In my last column, I wrote about leaders having AIM, which is my acronym for the key characteristics of leadership: authenticity, innovation, and motivation. Here, I’ll expand on the characteristic of authenticity.

Over the years I’ve enjoyed many leadership roles, most of them as a volunteer in the nonprofit sector: community groups, business associations, youth organizations. One of the challenges of being a leader to volunteers is that you don’t have the traditional inducements of the carrot and the stick. You can’t motivate them with money (since they’re not paid), and you can’t threaten to fire them (well, yeah, you could, but then you’d have to recruit another volunteer, and in some organizations finding volunteers is difficult). In short, you have to motivate with authenticity. The good news is that once you learn how to do this, you’ll be able to use these methods when you have traditional employees, too.

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