Team Leadership Lessons from Volunteering

The Promotion-Experience Trap

We can all get stuck in the promotion-experience trap: a management position is open and you’re confident that you can do it, but they want experience in leadership which you don’t have.  You just need to get the job to get the experience. But you can’t get the job, because you don’t have the experience!  You’re stuck. But is there another way?

You’ve got to think, and act, outside the box. Volunteering is one great way to do this.  In many charities, clubs and societies, there are plenty of opportunities to lead and make a difference.  You just need to be prepared to do it for free. 

There are huge rewards to be gained and not just transactional ones. The whole experience can be transformative.  For me the experience of volunteering keeps giving in terms of learning about leadership and teaming. 

Volunteering

I’ve volunteered weekly since 2011 when I joined my local Scout group, initially as a chair of trustees, then as a team lead for a section of scouts. The experience has made a huge difference to me as a person, team player and leader.

Scouting is the largest voluntary educational youth movement in the world with over 60 million scouts and volunteers in 176 countries. In the UK, there are 450,000 scouts and 140,000 adult volunteers.  In my local scout group, volunteers come from all walks of life: employees in corporates and public sector and the self-employed; mums, dads, single parents and non-parents; full-time commuters and part-time locals. There is no typical volunteer. But each one has a reason for helping out – mostly because one or more of their children have joined, but there are plenty of other reasons too.

Do you volunteer?

In the UK, only 17% of people volunteer at least once per month and it is on a downward trend. The figures are disappointing because of the tremendous rewards from volunteering.  Not every hour needs to be valued in money.  Volunteering rewards in other ways such as joy, meaningful work and belonging.  Recent Gartner research indicates that these are a top priority for corporations in 2026.  So volunteering is a great place to learn that work can be different

Rich Experience

Volunteering in organisations such as scouts provides a rich learning experience.  This is because:

·         The number of people involved is typically much higher than in businesses

·         The variety of the programme means no two events are ever the same

·         The support that the overall organisation provides means you get guidance and training.

Within a short period, you could be running an activity involving 20 scouts. It could simple be a game lasting 10 minutes, a whole evening’s activity, or a 3-month programme. Within a few months, you can gain huge experience that might take years to access in a business environment.

Whilst running activities for young people can be daunting, the richest experience comes from working with peers – other adult volunteers.  It’s rich because this is where one truly learns the art of teaming and leadership.

Leading without authority

What makes volunteering such a great crucible for development is because no-one is paid.  Influence isn’t through authority, promises of rewards or threats of sacking. Instead, it’s about helping people find the meaning in the work, higher purpose and helping them find their innate motivation. They are volunteering for a reason – what is that reason? What are they interested in? What are they hoping to get?  What do they really gain? 

Being curious means being willing to listen.  Listening is an amazingly effective way of leading without authority. No-one has all the answers.  Listening often unearths ways forward that benefit everyone. 

For instance, I once I listened to a leader grumble about a shortage of volunteers, not in his section, but next age up – where some of his scouts would move to next.  I recognised the problem and was trying to formulate plans to address it. What made recruitment harder was this age benefitted from more experienced scout leaders. I asked him if he had anything else he wanted to discuss. At that moment he proposed that he move up to lead the older age group. It was a fantastic idea that I never saw that coming, but an elegant solution which positively affected the whole group.  I believe that if I hadn’t asked and listened, that solution wouldn’t have emerged.

The Leaders Team

Charities typically need lots of volunteers. The more adult volunteers you have, the more one needs to focus on teaming – thinking about the whole team, not just individuals. And as a team leader in scouts, one quickly realises that the job is not about leading the young people, but instead, leading the adult leaders team.

