Why the same five people end up doing everything

Open your rota for the last three months and highlight every name that appears more than six times. In most programs that is somewhere between four and eight people, and those people are doing something like two thirds of the work. Everybody knows who they are. Half of them are tired and the other half are about to be.

The usual explanations are that the rest of the volunteers are less committed, or that people are busier than they used to be. I do not think either is the main cause. The main cause is that delegating costs more than doing, and it costs more every week, and the person who has to decide is always deciding under time pressure.

The arithmetic nobody puts on a slide

Two sets of numbers explain more about this than any amount of talk about culture.

The Urban Institute’s 2004 study of volunteer management capacity in American charities and congregations found that 62 percent of charities had somebody responsible for volunteers, but the median coordinator spent only 30 percent of their time on it. One in three had no training in volunteer management at all. Only one in eight had a full-time volunteer manager. That is twenty-year-old data and the picture has not obviously improved: the 2023 Volunteer Management Progress Report from Tobi Johnson & Associates, with 1,247 responses across 36 countries, found only 47 percent of volunteer managers spend more than three quarters of their hours on volunteer management, and only 20 percent are fully dedicated to it.

The same report puts the mean volunteer-to-supervisor ratio at 21 to 30 volunteers per supervisor.

Put those together and you get the actual job: one person, working perhaps a day and a half a week on volunteers, responsible for somewhere north of twenty of them, with no training in doing it. Under those constraints, concentration is not a failure of character. It is the only strategy available.

The trade that happens every Tuesday

Here is the decision in its real form. It is 4pm. The newsletter needs to go out tomorrow. You could send it yourself in forty minutes, or you could hand it to Marcus, who has offered twice, which means writing him a brief, walking him through the mailing tool, waiting, reviewing what he sends back, and fixing the two things he gets wrong. Call it two and a half hours across three days, and it still might slip.

Doing it yourself wins. It wins on Tuesday, it wins the following Tuesday, and it wins every Tuesday for a year. Each individual decision is correct. The accumulated result is a program where one person holds the newsletter, the rota, the supplier relationships and the keys, and where twenty-five other people show up and move chairs.

That is the whole mechanism. Not indifference. Compound interest on a rational short-term choice.

What that does to both groups

The five carrying it get the exhaustion, and it does not usually announce itself as burnout. Maslach’s model describes three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, a cynical or depersonalized attitude toward the work, and a drop in your sense of personal accomplishment. In volunteers the middle one shows up first and it looks like sarcasm in the group chat.

NCVO’s Time Well Spent 2023, with fieldwork among 7,006 UK adults, found 14 percent of people who stopped volunteering cited stress-related reasons, up from 9 percent in 2019. In the same survey, 26 percent said volunteering felt too much like paid work, up from 19 percent, and 24 percent reported unreasonable expectations of them, up from 17. Your most-relied-upon people are the ones most likely to be answering those questions that way.

The other twenty-five get something different and worse for the program. They get general labor. And the retention gap on general labor is the largest single effect anybody has measured in this field: 53 percent return the following year, against 74 percent for volunteers doing professional or management-level work, from the analysis of US national data published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2009. That is 2006 and 2007 figures, so treat it as a signal rather than this year’s benchmark.

So concentration produces two exits at once. The overloaded few leave through stress. The underused many drift away without ever deciding to stop. Both look like separate problems. They are one problem seen from either end.

Paying the cost once

The cost of delegating is real. It cannot be argued away, and any advice that pretends otherwise is useless to somebody with a day and a half a week. What you can do is pay it once instead of never.

The method I have seen work, at every size from a nine-person crew up to camps with more than five thousand participants staffed nearly entirely by volunteers, is deliberately unambitious. One thing at a time.

Pick the smallest thing that is genuinely yours and genuinely repeats. Not the biggest bottleneck. The one with the shortest cycle, so you get to the second iteration soon. The weekly reminder message. The supply order. The room setup checklist.

Write it down while you do it next time. Not afterward from memory, which produces a document that skips the four things your hands know. Do the task with a notes file open, and write the awkward parts: which cupboard, which login, who to call if the van is late, the thing you always forget.

Hand it to one named person, not to the group. A task offered to a WhatsApp group belongs to nobody. Write it as an actual role with a title, a boundary, and your name on it as the contact for changing it. That is roughly what a role description is for.

Do one round together, then get out of the way. They do it, you watch. Then they do it and you do not watch, and it comes out slightly worse than yours. This is the part where most handovers die.

Do not take it back. The second time it goes wrong, the pull to reclaim it is very strong. Resist it for three cycles. Almost everything that is wrong at cycle two is fine by cycle four, and reclaiming the task teaches the volunteer, accurately, that the handover was theater.

One task a month is twelve roles a year. That is not a transformation program. It is about ninety minutes of extra work a month, which is roughly what most coordinators can actually find.

”My volunteers don’t want that much responsibility”

I hear this constantly and it is sometimes true. It is much less often true than people believe, and the way it is usually tested guarantees the wrong answer.

The test that produces a no is announcing at a meeting that you are looking for someone to take on the newsletter, and waiting. Volunteering in front of a group is a social risk. Nobody wants to be the person who claimed a job and did it badly in public.

The test that produces a yes is asking one person privately, naming what you noticed about them, and being specific about the size. “You caught the error in last month’s mailing before I did. Would you take the newsletter for the next three months? It’s about an hour a fortnight and I’ll sit with you the first time.” Small, bounded, time-limited, and addressed to them specifically.

Some will still say no, and no is a perfectly good answer. But you will find that the people who decline a vague open call and the people who decline a specific direct ask are not the same group at all.

What I am not claiming

None of this is causal evidence. The retention gap between general labor and professional work is a comparison between groups, and it is entirely possible that people who were already more committed took the bigger roles. The Urban Institute’s capacity findings describe what organizations have, not what happens if you change it. Nobody has run the experiment where you take a concentrated program, redistribute the work, and measure what happens two years later. If somebody has, I have not found it.

What I would say with confidence is that the alternative explanations mostly point at the same action anyway. If capable people gravitate toward consequential roles, you need consequential roles available for them to gravitate to. If concentration is caused by time pressure on the coordinator, the only fix is to spend some of that scarce time deliberately, once, on a handover that then stops costing anything.

The five people who do everything did not volunteer for that arrangement. They volunteered for something specific, said yes to one more thing, and were never handed a way out.