The Power of an Apprenticing Culture

Calvin and Hobbes are speeding down the hill in the little red wagon. Calvin says to his tiger friend, “I thrive on change!”

Hobbes responds skeptically, “You?

You threw a fit this morning because your mom put less jelly on your toast than yesterday.”

Calvin revises his statement, “I thrive on making other people change.”

Most people see delegation as getting other people to do the work they don’t want to do themselves. But abdication and abandonment are not the same as delegation.

In an abandonment culture, volunteers learn never to volunteer for anything, never to suggest an idea, because if they do, they “get stuck with it for life.” In an apprenticing culture, volunteers have all the support they need every step of the way, from the one-on-one orientation meeting to the final victory dance—and all the troubleshooting in between.

Most youth workers I know despise meetings. But for our ministries to be consistent, the unpredictable people who serve in our ministries need a predictable structure. When we assume that our volunteers will naturally do what we expect them to do, we delude ourselves. They will do only one thing predictably: be unpredictable.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter discovered in her fascinating study of winning streaks and losing streaks in business that:

  The losing companies are twice as likely as the winning companies to have reduced the number of management meetings in the preceding two years. At the very time when communication is most needed, losers are more likely to stop talking. ... Losers, compared with winners, are nearly four times as likely to keep information in the hands of a small group that operates in secrecy behind closed doors, shutting everyone else out.

In “winning” organizations, information flows freely; in “losing” organizations, a select few hold the information. Meetings are nowhere more important than in the delegation of responsibility to key volunteers. Three kinds of meetings are pivotal to developing this apprenticeship culture: orientation, check-in and celebration.

1. The Orientation

At this meeting, the ministry leader and the volunteer talk through the specific job description, the youth leader covenant, the overall mission of the youth ministry, and the unique scope and sequence of the work to be done. If we hope to give our volunteers load-bearing responsibility—the only kind that’s truly satisfying for a volunteer—this is essential.

During this orientation meeting, the leader might learn the specifics of building relationships with students, the general concept he or she agreed to initially. For example, a weekly volunteer might learn that he or she is responsible to:

• participate weekly in an assigned ministry setting (Sunday School, youth group or small-group Bible study)

• spend 30 minutes a week being in touch with his or her assigned students (for example, one week by phone, the next by e-mail, the next by letter, the next by attending a student’s game or going out for coffee)