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Difficult conversations. We, volunteer managers don’t want to have them, but from time to time, we must. A complaint is lodged against a volunteer and we go numb. This shouldn’t be happening, because well, volunteers are selfless, caring souls who just want to help, right? Won’t we drive them away by reprimanding them?

To make matters worse, what about when a volunteer has an issue with staff and hopes that you will intervene?  Our hearts skip a beat. We’ve just spent hours recruiting and cultivating this volunteer, and now we imagine all that time evaporating.

It’s a part of our jobs we wish to avoid because initiating these conversations is uncomfortable. We exist in a world where we inspire and motivate, so correcting is somewhat foreign to us, a skill that needs to be dusted off once in a while.

But, in order to effectively…