126 – 8 Ways to Empower, Not Rescue Nonprofit Employees & Volunteers

September 5, 2024

Episode #126: 8 Ways to Empower, Not Rescue Nonprofit Employees & Volunteers 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast, Tobi shares the 8 ways to empower, not rescue nonprofit employees and volunteers. She discusses the importance of coaching skills for nonprofit professionals who work with volunteers, highlighting key lessons and frameworks that help improve performance. 

Tobi outlines how nonprofit organizations can effectively support their teams without resorting to ‘rescuing’ them, enabling real growth and transformation by focusing on fostering accountability, reframing mindsets, and enhancing leadership skills. 

Nonprofit Employees – Episode Highlights

• [00:29] – The Importance of Coaching in Volunteer Management 
• [02:09] – Training vs. Coaching: A Deep Dive 
• [06:17] – Empowerment Over Rescue: Key Concepts 
• [08:51] – Eight Ways to Empower Nonprofit Employees and Volunteers 
• [12:52] – #1 – Acknowledge the System and Dynamics at Play 
• [14:49] – #2 – Help Employees and Volunteers Focus on the Overall Goal 
• [16:53] – #3 – Exploring What’s at Stake if Change Doesn’t Occur 
• [18:46] – #4 – Ask Instead of Telling 
• [24:05] – #5 – Reframing Mindsets for Growth 
• [30:43] – #6 – Establish Clear Boundaries and Eliminate Triangulation 
• [32:29] – #7 – Build Clarity vs. Wishful Thinking or Denial 
• [35:01] – #8 – Foster Informed Accountability 
• [40:41] – Conclusion and Final Thoughts 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Membership Community 
• Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #061 Training for Nonprofits – How We’ve Got it All Wrong 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #012 Training Volunteers What I Wished I Would Have Known 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #126 Transcript: 8 Ways to Empower, Not Rescue Nonprofit Employees & Volunteers 

Tobi: Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I have just gotten off such a wonderful training experience today. I was working with our Volunteer Pro members around coaching. And, you know, I haven’t done any training on coaching in our community, or elsewhere for that matter, ever. 

And I am a coach and a consultant and do this for a living, and I couldn’t believe it. But I really started to think about it, and folks started to ask in the community, hey, we need help working with our volunteers. Specifically, we need help coaching our coworkers who work with volunteers. And it was a huge request. 

Lots of people found that a problem. positive and popular requests to ask is we, we survey our members every six months to find out what topics are of interest and what they’re working on and where they can use help. So, we always design our training calendar based on our members’ needs. And this was a hot topic 

And it really was because a lot of people showed up today to learn how to coach. And It’s something I take for granted because I’ve been doing it for so long that was kind of interesting to pick apart how I actually go about coaching and also just share some really simple frameworks that can help us improve performance, especially in our organizations, because the better we are at our jobs, the bigger impact we’re going to make in our communities. 

Often, when we think about working with volunteers, I get a lot of requests and I do train on how to train others, training the trainer, right? And we think that training, all our coworkers need is a little bit of training and awareness about volunteers, and everything will be fine. But you’ve got to realize that what you are training people on is a skill set that uses a lot of emotion, that uses a lot of intuition, that uses a lot of emotional intelligence. 

It’s leadership. When we’re talking about working with volunteers, we’re talking about collaboration, we’re talking about leadership. And it really does take a special set of skills to be able to work with volunteers effectively. In fact, I would argue that it’s more difficult than working with paid staff because volunteers can simply vote with their feet if they don’t like what’s going on, and paid staff are more likely to stick around even if their supervision or their leadership isn’t that great. 

So first off, we must acknowledge that training for leadership in this kind of complex leadership isn’t a one and done kind of thing. So, what’s the solution? Do we train over and repeatedly? Or do we try something different? And you know, there was a great book by Harold Stolovitch and Erika Keeps years ago. 

This was in the 2000s. This is one of the big books of learning and development. If you’re in the learning and development space, you’ve heard of, probably heard of these authors, but they wrote a book called Telling a Training. So, it’s all about how presentation style training doesn’t really cut it when it comes to training people to do things. 

