Trust Your Volunteers

This trusted docent holds the keys to our non-profit kingdom.

At almost any gathering of professionals from small non-profits you will find at least one who truly believes that her or she is the only one who can do his or her job.

In two recent cases these were directors of small museums.

They guard their keys like the Holy Grail.  Work weekends because apparently no one else can open the building and refuse to leave their volunteers in charge.

How sad.  And really how silly.  I love my job but it is not brain surgery.

We have about six trusted volunteers who have the keys and all the alarm codes and are very, very capable of running the show on any given day.

If you don't trust your volunteers to sit in your museum and greet visitors then something needs to change.

You might need to recruit better volunteers but more than likely you need to loosen your grip on the keys.