3 Steps to Finding the Right Leaders for Employee Volunteer Teams

By Chris Jarvis

When it comes right down to it, the success of your company’s employee volunteering program rests on its ability to form, mobilize, and manage teams across all of the regions in which your company operates. Not only is the global nature of your company a hurdle, the various departments and business groups can make things very complicated. Here are three steps to success.

Step One: Finding the Right Employees to Lead Your Teams

First, you’ll need to identify the group of employees who will be instrumental to your program’s success. In order to generate widespread participation in the program, it is essential to find and collaborate with employees who are already volunteering in the community, either on their own time or through your company’s volunteering program.

How can you tell if you’ve found the “right” leader? Good question. You are looking for employees who demonstrate strong leadership skills through the practice of prosocial behavior such as volunteering. These are people with the existing enthusiasm, experience and energy upon which to build your program.

Sometimes senior managers appoint people to lead the program at their site or in their region. This almost always leads to failure. A solution we’ve found very successful to identify team leaders is through a simple interview process.

Potential leaders typically possess distinguishing characteristics:

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