How does volunteering make someone a better leader? Volunteering offers plenty of benefits, mostly emotional but also mentally. We challenge ourselves in new ways that give us leadership qualities. Those qualities can then help us advance in our careers and in life.

How Does Volunteering Make Someone a Better Leader? | Challenging Environments

We can take advantage of many benefits from volunteering but how does volunteering make someone a better leader? Volunteering usually means working in a challenging environment. Those challenges can come in many different forms from the organizations budget to the people you are helping and beyond. Those challenges help us develop problem solving skills. A good leader needs to be prepared to face difficult challenges and then use critical thinking to find the solution. This happens a lot in the non-profit sector, especially with the budget. Charitable organizations often operate on donations which means the budget is constantly fluctuating and can sometimes be almost non-existent. But charities find ways to make it work and that is what creates the problem-solving leadership skill.

Reflection

Leaders need to be able to hear everyone on their team, evaluate the input, and decide what is best in the end. Volunteering allows you to see from the perspective of others more often. You will get a chance to talk to people that you may never have talked to before depending on the volunteer opportunity you accept. This allows you to reflect on yourself, your career path, and the way you deal with others on a regular basis. You can even develop more aggressive opinions which allow you to speak up more often. Speaking up is a powerful leadership quality that every leader must possess.

Get Uncomfortable

How does volunteering make someone a better leader? Volunteering is not always a comfortable experience. You must deal with people who may not be stable, environments that are not stable, and just instability in general. However, leaders often find themselves in uncomfortable situations. For example, leaders are often the ones who must do public speaking. The fear of public speaking affects more than 73% of the population. That means even leaders are uncomfortable with public speaking. However, they get past this, suck it up and move forward. Volunteering may not give you a ton of public speaking opportunities. But you will learn to speak to multiple people at once. You should remember that public speaking is just one uncomfortable example, there are plenty of others volunteering helps with.

Becoming Authentic

Being your authentic self is especially important to being a leader. Leaders must be able to listen to themselves, express themselves, and get their points across as often as possible. All of that means being authentic to yourself and having the confidence to bring your thoughts to the table. How does volunteering make someone a better leader? It makes us more authentic, more confident, and helps us to be more positive. This will come from the interactions you have with different people from different walks of life. Simply volunteering means you have one leadership skill already under your cap, the desire to better the world around you.

Becoming Passionate

Leaders are often the most passionate person in the room about whatever it is they are doing. Think about it, have you ever been in a meeting and just watched the clock while your boss was enthusiastically discussing quotas? That leader is trying to impose their passion on you helping you to become more passionate about your job. Volunteering is the same way except you will be surrounded by people who are passionate. Volunteering is not mandatory, hence the word we use for it. That means everyone is choosing to be there because they are passionate about the project they are working on. This gives you the chance to see what passion is really like or to pick something you’re passionate about so you can see why it is so important.