Now, you know, we can argue one way or another. There are ways to support presentation style training, and certainly we do a lot of extra support around that. But they also did a book called Training Ain’t Performance, which is an interesting look at, is training enough? And is it that our training just needs to get better, our content needs to get better, if people aren’t learning? 

Is it that people aren’t paying attention, they’re not committed to learning? And we find that human beings sometimes need multiple modalities in terms of acquiring new skills, especially complex skills. And Stolovitch notes in his book, training is often necessary, but rarely adequate. And I think that’s true when it comes to building leadership skills, because it’s a complex set of skills, and often the folks that are tasked with supervising volunteers have never received any supervisory training in the past. 

They may never have supervised a direct report who’s paid. And so, we can’t assume that a one and done hour long training, for example, on how to lead volunteers, is going to cut the mustard. It helps people, certainly, but the second part of really engineering and designing for human performance is coaching. 

So training is great, but training plus coaching is excellent. And so, I spent about an hour training our volunteer pro members on coaching skills and giving them frameworks. Now, of course, in an ideal world, I’d love to be able to be in a room with them and have them practice those coaching skills, but they’re going to have to do it on the job because sometimes that’s the way it goes. 

But we have a workbook. book. We have an online community. We have live calls where people can ask and get feedback on their coaching if they come up against issues. So, there’s additional support provided outside the training. So, we’ve got to think about this. How can we coach nonprofit employees to better lead volunteers? 

And One of the ways, key concepts or key lessons that I shared during this training, there was a lot in it, but I thought I’d pull out one thing for you today. And that is that we need to learn how to empower, not rescue our nonprofit employees and our volunteers. So, anybody who’s leading others, we really need to empower, not rescue them. 

And, you know, there’s a real reason for that. First, if we rescue, we often rescue, like I said on our webinar today, I said, don’t rescue before they break through. So, when people are transforming. How they lead. They’re transforming and trying new behaviors. They’re trying to influence others in different ways. 

They’re trying to inspire others. They’re trying to be more productive. They’re trying to build more teamwork. Any of that, uh, it takes some time. And when they’re coaching others, they need to not rescue them before they experience that breakthrough moment. If we rescue people, they don’t have the opportunity. 

We basically rob them of their breakthrough moment, the aha moment where the light bulb goes off and we say, ah, I finally get it. The penny dropped. We robbed them of that when we rescued them. Now, I know people ask us to rescue them. We, you know, people come to us all the time and put a big fat problem in our laps and say, I don’t know how to fix this. 

So, I want to share today what you do when people do that. Because you’re going to put that big fat problem back on their lap. And you’re going to help them deal with it, right? Because the more you rescue, not only do you rob people of their breakthroughs, their aha moments, their insights, their ability to grow as a professional. 

You also create a situation where you’re the person people always come to be rescued, and you train people to come back to you repeatedly. Now, maybe that feeds your ego a little bit, but it gets overwhelming pretty darn fast. And so, we’ve got to help people become empowered. And I know empowerment’s a big You know, it’s a word that’s commonly and often used in the nonprofit sector. 

Sometimes it has no meaning whatsoever. Today, I want it to have real meaning. Let’s talk about eight ways to empower, not rescue nonprofit employees and volunteers. Before we get too far into this, I also want to mention if you’re interested in learning and development, you’re interested in training presentation, and my thoughts on the training side of things versus today we’re talking about the coaching side of things, I have a couple of Volunteer Nation podcast episodes that I’ll link to in the show notes. 

One is Volunteer Nation episode 61 where I talk about training for nonprofits, how we’ve got it all wrong. So I talk about some of the things that, errors that I see people make, the, the mindsets that we have about training that we need to shift. And then episode 12, I talk about training volunteers, what I wish I would have known, and I dish a little bit on the mistakes I made early on when I was a young trainer. 

You know, when I first started working in the nonprofit sector, uh, one of my early jobs was as a trainer and I would travel around. my state or my region and train volunteers every month. And so, I was on my feet training people nonstop. And I’ve never stopped since. I’ve been training, oh, I don’t know, 30 plus years, and it’s like second nature to me. 

But not everybody starts there. And I remember when I first started, I was not a volunteer. Absolutely awesome at training. It was scary in the beginning. I remember my first big presentation in front of a conference and my voice went so low, my, my, I started whispering practically because I was so nervous. 

