Volunteer Commitments are Professional Commitments

A well-rounded professional career can benefit greatly from the experience, connections and mutual value that volunteer commitments can provide. However, your primary focus should be on providing value to your chosen community: you provide no value whatsoever in your volunteer role unless you are fully engaged and fully committed.

This applies to any committees you may choose to join, and it particularly applies to Board positions. For all intents and purposes, Board roles (including voluntary Board positions) mean that you and your Board colleagues oversee other people’s careers, expectations, goals and lives. As such, you are honour-bound to step up and do your absolute best. The root of any Board position is that it should never be “about you”.


If the commitment feels like a duty rather than a privilege, then please do your final duty and source an engaged individual who can fill your chair – and then get out of the way.

So many people join Boards for the wrong reasons: they are fulfilling employer expectations, or worse, they are padding their resume. If you are one of these people, do us all a favour and quit your position RIGHT NOW. You may not respect the magnitude of your Board position, but the staff of your organization certainly do, and you owe it to them (to say nothing of all other stakeholders in your organization) to give your volunteer role everything that you can give.


If you can’t, then please get out of the way of everyone else’s progress.