Leadership That Supports its People

Most of the work that holds a community together is done by volunteers.

They bring time, skill, judgment, and care—often on top of full lives, jobs, families, and responsibilities. Healthy leadership begins by recognizing that reality and designing systems that respect it.

This is not just about one policy, one committee, or one meeting format. It’s about a broader pattern that shows up whenever volunteers name limits and the response is enforcement rather than support.

Good leadership does not assume capacity. It asks about it.

The new bylaws subcommittee requested a default in person meeting, and a Zoom link was shared over the objections of the organizer. This work matters, —work that goes directly to governance, member rights, and long-term stability—and accessibility matters. We can ask for that. 

When we instead demand how the work should happen without adequate attention to volunteer capacity and support, it’s a signal that the issue isn’t procedural. It’s cultural.

When something matters—accessibility, transparency, participation—the first question shouldn’t be “Why can’t you just do this?” 

It needs to be “What would help make this possible?” 

That distinction is not cosmetic. It determines whether people stay engaged or quietly step back.

Accessibility, for example, is often framed as a moral absolute, detached from the labor required to make it real. But accessibility is not something individual volunteers should be expected to personally absorb. It is a shared responsibility that leadership carries by providing tools, staffing, and clear choices. When access requirements are imposed without equipment, training, or consent, the result is not inclusion—it is burnout.

This pattern doesn’t stop with accessibility. It shows up in how governance work is structured, how feedback is handled, how rules are applied, and how much discretion volunteers are allowed to exercise in their roles. Again and again, the tension isn’t between values. It’s between support and compliance.

Support vs. Compliance

Leadership choices often come down to one question:

Where does responsibility live?

Support-based leadership assumes good faith and real capacity. When expectations are set, leaders ask what tools or help are needed to meet them. Boundaries are treated as information, not resistance. Responsibility stays with the organization.

Compliance-based leadership treats expectations as fixed and difficulty as a failure to comply. The burden of making systems work is pushed onto individuals. Uniformity matters more than impact.

The difference isn’t about having standards.

It’s about whether our people are supported in meeting them.

Over time, support builds trust and participation.

Compliance produces burnout and quiet withdrawal.

Communities grow when leadership chooses support.

Strong leaders understand that boundaries are not obstacles. They are how people remain willing to serve. When a volunteer says they are not comfortable hosting a Zoom meeting, or do not have the equipment to run a hybrid meeting well, the answer cannot be dismissal. 

Leadership is collaboration with many parties towards a shared goal. That collaboration can sound like: What support would help? Can we assign someone to assist? Can we set clear defaults and communicate them transparently?

These are not concessions.

Leadership isn’t about enforcing what the person in power thinks should be easy. It’s about building systems that acknowledge the real costs as experienced by volunteers and addressing those costs together.

Communities don’t lose volunteers because expectations exist. They lose volunteers when expectations are enforced without care or consideration.

We don’t have to accept burnout as the price of civic engagement. We don’t have to confuse authority with indifference. We don’t have to pretend there is only one way to do things.

We can choose leadership that listens first, supports openly, and treats volunteers not as resources to be used, but as neighbors to be respected.

That’s not idealism. That’s how communities last.

Why Support Has to Be Structural

In a previous volunteer leadership role, I served both as a communications director and as a Child and Volunteer Protection Advocate (CVPA). The CVPA role carried real responsibility: ensuring coaches completed required safety training. What it did not carry was enforcement power.

Early on, the system relied on the CVPA chasing people down — emails, reminders, phone calls — even though the CVPA was the person legally responsible if training wasn’t completed.

That wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t fair.

So we changed the structure. Division coordinators held team rosters until coaches completed their training and were approved by the CVPA, who checked the logs at regular intervals and reported. The responsibility moved upstream, to the people with leverage. Compliance became automatic for most teams — not because anyone worked harder, but because the system aligned authority with responsibility. It also set a timeline to get coaches trained each season, and provided a built-in backup system.

One coordinator objected. His position was that the CVPA should call coaches indefinitely, and that he would put untrained coaches on the field to get players moving faster. His decision made it harder to recruit CVPAs, a required position, led to volunteer burnout, and also put the organization at risk because he decided how another volunteer should complete their work, while he put untrained coaches on the field.

That moment clarified something important: The cost didn’t disappear. It was pushed onto the person with the least power and the most risk.

Support-based leadership fixes that. It doesn’t ask volunteers to absorb responsibility without authority. It redesigns systems so expectations can be met without burnout.

That lesson applies everywhere volunteers are asked to carry work that matters — from safety compliance to governance, accessibility, and bylaws. If leadership cares about outcomes, it has to care about how the work is structured, not just whether rules exist.