And my boss later was just like, what happened to you? I said, I got a little nervous. And she said, well, you know, you don’t need to be nervous. You’ve got things to say. So, we all start somewhere. And With coaching, it’s the same, you know, empowering others through coaching, through how we’re working and partnering with others. 

That’s also not something we’re born to do. I mean, there’s very few people, certainly we all have emotional intelligence, but we’re not necessarily born with the skill of eliciting a behavior change in someone and we’re not really eliciting. I would say facilitating is a better way to describe it. 

Training is about presenting and helping people acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities. Coaching is more what happens on the ground level. It’s what we do to support others to recognize in themselves their ability to transform. Coaching is more questions than training is. Coaching is more questions than telling. 

And so, when we are coaching in a true sense of the word of coaching, we’re asking questions and helping our coworkers or our nonprofit employees and our volunteers, we’re helping them self-reflect and they make decisions. 

And so that’s coaching in the true sense of the word. And it’s just a joy because you assume when you’re a coach that the people you’re coaching have the answers. And it’s a great way. That’s the first step to empowerment, right? Just assume other people have the answers. You’re just a facilitator. You’re just helping people recognize what’s already in their head. 

Now, sometimes training can be that way. I’ve delivered trainings where folks will tell me, you know what, you reinforced and validated everything I know about this. And I said, well, good. That’s part of my job as a trainer is to help you build confidence. So that’s a little bit of the differences between training and coaching. 

But let’s move on and let me give you these eight ways to empower, not rescue nonprofit employees and volunteers. Again, these are particularly relevant when coaching others to help them improve their leadership skills. I’m focused today really on leadership development. The number one way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to acknowledge the system and team dynamics at play. 

It’s important. When we’re in a nonprofit sector, we need to understand, especially for a coach, we need to understand the context and systems and how they impact us and how we behave. We often think and leave it up to the individual to take responsibility for change, but there are often forces at work in our organizations that keep us from making change happen. 

Sometimes it might be because we don’t feel safe. Sometimes it might be because we’re always undercut when we make changes. You know, we’re always subverted. There’s a lot of reasons that culture may not support change. We may fear losing our jobs if we shake it up too much. There’s lots of reasons systemically why people might resist or might not take the opportunity of change that’s being offered through coaching. 

So, I think when we start out with coaching and helping people become empowered, we need to understand that there’s a system at play and that folks have a choice and sometimes the right choice is for them not to change. And I know that’s hard to, you know, most of us are aspirational. We want to see everyone evolve, but sometimes, you know, it’s just not the way it’s just not going to happen. 

And we need to acknowledge that and sometimes see what we can do to be advocates for change in our own way. If we, if we feel like it’s safe for us to be the rabble rouser, okay, so that’s the number one way to empower nonprofit employees is to listen to them. To make sure we understand the context and the pressures they feel and what the team dynamics are at play and that kind of thing. 

The second way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to focus on or help them focus on the overall goal. And the other Our goal, often when we’re coaching others, is to help, especially when we’re coaching, nonprofit employees or our coworkers, is to help them strengthen their connections with not only volunteers in this context, but also with their supervisor and peers. 

And we need to keep this in mind when we’re coaching and helping others become empowered or creating a space for people to feel like they can step into their own empowerment. Certainly, we’re not rescuing people. That’s not our role. Just helping people and encouraging people and, and really asking the right questions so people can self-reflect. 

So, our goal as a coach is to help our coworkers strengthen their connections with volunteers again, but also with their supervisors and peers. And the reason I say this is certainly when if you’re a leader of volunteers or a director or an executive at a nonprofit and you’re coaching others to work with volunteers, you often just leave it at that. 

But imagine how it’s going to improve the relationship if they begin to work with volunteers more effectively, how that’s going to improve their relationship with their supervisor, right? There’s not going to be as much conflict, or how it’s going to really improve the relationship with their peers. 

Let’s say they won’t be complaining all the time when they’re around their peers. Or their peers may not have to take up the slack because they’re always managing volunteer problems, right? Those problems have been resolved. So, there’s lots of ways that when someone becomes more adept at leadership, becomes a more empowered leader, that that also impacts others who they don’t lead and aren’t responsible for leading. 

