I believe that developing a viable leadership culture is about mindfully recognizing and appreciating people’s value. Even the value of those that complain. This is not about meetings, or facilitating engagement through voting. Potential volunteers want to be heard, respected, and valued in an authentic way. They don’t want to be criticized for making a suggestion. Individual contributors lack the mindfulness to turn critics into volunteers, and develop relationships with intentionality. I believe volunteer engagement suffers as a consequence.
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I agree with this. Where I think we differ is how to accomplish that and what factors affect that. I see a lot of what we put chairpersons through now as not valuing them at all and that’s what I think needs to change.
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I’m not sure we completely agree, because I think we are coming from two different angles. I think your argument disregards leadership skills as being an important part of the volunteer leadership roles at the Space. Instead, what I think you are arguing is that volunteer leadership shouldn’t need leadership skills, they just need to be empowered to do the job using whatever abilities they already have, even if they want to work alone, and make decisions alone.
The problem is, you speak of individual contributor roles, not chair roles. The Chairs, committees, and the Board can already delegate responsibility to individual contributors, if they choose to do so. This has already been in practice for a long time, albeit, not very consistently among the committees. I expect this is due to an inconsistency in leadership skills.
Someone in a leadership role, such as a committee chair, should be equipped to develop new relationships with a variety of people that won’t necessarily show appreciation. Here, I am making a distinction between someone who is a volunteer in leadership and a someone who is a volunteer individual contributor.
Yes, volunteers in leadership should be heard, recognized, and valued, just like everyone else. But volunteers in leadership can’t expect these things to come from the membership at large. That generally won’t happen very often. Having this expectation, and complaining about getting complained about won’t encourage people to work with you. It will be perceived by the membership with more negativity and cause a would-be volunteer to not volunteer, or maybe even leave the Space altogether. Instead, a committee chair feeling heard, recognized, and valued should come from senior leadership. I have faith that our present Board already does this.
I think that you’re arguing to force a square peg into a round hole without first rounding the edges. We should be filling leadership roles with people that at least want to learn leadership skills and be trained or mentored in leadership. We should not be seeking to change the environment so that leadership skills are irrelevant.
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Can you translate that into something directly applicable to the space? We have chairperson vacancies and I think change in policy is needed. I get that you don’t agree but can you go a step further and make recommendations? Or do you think leaving the committee leadership policy should be left as-is?