For an organization to serve its mission, a leader must serve its members.
“Half of our members are dead weight.”
“Other e-board members never take initiative.”
“Guys keep showing up at service events hung-over.”
The joys of running a student organization, right?
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Getting a group of 18-22-year-olds to voluntarily exert effort is a challenge. You can’t give raises to incentivize them or fire them if they don’t show up at events. But the success of your organization depends on these souls. So how do you get them engaged?
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I am going to share with you a quick story about how a student organization I was part of got turned around by using one simple principle that you can use to dramatically boost the engagement of your members as well.
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My junior year I served as president of our 3-semester-old fraternity chapter. We were struggling. The previous semester, we had one new person join – one. Offering free pizza at informational sessions apparently wasn’t drawing crowds. We had an anemic bank account, no one knew who we were on campus, and getting members to come to meetings was like herding cats. More than half of us were going to graduate by the end of the year and I wondered how long our chapter was going to stay afloat. At first I vented to my e-board members: “How are we going to fix all these issues? How are we going to increase recruitment by the end of the year when most of the guys aren’t doing anything?”
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But our advisor told me not to worry about the organization, but rather to think about what our members wanted. Focusing energy on making our crew members happier didn’t sound very logical as our figurative ship was about to go the way of the Titanic. Nevertheless, I shared this advice with our e-board – nothing to lose, right? We thought about our organization and realized the depth of untapped skills and interests among our members. We thought to ourselves, “Okay, forget the organization’s problems for a moment — what do our members want?”
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We had a newer member named Kyle, who enjoyed making videos for class projects and he wanted to make a video for us. Making a “chapter video” was unprecedented at the time (this was before YouTube existed), but we pitched the idea and the guys loved it. Our internal listserv was boiling over with discussions about the video, which quickly became the talk of our friends. The video project allowed each member to get something that he wanted as well. Some got to show off their unique strengths in the video – playing basketball, rapping, dancing – and some got to help write the script, shoot, and edit. At the next informational meeting, every seat in the room was filled. We even ran out of pizza. Students were all waiting to see the video that everyone had been talking about. Needless to say, we had no problems hitting our recruitment goals.
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If we had simply focused on fixing the problems of the organization, we probably would have had the same halfhearted meetings and events – and no new members. Instead, by focusing on what our members wanted to do and get out of their experience, each person was able to be creative, take ownership of something, get in the limelight, and have fun. We didn’t even have to call meetings – people organized themselves to work because they were excited about the project. And the payoff was huge.
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When it comes to getting things done in a group, Colin Powell wisely prescribes: “Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.” [emphasis mine] Thank you, General Powell – the lifeblood of any organization is its people.
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So how do you get people to do something? Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, amongst his beliefs, asserted that people act primarily to serve their self-interest. One of the charges of leadership is to figure out how your organization can help fulfill the unique self-interest of each of your members.
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The moral of this story is that for your organization only works if your members are taking action, and for your members to be engaged, they have to get something out of it. (You don’t pay them, remember?)
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The best way to find out what they want is simple: Ask your members, “What do you want to get out of this organization?”
You can do this through a quick one-on-one conversation and will be delighted to see how well people react to you asking them what they want.
Self-Test: Think about a member in your organization right now.
Do you know what he or she wants out of the experience? If not – go find out 
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Remember, it’s your members that make things happen – the more they get out of the experience, the more the organization gets out of them. Now get out there. Make Colin and Hobbes proud.