So, I think that’s an interesting way to look at empowerment. Number three way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to help. The coachee, the person you’re coaching, explores what’s at stake if change doesn’t occur. The big why. So why should they go through the discomfort of making changes to behavior? 

Because you know what? Nobody likes to feel inadequate or feel like they are not, um, doing things. Adeptly, you know, imagine anything you started doing, you started learning from scratch, like started learning how to play guitar, or started learning how to make a speech, or started learning how to drive a stick shift, and you hadn’t done it before. 

You feel like a complete dork. And some of these are, it’s totally fine to look, look like a dork. You understand where, what the end result’s going to be. But in a workplace, things aren’t as safe. They’re not things we’re doing for our personal development. It might be for professional development, but it’s not for personal development. 

And so, sometimes we must help people become empowered by helping them understand why staying stuck isn’t helpful to them. And, you know, sometimes the big why is about our volunteers, sometimes the big why is about the organization, sometimes the big why is about the nonprofit employees themselves. 

It just depends, and people can find their own big whys. So as a coach, you want to be able to, um, facilitate a conversation about, well, why does this matter? Why do you think this matters? That you’re able to get to this next level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The fourth way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers, I’ve already talked about it, but it’s to ask instead of telling. 

So, ask questions instead of telling people how it is. Now, certainly you could offer advice, point people to resources, et cetera, but true empowerment comes from within. And so, when I’m coaching others, whether it’s coaching teams or individuals. Often, it’s small teams that I’m working with around volunteer engagement and helping them improve their volunteer engagement at their nonprofit. 

I first will ask a lot of questions. Even when I make discovery calls with folks before I even start working with them, I’ll ask a slew of questions. I’ll tell people, look, I’m going to be very, very nosy. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions, but it’ll help me understand your context and I want to understand it. 

So, I will ask a lot of questions to gather information. It also helps me gain insights into their particular challenges and where their strengths are and that kind of thing. But, you know, there’s this secret thing that questions do when we ask others, is they spark self-reflection. They spark self-reflection. 

For example, I was working with an organization on redesigning or redeveloping their volunteer strategy and I asked them, they said, look, we want our volunteers to feel like a million bucks. Well, hey, sign me up. I love doing jobs like that. And I was talking to the director, the executive director, and I said, you know, you really get it.

You really understand volunteers. How is it that you understand volunteers so well? And she said, well, I used to volunteer myself at a different chapter of the same organization. So, there’s a question I asked that just out of the blue helped me understand a little bit more about her commitment and her experience. 

Now, the other thing I asked her was, what is the main goal or what are some of the challenges that you’re coming up against? She said, well, not all my staff are taking on the support of volunteers in a serious way. And I’d like to see everybody contribute to this effort of making volunteers feel like a million bucks. 

And I asked her, so are the responsibilities for working with volunteers and supporting volunteers, are those included in their position descriptions of your nonprofit’s employees? And she said, um, no. And I said, um, interesting. And she said, wow. I can see why that would be important and she began to tell, began to tell me why it was important. 

Well, I can see how people aren’t going to be held accountable if responsibilities are not really detailed in their job description because they’re not going to get evaluated on them and they just don’t, they just feel like it’s an add on to their job and they’re not taking it seriously. And she said, I’m going to go and make these changes immediately. 

I didn’t need to tell her a thing. I just asked a simple question. And so often, our questions, instead of telling people, we ask questions to help people, to give people pause and help them self-reflect. Now, sometimes we don’t know what their answer’s going to be, and we don’t know what their, uh, reflection’s going to be. 

And that’s okay, because they’re going to need to come up with the answers, because the only answers they’re going to want to follow are their own. So, as a coach, we want to be able to empower people by just helping them think through problems more clearly. So sometimes my questions are about just helping them understand what the challenge is specifically that they’re trying to overcome. 

Often people come to me, and they don’t completely understand what the core problem is. So, part of my job is to help flesh that out. So those are four ways to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers. Yeah, you can use them with your employees. You can use them with your volunteers and volunteer leaders. 

