Why the Same Six People Do Everything

There is a sentence that can sound like an observation about a volunteer organization and feel like a compliment to the people running it: the same six people do everything. It recognizes the work, which deserves recognizing. It also gives the people doing it a fairly comfortable explanation for why they are exhausted. We keep showing up. We keep saying yes. If a few more people did the same, perhaps we could all go home.

Six is really just shorthand. Sometimes it's eight. Sometimes two. Whatever the number happens to be, what interests me is how an arrangement like that becomes normal, because somewhere in this last year as Chamber president I helped build one. The same people kept doing everything partly because they were willing, and partly because the work had become easier for those people to do than for anyone else to take over.

So you ask the same person again.

The difficulty is that their competence has begun doing work neither of you necessarily intended. It makes them the obvious choice. The next time the job appears, there is less reason to discuss who should do it. Everyone knows who did it last time. The person may still be happy to help, but somewhere along the way the organization can stop asking whether they are available and start planning around the expectation that they will be.

Nobody has to behave badly for this to happen. A responsibility can accumulate through a series of invitations, each small enough to seem reasonable, until declining one requires explaining why you're no longer doing something everyone has come to understand as yours. That is a substantial consequence of having done a good job.

I don’t know how often prospective volunteers see that possibility before they ever agree to help. I can understand why they might. An organization delighted to discover a reliable person has every incentive to ask again. They have already learned the job. We know they are good. Recruiting someone else would mean starting over, and the people making the invitation are usually the ones who would have to find time for that.

Some people want an ongoing role. Organizations need them, and there is nothing wrong with inviting someone to stay. But a person ought to be able to recognize the point at which they are being asked to take responsibility for something. We should be able to tell them what that responsibility includes and give them a meaningful opportunity to decide. Otherwise, the person who agreed to help with an event can gradually inherit a small unpaid occupation, with performance expectations supplied by people who remember how well they did it last year.

The more reliable they are, the harder it may become for the organization to imagine proceeding without them. I know something about that from the inside.

Doing the work myself often felt like the responsible choice. There was always more waiting, and teaching someone a task could feel like adding an item to a list I was already failing to finish. Handling it removed one. At least for the afternoon.

What it also did was preserve the conditions under which I'd be the obvious person to handle it again. The information stayed with me. The relationship stayed with me. The next question came to me because I'd answered the previous one. Eventually, handing off a relatively simple task required handing over enough surrounding knowledge to explain why it had been simple when I did it.

I'd been saving time in installments and running up a bill.

And, because I would rather name this myself than leave the reader to supply it, being needed can feel very good.

I wanted to help the Chamber. I had useful experience. I could solve problems, and when something worked because I'd figured it out, I got the ordinary satisfaction of having made myself useful. I don’t think there's anything especially shameful about that. But it makes dependency harder to recognize while you're becoming the person everyone depends on. From where you’re sitting, you're answering questions and getting things done. People appreciate it. You have evidence that your presence matters. The possibility that your usefulness is making it harder for someone else to become useful is considerably less pleasant to consider.

It also complicates the familiar complaint about volunteers. Said often enough, the sentence about the six people can imply that everyone outside the reliable little group has failed to step up, while leaving the group’s own arrangements largely unexamined. Before I conclude that nobody can help, I have to ask how much of our work someone could reasonably take on without first acquiring a working knowledge of me. There were periods when the honest answer was far too little.

The high school students who helped run our candidate forum gave me evidence that the circle could be wider. I wrote about them in The Drawer Marked That One Time. They had specific responsibilities, clear rules and an assignment that ended when the evening did. They were terrific. Then I largely returned to thinking about capacity in terms of the people who were already inside the organization, because they were familiar and the next problem needed solving.

The students hadn’t been hiding. They simply hadn’t appeared in the version of volunteering I was carrying around in my head. That experience made me think about the shape of an invitation. If someone accepts the invitation and does the job well, can we let them finish? Can we thank them without quietly adding them to the list of people we assume will be available next time? Can they remain someone who helped us without becoming someone who owes us?

I don’t think every repeated invitation creates an obligation. I do think we need to notice when our planning begins depending on an answer we haven’t actually received.

We also need to notice what we are prepared to give away. Shared calendars help. Documenting processes and capturing vendor information help. I've been trying to make relationships belong to more than one person and information live somewhere more durable than my inbox. But giving someone access to the instructions doesn't accomplish much if I remain responsible for every decision.

Someone else needs room to exercise judgment. They need enough context to make a choice, enough authority to act on it and some room to do it differently from the way I would have. That's where my enthusiasm for delegation occasionally encounters my personality, and both require supervision.

It can take longer. It can feel less efficient. It also requires accepting that the organization may begin needing me a little less, which is an awkward measure of success for a person who has been working very hard to be useful. I'd like to think that's part of the job.

Before we agree to another worthwhile thing, there are questions worth making time for. Who would actually carry it? If the answer is a list of people who already carry everything, that tells us something about the proposal. What would someone new need in order to own a real piece of it? If the answer is currently in my head, getting it out belongs on the schedule too.

And what happens if nobody can take it on?

That question deserves an answer before the reliable people begin rearranging their lives around the gap.

Sometimes there really aren’t enough people. Sometimes an organization lacks the capacity to recruit and support more of them. Dividing work into smaller pieces does not make coordination disappear, and a town’s affection for a tradition doesn't always supply everyone needed to keep it going.

Sometimes a good thing has to remain undone. That's difficult to accept when the thing matters and the people asking have good reasons for wanting it. But an organization’s willingness to do worthwhile things needs some relationship to the human beings available to do them. The people who have helped before are among those human beings. They may care enormously about this place, but their previous generosity can't be the whole argument for asking more of them.

They should still have time to live here.