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Paul Clarke

Press Play

Published 5 days ago • 2 min read

Hi Reader

It’s late on a weeknight, and somewhere a volunteer chairperson, or similar, is watching a former international footballer on YouTube explain that a “good dressing room” comes down to attitude, honesty and hunger.

He’s not wrong. He’s just not much use on Thursday, when the committee meeting has three items nobody wants and the treasurer has gone quiet.

Last week a sports club chairman, a volunteer in the role, told me what he’d most have liked when he started: someone to explain what the role of a chairman actually is. He meant a conversation, not another document.

Ask most organisations about support for their volunteer leaders and they’ll point you to it: a phone line, a page on the website, a training module, a regional officer who’d be glad to help. Ask the volunteer leaders and you’ll often hear some version of “there isn’t really anything”.

Both are telling the truth. The support is available. It just isn’t properly offered.

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‘Available’ waits for someone to ask, ‘offered’ turns up and has a conversation. And the people who take on these roles are the least likely to ask for support. They tell you they’re fine and keep working away, and some feel that asking for help would mean taking resources from the very people they’re there to serve.

It’s not enough to have it on the menu. Somebody has to bring it to the table.

In 22 years of coaching, I can count on a few fingers the times someone above me rang to ask how I was doing, rather than how the team was performing.

Offering doesn’t need a budget. It’s more like a named person who rings a new volunteer-leader in their first month, and again in their third and sixth, and asks how they are rather than how the club or body is. It looks like twenty minutes before the vote at the AGM on what the role actually involves and requires, so nobody is learning it from a podcast or book at midnight.

Most organisations and civic bodies would say they already do this. It’s pretty simple to put that to the test - look back over the last three months and count how many times support was offered to a volunteer leader, as opposed to made available.

The former international footballer on YouTube is very good on dressing rooms but he can’t ask anyone watching how they're getting on.

So somewhere tonight another volunteer leader will press ‘play’.

My line of work is helping volunteer-led or dependent organisations keep the people who hold them together. It starts with confidential conversations that show where the pressure is landing, early enough to understand it and act on it. If recruiting or keeping volunteer leaders is a live issue for you, just reply to this newsletter and drop an email to paul@theleaders.coach

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Thank you for being part of this community.

The work on better personal performance is something you have to do alone.

But you don't have to do it on your own.

Onward and Upward,

Paul

​https://www.paulclarke.ie​

Connect with me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulclarkeperform/​

Beechmount Vale, Navan, Meath C15
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Paul Clarke

"Fine Lines" - For leaders in commercial, sport & volunteer-led organisations who'd rather be told the truth than told they're doing fine. We talk weekly about human performance under sustained pressure.

Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of organisational prosperity and human development - for leaders who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.

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