These strategies can work with anybody. I’m going to take a quick pause from my top tips and return after the break and I’ll give you four more. So don’t go anywhere. I will be right back.  

Iif you’re enjoying this week’s episode of Volunteer Nation; we invite you to check out the Volunteer Pro Premium Membership. This community is the most comprehensive resource for attracting, engaging, and supporting dedicated high impact volunteer talent for your good cause. Volunteer Pro Premium Membership helps you build or renovate an effective volunteer program with less stress and more joy, so you can ditch the overwhelm and confidently carry your vision forward. 

And it’s the only implementation program of its kind that helps your organization build maturity across five phases of our proprietary system, the volunteer strategy success path. If you’re interested in learning more, visit volpro.net/join 

Okay, we’re back with my top tips for empowering, not rescuing our nonprofit employees and volunteers. 

And number five is to help vision and reframe mindsets for growth. So, what is reframing? Reframing is one of the most powerful things you can do. Just one of the most. powerful things you can do. It’s about helping people see things from a different perspective. So, some of the ways you can reframe for folks to help them Feel more empowered often you need to reframe people for people or help you do some reframing with people when They are feeling helpless when they are feeling like a victim when they are feeling like look I have this big fat problem I’m putting it in your lap I want you to solve it for me and you’re saying actually, I’m putting the big fat problem back in your lap and I will help you solve it But it’s got to sit in your lap. 

You want people to take accountability So One way to do that to get people unstuck is to reframe and help them see things in a different way. Now, this takes courage. It takes courage, but the result is so worth it. So, one of the things we do when we’re reframing mindsets is calling out limiting beliefs for folks. 

Like, you might be talking to somebody about volunteer recruitment, and they’ll say, you know what? I’ve tried everything. No one is interested in volunteering in my community. And that can’t be true, right? No absolute, there’s no absolutes in life, right? Well, there is. We’re all going to die. That’s about the only absolute, right? 

We’re all, anybody who’s born is going to die. That’s an absolute, right? But there’s really no one in the community at All is interested in volunteering. Well, that’s just not true. We know there are nonprofits that are overflowing with volunteers. They have, they, they don’t have enough roles for volunteers. 

We know that’s the case. I know there’s some people in our volunteer pro community for whom that’s the case. So, I know that’s true. We also know that there are people joining things and using, if people weren’t volunteering, organizations like Get Connect. Or websites like Idealist or VolunteerMatch, none of those would exist because nobody would be interested in volunteering, so nobody would use them, they’d go broke, right? 

So obviously people are interested in volunteering. You can see in political campaigns, when political campaigns get heated up, uh, lots of people come out to get out the vote and start volunteering. And those people may not volunteer for a nonprofit, but they certainly will volunteer for a political campaign. 

So, you can come up with multitudes of reasons or answers to, or ways to refute that assertion that no one is interested in volunteering anymore. So, you know, you’ve got to call out these limiting beliefs by debating with folks a little bit about them. But also, it helps to sort of reframe things. 

And say, what could be the other reasons why you’re not getting a lot of new volunteers signing up or applying? Could it be? Your website, could it be your messaging? How do you say, how does your messaging stack up to others on, for example, the volunteer match website? So, you start to ask questions and people start to realize, oh, okay, maybe there’s another way of looking at this. 

Another way to reframe is to change language. We know that language, the language we use, gives our brains cues about what’s possible and what’s going to happen in the future. There’s no future, I was sharing this in the webinar today, there’s no future out there waiting for us. There’s no, at the end of the rainbow, we just need to get to this future. 

It’s not out there waiting for us; we create it and move towards it. This is true empowerment. We vision and create the future we want, and we move towards it rather than it just hanging out there and we somehow bumble around and like arrive. That’s not it, right? That’s not it. So, we’ve got to help people reframe negative self-talk.  

Now, I’m not talking about beating yourself up, but I’m talking about talking more about what you do want than what you don’t want. That’s true empowerment to free yourself of the burden of just the heaviness of talking all the time about what you don’t want. So, for example. I don’t want to continue to be overwhelmed that you may be talking with someone like, when you’re nonprofit employees, I don’t want to keep doing all the volunteers work and feeling overwhelmed, right? 

