“Culture doesn’t sit on a whiteboard. It lives in tone, habits, and what goes unsaid.”
Walk into any volunteer-led space and give it a moment. You can usually feel it. Sometimes, there’s a warmth in the air. A sense of shared purpose. A gentle rhythm to how people interact, help one another, and get things done. Other times, something feels heavier. There’s a quiet resistance in the room. A sense that not much changes here, and maybe not much is allowed to.
This isn’t incidental. In volunteer settings, culture is not just the backdrop to the work. It is the work.
The Challenge of Leading Without Levers
In most workplaces, leaders have levers. Tools. Systems of accountability. If someone’s performance is off, there’s a formal route. If cultural change is needed, policy and management structures can nudge it along.
But in volunteer settings, that’s not how it works.
You can’t compel someone to show up.
You can’t offer bonuses or threaten probation.
Often, even those in leadership positions are volunteers themselves; trying to build community, solve problems, and model behaviour, all without a position of formal authority.
Leadership here is about influence, not instruction. That makes it uniquely human and uniquely fragile.
According to Rochester, Paine and Howlett (2012), leadership in voluntary organisations tends to be diffuse, shared, and negotiated. It is rarely top-down. That makes volunteer culture deeply dependent on relationships and atmosphere. Not what you write down. But what you walk into.
When Inclusion Means Breaking Habits
Every organisation says it wants to be more inclusive. But inclusion doesn’t happen in statements. It happens in rooms. In first impressions. In what people notice and how they respond.
Imagine walking into a new volunteer setting, ready to help. You’re met with polite silence. Maybe a half-smile. There’s murmuring in the corner. Some eye-rolling when new ideas are suggested. You ask a question and get a response like, “Oh, we’ve always done it this way.”
Before you’ve even started, you already feel like you don’t belong.
There’s a name for what’s happening. Emotional contagion. Barsade (2002) describes how mood and tone spread through teams, often unconsciously. In settings where low-level negativity is normal, it doesn’t take long for enthusiasm to fade.
And in volunteer environments, the cost is immediate. People stop turning up.
The Weight of Legacy Leadership
I once spent time in an organisation that had been under the same local leadership for more than a decade. On paper, everything looked fine. No major complaints. No crisis.
But in conversation after conversation, what emerged was quiet frustration. Good people feeling stuck. Young volunteers unsure how to contribute. A feeling that things hadn’t moved in years. And wouldn’t.
It wasn’t because anyone had bad intentions. But over time, the space had begun to reward sameness and resist change. What Edgar Schein (2010) calls “cultural inertia”, the deeply held assumptions that stop new thinking in its tracks, was in full force.
When that kind of culture sets in, newer volunteers either adapt, leave, or disengage. And sometimes, they end up repeating the very patterns they hoped to challenge.
Culture Change by Influence, Not Instruction
In the voluntary sector, rules don’t change culture. Relationships do.
The most powerful cultural shifts I’ve seen have come not from policies, but from people. Volunteers showing up differently. Peers quietly supporting one another. Leaders modelling the values they hoped would take root.
Kouzes and Posner (2017) make this point clearly. One of the core practices of leadership is to “model the way.” People don’t follow instructions. They follow examples.
That’s why co-creating culture with volunteers isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s essential. If someone wasn’t involved in shaping the journey, don’t be surprised when they aren’t invested in taking it.
Clarity Isn’t Control
Sometimes, leaders in the sector worry that talking about culture too openly might feel too corporate. That setting behavioural expectations sounds like policy, not purpose.
But culture needs clarity. Without it, old habits stay in place. Power goes unchecked. And inclusion remains aspirational, not actual.
Schein’s work reinforces this. If leaders do not make values explicit and reinforce them consistently, old norms will reassert themselves by default. Culture is not neutral. It’s always forming. The question is whether we are shaping it intentionally.
You can’t stop every off day. But you can stop off days from becoming how things are.
What it Means to Carry Culture
Whether or not you have a title, if you lead volunteers, you carry the culture.
You decide, through tone, presence and response, what’s welcome.
You shape the conditions in which others feel seen.
You help create a space where people want to come back.
Culture isn’t soft. It’s foundational. It’s the emotional architecture of everything we do.
Final Thought
Culture in volunteer settings isn’t a side project. It is the environment in which all other efforts either thrive or wither.
It determines who shows up. Who stays. And who grows.
So ask yourself:
• What behaviours am I reinforcing through silence or celebration?
• Who might be quietly drifting away because they feel unseen?
• And what will I do this week to make the culture stronger than I found it?
Because ultimately, culture is not just what you declare.
It’s what you allow, what you celebrate, and what you choose not to ignore.
Footnotes
- Rochester, C., Ellis Paine, A., & Howlett, S. (2012). Volunteering and Society in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Barsade, S. G. (2002). The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094912
- Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
- Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
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