members.animalstaiwan.org

[Laurence]

Some ask me recently about how many people I can "coordinate"? Although they ask the question "coordinate" but I think they mean "delegate. " The answer is: I coordinate many people, maybe more than 30, but I almost can not delegate my work to maybe more than 3 people.

There is a big difference between coordinating and delegating.

As for coordinating volunteer, I need to ask very politely. Many times, people will respond " Hey, dood, how about you doing this like this and this and that?" "Is this smarter than the original method you tried?" I always hope that no matter how ridiculous their crazy idea are, I will never lose my patience. Sometimes, they respond "This week I am too busy, maybe next time?" I always hope that I can ask and ask again, and never lose my patience. The successful probability to get a totally new volunteer help our work for one time is about 10%. Maybe even lower.

However, my personal definition to delegation is: If I need to conquer a great task, if I divide this task into several parts, and then I can pass over a part to a active volunteer, who will always accept the part of work with probability about 70%.

The question is how to make a volunteer become willing to do work with strong motivation. This is a big question, and I have only my personal simple answer.
How?

The labor exchanging method
(1) I need the volunteers that I coordinating provide their personal difficulties to me. ( It should belong to problems that are not too difficult. For me, to repair a computer is not. )
(2) If I can solve his/her problems in very low cost, then I will do it.
(3) Given that she/he owe me a debt of several minutes work, then she/he will probably accept my delegation with higher probability.

The numeral example is like this:
(1) A volunteer have a problem that will cost 10 hours of labor, and he let me know that.
(2) I happen to be able to solve this problem in 1 hours, and I do that. ( Or, I happen to know a guy can solve this in one hour. )
(3) Because I am such a good helper, he decide to help me do a 5-hour-work.

The result is that both this volunteer and I have benefited from this labor exchanging system.