Feel the energy and that doesn’t feel good. It feels like it’s not possible. It feels like I’m a victim. It feels like it’s not possible to overcome. Now what if you reframe that and said, you know what? I want to have. Better delegation skills are wanting to have solid, sophisticated, or professional delegation skills and leadership that inspires others to dream and do big. 

Like, that’s a whole different way of thinking, right? Or I want to strengthen how I delegate to others so that they take accountability for the tasks that they commit to. Much more affirmative, right, than I don’t want to be overwhelmed by taking up the slack for all my volunteers, right? You can see the agency, the empowerment when you change the language. 

The same result, it’s going to be the same result, but the way you talk about it really does matter. Words really do matter. You know, they lodge in your brain, and they can be words that give you energy or words that sap your energy. You know, again, the result that they’re looking for is the same. Have volunteers do the work that they commit to, right? 

That’s the result everyone’s looking for or this person would be looking for. Bye. We get to choose the words we use to describe the goal. And should we choose one? I say I choose ones that have lighted me up and given me energy versus ones that drag me down. So that’s another way to help people empower by reframing. 

Number six way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to establish clear boundaries and eliminate triangulation. Now this is your part, and you can model this so that other people can do it too. Triangulation is when It’s sort of the he said, she said and the finger pointing and the, you know, it’s sort of a teenager, if, if folks are still doing this, this is, we haven’t developed past teenager hood. 

I used to work with a lot of young people and young adults. I was telling people about this and, and, you know, we We’d have young people come to us and then they’d go, if they didn’t get the right answer, then they’d go to their case manager, they’d go to another staffer, pretty soon we have triangulation going on and different people talking in different ways. 

The other way triangulation happens is through people coming and complaining to you about other people. That’s triangulation. And I say, you know what? Hey, let’s all sit down together. You’re having complaints about this person. Let’s bring that person in and have an open conversation. And one of two things will happen. 

People will stop complaining to you because they don’t want to be called to the carpet. Now you’re, you’re just saying, I am going to facilitate a safe conversation so we can overcome this conflict, whatever it is. I’m a neutral party. Call me Switzerland, right? So, either, you know, either people are going to stop coming to you with drama because they don’t want to have to be accountable for their drama, or people will come to you, and you will help them by asking questions and supporting and empowering folks. 

You’ll start to empower them to work out their own challenges, and you can continue to encourage them to solve them at their own level. Yeah? So, this is a good one, clear boundaries for yourself, and then you can model the way for others. Thanks. Number seven way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to build toward clarity versus wishful thinking or denial. 

So, there’s a lot of wishful thinking out there around volunteer involvement. I hate, I hate to say it, but people brush a lot of stuff under the carpet. You know, if I just ignore it, it’ll go away. Let’s say you have a toxic volunteer. If I just ignore them, you know what? They donated a lot of money to us. 

We can’t say anything. We’re just going to have to tough it out and keep going. No one will notice. Nobody’s noticing this but me, probably not. Probably a lot of people are noticing it. It’s probably impacting other volunteers and staff as well. And so, we want to be able to build towards clarity whenever there’s a problem or people are trying to solve something. 

If you’re coaching someone, you want to help them create a description, a crystal-clear description of the problem they’re trying to solve. But we also want to make sure we’re ferreting out anything that’s wishful thinking, like, hey, we can just do this. Double our volunteer corps overnight. Well, that’s probably not going to happen. 

Let’s talk about a more realistic approach. You’re not trying to deflate anybody, but you’re also, or, you know, wishful thinking that people will just show up repeatedly, even though they’re not being treated well or supported. That’s another wish area of wishful thinking. There’s also just denial, denial that our marketing is working. 

Denial that our website is great. You know, there’s all kinds of denial. Um, so we need to be those truth tellers if we are helping others become empowered. By being truth tellers ourselves, we’re exhibiting and modeling a kind of courage, and that kind of courage becomes something that. other people pick up on. 

You know, it becomes something that’s contagious. Courage is contagious, you know. When people are courageous around you, you’re ready to step up and be courageous yourself. And so, if you can be that diplomatic, compassionate, truth teller that builds towards clarity, you help other people, you give them permission and help them feel like they can be empowered and be that truth teller as well. 

