long run.

Have a succession plan. Some communities have succession plans in place that have the membership elect a vice president who becomes president the following year and past president in the final year. Applying this strategy to key volunteer teams will ensure a smooth transition from one year to the next. For example, a newsletter team member comes in as a junior member, transitions to a high-functioning member in the second year while a new person joins the team, and in the third year, takes more of a back seat and mentors the new team member. While this plan won’t work for all communities, particularly the smaller ones, certain aspects can be adapted to suit each community’s needs.

Hold a transition event. Having a three-year rolling plan is effective only if it gets used. It’s great to have documentation to pass along to the new team, but that is not a good substitute for face-to-face contact where real people pass along their knowledge and provide some context for activities and decisions of the previous year. After the spring elections, the outgoing and incoming volunteers should sit down to review the plan together. Whether the transition event takes the form of an evening meeting, a half-day workshop, or a weekend retreat, the goal is to gather ideas, compare notes, and create a positive atmosphere for the incoming volunteers.

One last thing. Don’t forget to have fun. You can’t hide the “flavor” of your administrative council, nor should you want to. When your council has the reputation of being fun and innovative, and that volunteering is a rewarding experience, your chapter will open itself up to a greater pool of potential volunteers. So as spring comes around the corner, along with STC community elections, it’s as good a time as any to make your chapter a great place to volunteer.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published with a slightly different title in the April 2003 issue of Leadership Tips, an e-mail bulletin formerly sent to STC leaders by the STC Leadership Tips Committee. The author has updated it for Tieline. We have chosen to republish this article because of its applicability to today’s STC leaders and issues.