Written in 2014.
You will always see problems in an organisation you work with. Honestly, you’ll always see opportunities for improvement — that’s not a sign anything is particularly wrong.
The easiest way to get real, sustained improvement is by leading from within.
Pointing out problems doesn’t solve them. Finding ways to actually solve them, building coalitions and teams, and coming up with workable answers — that’s what produces lasting change.
A concrete example
There are more girls on the waiting list for Girl Scouts than there are troops to take them. More demand than supply, and the shortage isn’t of girls or interest. It’s of adults willing to lead.
Rather than comment on that and move on, I’m starting a Brownie troop this autumn.
But the more interesting part is what I’m doing alongside it. I’ll be working with the parents to identify patrol leaders within the troop, so we can split into manageable groups and plan the year properly.
By not asking anyone to step up and lead an entire troop — just to take a small piece — it becomes something a working parent can actually say yes to.
It is far easier to get small commitments than large ones.
Why that detail matters more than it looks
That’s the whole mechanism, and it generalises well beyond scouting.
The reason the waiting list exists isn’t that nobody cares. It’s that the ask is too big. “Lead a troop” means a year of weekly commitment, unknown hours, and sole responsibility — and most people, faced with that, decline and feel slightly guilty about it.
“Run one activity a month with three other parents” is a different question entirely, and a great many more people say yes to it.
Most volunteer shortages, and a fair number of staffing problems, are actually packaging problems. The work exists and people would do some of it, but it has been bundled into a unit nobody can accept. Break the unit down and the supply appears.
Worth asking, whenever you can’t get anyone to take something on: is this genuinely nobody’s appetite, or have I described it in a shape nobody can say yes to?
The same thing at work
I’ve used this repeatedly in my career.
At my last job the important work was crossing boundaries between groups — building relationships with teams that had no particular reason to cooperate with mine. I had to make those changes from inside and get them to hold, and persuade two parties with genuinely different priorities to work together, by leading from within and in between both of them.
Nobody appointed me to do that. There was no authority attached to it. It worked because I was doing the work alongside them rather than describing what ought to happen.
Why this beats leading from above
I could tell people all day to start troops. It’s much easier when they see me beside them with my sleeves rolled up.
There’s a straightforward reason for that, and it’s worth naming. Instruction from above carries an implicit claim: I’ve judged this worth doing, and I’ve judged that you should be the one doing it. People hear the second half.
Doing it alongside someone removes the judgement. You’re not assigning the cost, you’re sharing it. And once someone has seen you do the unglamorous version, your view of what’s worth doing carries considerably more weight.
This is also the only form of leadership available when you have no authority — which is most of the time, for most people, in most of the situations where change is actually needed. You rarely get to be in charge of the thing you can see needs fixing.
Three things that make it work
- Start it yourself. Not a proposal. The actual thing, in small form, visibly underway.
- Make the ask small enough to accept. A specific, bounded piece with a clear end. People join things that are already moving far more readily than they start them.
- Give the credit away. The moment it becomes your project, you’ve recreated the authority problem you were avoiding.
It’s a powerful tool, and it works in most things. Use it well.
