Leading and Managing in Tasmania’s Volunteer Sector

11/11/2021

Date of Publication:  May 2021

Authors: Dr Toby Newstead, Dr Gemma Lewis, and the Volunteer Leadership Research Group at UTAS in partnership with Volunteering Tasmania.

Published by: Volunteering Australia and University of Tasmania

Across Tasmania, volunteers provide a range of services that protect, support, and enhance the wellbeing and development of individuals, enterprises, places, and communities.  However, relatively little is known about how best to lead and manage volunteer communities.

This report was based on interviews and focus groups conducted with over 30 volunteer coordinators who collectively managed more than 5,000 volunteers.

While the majority of volunteer coordinators felt a strong sense of satisfaction about their work and activity, they also experienced three key challenges. They related to:

  1. HR resourcing - there are not enough resources available compared with HR in business;
  2. Leader identity - volunteer coordinators tend not to identify themselves as leaders, although in most cases they are actually exhibiting behaviours associated with very good leadership and training; and
  3. Training – there is a general lack of management skills within their organisations and a lack of specialised training opportunities for leaders and managers of volunteers.

There were two main recommendations in this study:

  1. Invest in providing and developing good leadership and management in the volunteer sector, through initiatives such as:
  • Leadership and management training for volunteer coordinators;
  • Appropriately resourcing the human resource functions of volunteer coordinators;
  • Investing in succession planning to ensure a pipeline of leaders and to cultivate a culture of leadership beyond straight management; and
  • Providing specialist training in managing volunteer mental health and wellbeing

 Conduct further research to examine the challenges, strengths, and opportunities of volunteer leadership and management from volunteers’ perspectives. This would:

  • Provide evidence of how Tasmanian volunteers currently experience leadership and management;
  • Identify how volunteers would like to be led and managed; and
  • Inform efforts to design and deliver specialised training for volunteer coordinators.

 The full report is available to download here.