Dear volunteers: please stand still; frequent volunteer leadership rotation can keep you spinning.

No one can doubt that most volunteers in nonprofit leadership positions have the best interests of their organization at heart. Often they talk of infusing new energy into the group, of moving it forward, of getting out in front of the curve, and so on. But under certain circumstances the managers they employ desperately want to give them a different message: Please Stand Still.

Though a bit rare, there are situations when volunteers are committee members and members of the board of directors and their organization's policies require regular volunteer rotations. Typically this occurs when there is a practically guaranteed supply of board members, such as in a fraternal organization, or when membership is considered an honor or a perk.

In fact, it is the very thing that makes the position coveted that causes the problem in the first place: Because the group wants to make the posts available to as many people as possible the volunteers are required to spend no more than a year in their positions.

Requiring volunteer leaders to rotate through their positions every year or two causes many problems, not the least of which is that the organization's paid managers are whipsawed by the rapid-fire sequence of leadership changes. This year's leaders emphasize accountability and tight control, while next year's leaders demand initiative and creativity. Even if the staff can adapt to either approach, by the time they change the culture to fit the new style it's time to change it again. Battle fatigue sets in after a while.

When that occurs, one of two things follow: Either the staff grows a strong enough protective shell that it can ignore the leadership changes with impunity; Or, the staff becomes disempowered.

In the first instance, the leadership positions become largely symbolic because staff holds the real power. In the second case, staff is reduced to suppliers of administrative services with no substantive executive power.

There are other, more insidious results of volunteer hyper-rotation. One of the most damaging is the tendency for volunteers, who know they have a limited amount of time in which to leave their stamp on the organization, to gravitate to the concrete and the tangible. Such pull is a natural tendency if you can't have an impact on the big ideas. As one veteran nonprofit manager said, "If you can't see the forest, the natural tendency is to grab hold of a few trees." Naturally, that's not how organizations designed to serve the public operate most effectively.

Musical chairs

Another outcome is constant administrative changes. Either because board members demand it or because it's a necessary coping mechanism, processes get changed constantly. Workarounds proliferate as all kinds of administrative mechanisms get extended, cut back, or re-directed every year. Eventually, even routine administrative systems get hardening of the arteries and the whole organism slows down. There's often a sense that all that is needed is more competent staff, or a moratorium on changes, but somehow nothing seems to work, and the organization just goes on.

This is not an attractive picture, and readers who must deal with constant volunteer rotation know it with every ounce of their being. So, what can be done?

First, recognize that the volunteers mean well. Really, they do. The chances are excellent that they're all committed to the organization and its mission as they understand it, and they very much want it to succeed. They would be puzzled and possibly even offended if you pointed to their behavior as part of a problem. A simple, well thought out explanation of the problem along with some possible solutions could remedy things.

On the other hand, it probably won't work. This is, after all, a structural problem since the constant flow of leaders into and out of offices is likely rooted in by-laws and long-established procedures and customs. So a deeper analysis and a long-term plan are in order.

Start by recognizing that what is really happening is due to a loss of organizational focus. That parade of leaders means that the individual, not the institution, is the chief focus of action. It is the ultimate individualist lifestyle applied to the leadership role. Recognize also what the volunteers are getting from their jobs--most likely a measure of power, recognition, and perhaps some perks.

But, the recognition they're getting is based on their having achieved the position, not on what they have achieved in the position. Even the most insulated of volunteers has to recognize to some degree that the organization is under-achieving, and no one can derive satisfaction from that situation.

Course of action

To change the culture, the streetsmart manager needs to broaden the focus by lengthening the baseline orientation of a year. Fortunately, the organization is likely already to have a source of broader focus--its mission. Assuming a certain timelessness in the mission statement, the task is to find a way to keep the integrity of the one- or two-year time orientation while putting it in a larger context. The intention is to task each one-or two-year leadership stint with its part of accomplishing a larger goal.

This may sound like a strategy, and to a large extent it is, but it may not be wise to label it that way. People aspiring to leadership positions, especially volunteer ones with a short time frame, are likely to be doers, and doers often don't take kindly to strategy. For them it's "action first, strategy second--if at all."

In this situation, anything that stretches that time frame can help. There is one thing that many nonprofits do that automatically stretches institutional time orientation, and brings in money besides a capital campaign. It's an important effort not because it's the only way to counteract a year-by-year time frame, but because it contains so many of the right kinds of experiences for the short-term oriented organization as a whole.

Consider what a capital campaign offers an organization--an outsized goal, a long-term commitment for both the campaign and then for the execution of the goal, exposure to many new individuals inside and outside the organization with new perspectives, and a tangible payoff. The organization literally has to commit years to the cause, and each generation of volunteers has a different role to play depending on the stage of the campaign. Even if successive volunteer leaders wanted to, it is hard to divert internal resources to some other purpose.

This is not to say that a capital campaign is the best way to counter the short-term thinking that fast volunteer rotation encourages, it just has many of the elements one needs. Undertaking a program with a finite but multi-year life span is another, and so is a major alliance that brings the organization into contact with other ways of doing things.

In the truly long-term the only effective approach is to lengthen the volunteers' term of leadership. For the immediate future, though, lengthening the general time orientation will accomplish something similar. Frequent volunteer leadership rotation can keep an organization spinning, but changing its strategic focus can at least turn that into slow motion.

Thomas A. McLaughlin is a national nonprofit management consultant with Grant Thornton in Boston. He is the author of the book Nonprofit Strategic Positioning (John Wiley and Sons, 2006). His email address is [e-mail]