Over the years I’ve learned many skills as a team leader.  Here are just a few skills that anyone can learn from volunteering as part of a team:

• Finding out and providing opportunities in what motivates people

• Delegating responsibilities

• Providing encouragement and support – without interfering

• Developing others to take the initiative or make decisions

• Role modelling a preferred way of working – walking the talk

• Enabling other people to do things differently from how you would do them

• Ways to build trust within the team

• Recruiting, retaining, and also letting go of volunteers to keep the team fresh, relevant and purposeful

Inter-Dependent Teams

One of my biggest successes as a scout volunteer was setting up a team with the sole purpose of rebuilding the scout HQ. It was this experience that helped me really appreciate the power of interdependent teams. I had the opportunity to design the team from the start.  Rather than recruiting as many people as possible and then trying to coordinate, I started with the principle that everyone needed to play a unique role which contributed towards a shared goal, and that every role would depend on every other role to achieve the shared goal. This would ensure that everyone in the team would be mutually responsible. In other words, we would all care equally for the goal and each other’s achievements in the team. 

This is fundamental in Inter-Dependent Teams. 

I recruited volunteers for all the roles needed to rebuild the scout HQ. This obviously involved fundraising, but also building requirements, and importantly, maintaining the scouting programme whilst there was no building! 

The team was a fantastic mix of complementary skills of people all working together to achieve a common goal, and everyone was a volunteer.  As a team, we raised £250,000 and spent it all demolishing and rebuilding, all within 10 months.  It was an amazing volunteering experience from which I learned some amazing lessons that I subsequently use as a team leader and as a team coach. 

Learning to Lead Leaders

What particularly makes me write this blog now is that I’m just off our annual scout camp. I am normally the one who organises and runs the annual camp.  Of course it’s a team effort, but I’ve been the one in overall charge. Even last year when another leader took over the organising and running, I was still playing an oversight role as he was doing it for the first time.

But this year, that same leader was now acting in the role of oversight for yet another leader learning to organise and run the annual camp. That meant I had no leadership role.  

You can see that in our leader team we don’t have fixed roles. One of the most successful ways of teaming that we have achieved is taking it in turns.  It takes the pressure off a single leader doing everything, it breaks up groves that can become ruts, and it broadens and deepens the capabilities across the team.  But it takes time and effort, and as a leader, I’ve had to learn to let go.  But the reward is that I don’t have to lead all the time!

So what did I do if I wasn’t leading?  For this summer camp I ended up being asked to be the First Aider. This role is unique in that it is singularly dedicated – it’s the only role you can do.  It means that if an accident happens, the First Aider doesn’t have to stop anything else to step in.

It made for an interesting challenge.  Because I still have loads of experience as a leader, and I’m still the leader outside of camp.  What’s more, being first aider meant I was always close to the action.  It meant that I had new leadership challenges.  For instance:

• Adults were treating me as if I was still the leader.  During one activity, another leader told me something that the camp leader needed to hear and make a decision on. It would be easy to get pulled into taking over. I had to ask that person to tell the camp leader, so that she could make the decision

• Some leaders found it difficult to do things differently and vented to me. A camp leader grumbled to me about some of the new ideas the camp leader was introducing.  I needed to support the camp leader. But if I told the person to do what the leader wanted, I’d be protecting the leader from someone’s genuine concern.  I needed to help the person talk directly to the camp leader.  For the camp leader to really experience the leadership role, she too needed to experience the concern, or else she would not have learned to listen to her team.

• Safety concerns still need to be called out.  Anyone in a leader team needs to be able to call out any safety concerns. As an experienced leader, I’m very aware of many safety issues (and simple ways to manage them) and would always address them. Outside of my leadership role, I still have an obligation to call them out.  But there is a fine line between calling out safety issues and undermining the camp leader who may be taking a little while longer to address the risk. Sometimes I stepped in and felt like I was treading on toes, other times I didn’t intervene and no issue arose. This was the trickiest issue I had to address, since at times I felt my voice was misinterpreted as an intervening leader, rather than as a team member who had something to say. 

Always room for improvement

This last point is the area where I believe I can make the most improvements as a leader.

We always conduct an after-action review to learn what we can, and this will be one topic I raise when we review this camp.  We’ve reviewed some very tricky topics together as a team.  It’s hard but so rewarding as it’s moments like this when I value the fullness of us as a team.  We trust each other to raise difficult topics, review them fairly and move forward together.  And in doing so we experience real friendship, deep values and a sense of achievement and belonging.  Everything you want to learn about teaming. 

And everything businesses would benefit from.

Explore our Mastering Extra-Dependent Teams to learn how to stimulate the right kind of collaboration and unlock high performance in your organisation.