So, it’s a really great way to empower folks. Okay, last, number eight, last way to empower nonprofit employees and volunteers is to foster what I call informed accountability. Informed accountability. So, what I mean by that is, when we are coaching others, there are many options. Sometimes people don’t believe they have a lot of options. 

We tend to like to think things are black and white, where either, we either have this choice or this choice. There’s always like this binary choice. But in the real world, there’s a multitude of choices that we can make around a certain obstacle or barrier we’re trying to overcome. And, you know, there’s lots of nuances to this. 

So, one of the things you can do to foster informed accountability is to ask people to brainstorm several options, and they can be as crazy as they want in their options. I would say what are five different ways you could solve this problem, do you think, in your mind, right? Any other, and then you can probe people, any other ideas, and just start writing down crazy ideas of, for solving the problem.   

Okay. Then circle back and ask people or the person you’re coaching, which one do you like the best? Which one do you feel the best about? Which one do you think you could carry forward? Which one feels right to you? And they’ll tell you which one they, and you might ask, why do you say that? Tell me about that choice and tell me more about that and then ask people to choose.  

So, are you choosing that one or can you commit to that choice to solve this problem? You know, people may waffle a little bit and this fear starts to, well, what if I choose this and it doesn’t go wrong or it doesn’t go right? Well, what do we do? We go back to clean the slate, and we start over. 

But now you’ve got like, if you came up with five solutions, you’ve got four other ones to try out. So, we’re already halfway ahead of the game if this doesn’t work out, right? So, you can keep that positive, upbeat tone when people are choosing. But informed accountability, the other thing about informed accountability is you’re asking people, you’re asking people to think through consequences too. 

So, if we’ve got these five options, what would be the consequences of each, both intended and maybe unintended consequences? Let’s think through these a little bit. And then choose, right? So, this is a way for people to be very clear and informed about the choice they’re making, to make the commitment to the choice and then move forward. 

So, it builds accountability through becoming informed and thoughtful. Right. And you haven’t made the choice as the coach. It’s not your job to make the choice. It’s your job to help them, them make their choice now so that you can see how this is different than supervision. Coaching is different than supervision, although supervisors sometimes coach. 

So, when people have made their choice, you may also. Or when you’re discussing, uh, consequences, you may also coach them by saying, have you thought of X, Y, Z? Sometimes you know, or have you checked out this resource? So sometimes you can advise during the coaching process but doesn’t mean you’re giving people the answers. 

This is what true empowerment is. But people sometimes need support. to become empowered. And again, you’re not saving people. Your assumption as a coach is that they already have inside of them the ingredients of their own empowerment. But sometimes people need to guide a coach, a friendly supporter to help them build confidence, see things in different ways, overcome fear and doubt.  

There are all kinds of things that you’re doing to help, right? Helping them uncover, uh, limiting beliefs that they may not realize that they have, those kinds of things. I hope this helps you think about in whatever way you’re hoping to help people become empowered because remember, you don’t want to rescue before people break through. You’re robbing them of their breakthrough and their aha moment if you rescue them. Now people, again, people want you to rescue them. People ask us, people have learned helplessness in a lot of ways, but we don’t need to do that. 

And that’s not how we’re going to move forward with our missions and our difficult work. And our work is difficult in nonprofits. If it were easy, someone would have monetized it already and made a million bucks, right? So no, we, we have difficult work to do in this world. So, everyone must pull their weight. 

And everyone needs to become the best version of themselves if they can. And by coaching them and not rescuing them, you can help your coworkers, your nonprofit employees, your volunteers, become or transform or evolve to their true potential, to find and locate their true potential. You know, rescuing people keeps them from their true potential. But you have the power now with my eight tips for ways you can choose, and again, I gave you eight, so you can choose any of these, or not, you can choose others. But remember, bottom line, don’t rescue before the people you care about break through. Okay, so those are my tips for this week. 

I’ll be back next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. And hey, if you liked this episode, would you rate and review it? I would love it. Leave us a comment, share it with a friend. That’s the way we reach more people just like you who care about our communities, care about our nonprofits, and care about our volunteers. 

Alright, I’ll see you next week, same time, same place, on the Volunteer Nation.