When you give your commitment to join a board, committee or volunteer organization, is it because you have deep convictions for the project or are you doing it to give the appearance that you are more important than you actually are?
Charitable societies, social projects or community prosperity initiatives all require brain trusts and people to follow through on decisions, ideas and commitments. All too often, we see people who initially show excitement and support for a project only to lag behind and blame their busyness, schedule or various other commitments to other boards, committees and social projects.
People who sit on volunteer boards can be categorized as either heroes or zeros. The heroes make no excuses for their involvement because they find the time to just get things done. Zeros, however, want to give the outward appearance of caring about something but their level of care is evident in their participation. Zeros are aptly named because other than attending the meetings, their output is a zero.
It's one thing to be involved and to make your commitment to the project you choose to be involved with. It's quite another thing to give the illusion of being involved only so you can use the name of the humanitarian effort to advance yourself, not your project.
Volunteer organizations have a culture just like regular business. As volunteers, you are allowed to fire other volunteers who are not advancing your cause. In fact, if a board member is not advancing the cause by claiming to be too busy to do more than attend the meetings, then he or she is dragging down the cause. Separate yourself immediately from laggards who are "using" you to advance themselves. That board member is taking the space of someone who would be willing to do the work. Get rid of the roadblocks. Sometimes that means removing people.
If you're not prepared to participate fully to elevate your cause to one of greatness, then you are standing in the way of a group of people making a difference. And you become the reason why nothing changes.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist
Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture
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