Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Just One Fix

How many volunteers in Ultimate do you know who do just *one* job?

I don’t know many. Most volunteers I know are doing all sorts of things – they might organise a team, coach some kids, run a tournament, be a committee, write a blog, book a field.

This is partly because its fun to do all sorts of stuff, and volunteering is and should be fun.

Its partly because different things start and finish at different times and require different amounts of time and involvement.

Partly too, “one thing leads to another”, and there are lots of synergies that can sometimes be found in doing these various jobs.

Mostly its because of demand though – Ultimate players and groups and as a new sport has lots of ideas and things to do.

And sadly, its often because once you have a bit of a track record in doing a good job as an Ultimate volunteer on one activity, people look to you to help them with everything else, and the volunteer becomes sucked in by the vacuum that’s there.

But maybe Ultimate volunteers should rethink this. Maybe they should just do one job, and do it really well? In fact, often the best jobs done in Ultimate are done by someone who’s dedicated to that one role or task, and not juggling a bunch of different things.

Can you simplify what you do for Ultimate, and thereby do what you do very well, and get a sense of achievement from that and model what we want everyone to be doing?

2 comments:

Rog said...

There's a lot to be said in favour of specialisation. Having taken many thousands of frisbee photos to the point of temporary loss of enthusiasm about anything related to frisbees or cameras, I can also see the need for variety.

An opportunity exists to make the most of specialist knowledge/experience, such as that which is distilled in the events manual, for example, by recognising, documenting and respectfully tapping such resources. Some of this already exists and happens in an organic kind of way, but not evenly across all areas.

In a way, I guess it's an extension of the AFDA director portfolios into smaller operational roles. Maybe someone wants to be the National Director of Event Hydration Operations, or the Chief Executive Blogger. :)

Apologies for the brain dump of long sentences.

sensei said...

A guy called Robert A Heinlein once said that "specialisation is for insects", but I may very well be quoting him significantly out of context here...

The great Motoko Kusanagi also said "overspecialise and you breed in weakness"...

But the Major was saying that from the context of her small special-ops unit where a diverse range of skills was required from a small group of people in order to cover all the bases they needed to cover.

The trick is to find out who is good at what (if they don't step up of their own accord) and get them on the payroll...