Lesson Learnt

Look back and learn

Looking back on this week, it’s been full of challenges, some good, some not so good. Some work-related and some arising from my involvement in a voluntary group. And it’s the latter issue that I’d like to share with you today because, for me at least, it taught me a valuable lesson.

Working with staff is challenging, but working with volunteers is a whole other ballgame. When you're the “boss” you have a certain amount of authority that goes with your job title and the fact that you are paying people to work for you. As a leader in a voluntary group. You don’t. So getting people to do things needs more flexibility and nuance.

Having discovered that some members were not as engaged with the group’s online learning platform, I have been trying, for several weeks now, to encourage and educate them to participate and to show them how to do it. To cut a long story short,in the middle of this week, I reached the conclusion that I was wasting my time. As a result I was becoming increasingly disheartened, to the point where I was about to give up.

What particularly frustrated me was that I believed that the members were missing out on some really valuable learning resources that would help them achieve their goals that had caused them to join in the first place. I guess I was also upset that what I was doing to encourage them wasn’t working and I couldn’t understand why.

Then, on Thursday I had a video call with one of the members in question. To my surprise and delight, the first thing she did was tell me that she had been online and had caught up with her backlog of online learning. Apparently, the progress tracking spreadsheet I had shown her, spurred her into action. What was even more heartening was how she expressed this news. She was positive, upbeat and distinctly enthusiastic about it. It seemed that my efforts, with her at least, hadn’t been in vain after all.

We then went on to explore alternative approaches for getting the benefits of the programme across to the other members. By the end of a relatively short 15-minute conversation, we had, together, developed a list of great ideas and a bucket full of motivation to follow up on them.

The lessons for me were as follows-

• If you think something is worth doing, don’t give up on it before you have explored every avenue.,
• Remember that when it comes to communication and influence, once approach rarely works for everyone, so be prepared to be flexible and try multiple approaches. Which in turn reminded me of the quote from American Philosopher and Psychologist William James who defined Intelligence as having clear goals and multiple routes to achieving them. Or to consider the corollary, Having a clear goal but only one way to achieve it is folly.
• When you are stuck, remember to tap into the power of your network and ask for help. Sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees and talking the problem over with at least one other person can unlock a shed load of creativity,

So, in conclusion, the week ended on a high and my determination, and optimism, have been renewed. Now, I don’t know what kind of week you have but I sincerely hope it was a good one, at least in part,  And I hope that you, like me, learned something valuable.