STYLES

One important lesson that the Friends of Arrow Rock learned from working with the volunteers and interns relates to the adjustments in administrative style needed when significantly increasing the number of people involved in an institution. The Friends staff faced two main issues as they sought to broaden their personnel base:

1) As they worked with both volunteers and interns, certain staff members found they had a preference for interacting with one group or the other. Kathy Borgman stated that they learned this to be a matter of "style; some people naturally work better with volunteers than others." Without prior knowledge of these stylistic preferences, working with the different groups and age levels posed challenges to each individual on Arrow Rock's staff. Now realizing these preferences and styles, however, has allowed the Friends staff to administer its expanded volunteer core as optimally as possible. Most importantly, the staff can plan future projects according to its members' leadership styles.

2) In using different volunteers and attempting to capitalize on their talents, the staff needed to sacrifice a certain degree of control over the outcomes of the volunteer's work. As the Friends staff stated, they still struggle with striking the balance of giving the volunteers the freedom to work in their own way while still providing them with guidance. After all, the Friends need to maintain quality in their programs, but they would also like to retain the volunteers for the long term. Striking this middle ground entails giving the volunteers opportunities to have fun, as they reported having after the "Gunstocks and Bustles" event; however, providing-and following up on-adequate training for the volunteers has been challenging to a small staff which has been accustomed to implementing programs without much volunteer help. Kathy Borgman commented: "[It's a] control issue-you have to give up some of that and try to utilize different people … knowing that you can't always control the outcome…" Yet, the staff has also learned that "you can't grow if you don't do [these] things." So, they continue to work out the kinks in administrative style in order to form solid bases to use in future projects.