Hoo boy, some volunteers..."You shouldn't have. No, I mean you really should NOT have."

Part of the problem is what we've mentioned before: many people now grow up without ever having any experience with tools or manual labor of any kind. What looks easy and fun won't be if they do it right--in other words, if experienced staff is present, the "hey, everybody, let's go down and paint some things, whee!" Saturday turns into "no, this needs scraped first, and that needs a rust preventor applied, and..." If no one experienced is on hand, the paint job is what you describe, often in wildly inaccurate colors to boot. It's easy to spend way more time on a project with a big crowd of unskilled volunteers than a handful of staff would need. HOWEVER...if you turn down a Boy or Girl Scout troop or whatever, that makes you ungrateful and nasty and not team players. It's very helpful to go to the group beforehand, preferably at a regular meeting, and demonstrate what needs done before they get near the property and go out of control.

The other problem I ran into a lot was the Unhelpful Helper. On a playground project, the supposed safety officers spent all morning marching around in step, glaring at everyone and shouting orders for no apparent reason. No matter how often we explained to them that my son was old enough to be working there, they'd "forget" by the next time they came around. They couldn't grasp the idea that bottled water was available, so there didn't need to be a cooler and paper cups...and so on. Neither paid any attention to actual safety problems, nor did they do any work. On another project, the "helpers" consistently messed up the kids' projects because the helpers weren't listening to instructions (and believe it or not, the kids were.) I actually resorted to sending the "helpers" after items we really didn't need just to get them out of the way.

That may have applied in 1977. In the modern post-Gettysburg post-Eventbrite age, if you don't know if anyone's going to show, you should not be firing that steam locomotive. First because it's too expensive, and second you need to fix your publicity to where you ARE sure!


I would call that an effect, rather than a definition, of a Money Chase museums. Their DNA looks like a dollar sign, and they are spit shined and streamlined toward that singular purpose. They are clean only because they think that's profitable: "all the other successful museums are clean". Your Government museum will also be clean, as will some Preservation Paradises. (the Upstarts can't, and the Fadeds won't.) What makes them Money Chase is the attitude of "come get your train ride, and exit through the gift shop!"

If Money Chase doesn't have the facilities, they might not have a spiff museum and clean bathrooms. I've seen them with porta-johns. The defining feature is "all about the benjamins".

WRM is not a Money Chase museum but has the outward appearance of same, with a huge state-of-the-art parking lot connecting directly to the clean modern Visitor Center. I would classify it a Preservation Paradise albeit endangered.

Money Chase is the most miserable of the bunch. It's a treadmill, Sisyphus pushing his stone, and not much to show for it. At least at the Faded Glory, some actual museuming is on the crotchety controller's "to do" list.

"So what do you do with the eager volunteer who shows up regularly but is totally incompetent at everything he has attempted?"

You grin, bear it and be of good cheer, because they will continue to show up and work on projects. It takes great skill to be an instructor, but try we must. The next time it needs paint, or what ever, they will have several years of experience and will know how to do it better.

Many of the skills that us dinosaurs have, are lost to the current generation. Preserving these skills are as much of the museum's mission as the artifacts we are trying to preserve.

Well, managers have several responsibilities, which fork out of the word "manager" itself, e.g. "he who manages". People. Yes, you aren't there to manage spikes or paint supply.
The very definition of the "manager" job is working with other people, and if a fellow doesn't have the chops for it, well, maybe he needs to hand back the title.



I'll name several jobs of a manager here. They are not all-inclusive and are not ranked in order. #1: Their job is to make those volunteers feel accepted. This is a very simple litmus test: either the volunteer feels accepted, or he does not. It would be difficult to do that job by micro-managing each new volunteer's experience: the effective way would be to sculpt the political environment of the group before he shows up.

And here the problem is that the "power structure" is often controlled by those with the sharpest elbows. Good managers tend to be professional... reasonable, gentle, and fair. Even though they're worlds better qualified, they won't fight for a managerial position against a pushy and politically conniving person who wants the job more. The latter qualities do not recommend one to management, so chances are this person has never been a manager, and as such, has a distorted view of what management really is.

They think it's bossing people around, having their way, and having a social status such that none dare question them. And by their logic, they've worked hard and they've earned it, because management is a "perk" and not a different and more complex job.

And for this kind of person, the primary duty of welcoming and developing volunteers goes right over their head. They don't even realize that's their job (heck, just read their rants in the newsletter about lack of volunteers.) If a guy is hovering around looking for something to do, they don't consider that a cause for action. If a responsible guy detects the lack of management and competently self-guides, SUDDENLY (to them) it's a management issue: they lost control and they don't like how that feels.

Incompetent people are not passive: they are just active in the wrong ways. They are incapable of realizing their incompetence even if their ego could tolerate it, which it can't.
[LOL, rereading this it almost sounds like I'm talking about the managed volunteer. No no, I'm talking about the manager.]

Again: Managing other people is what it means to have a manager title. The courageous thing for those individuals to do is overcome (humans do that) the Dunning-Kruger effect, and get sympatico with ones own limitations and either step down or school up. Of course this is incompatible with ego.

And if the individuals won't do it, then either the rest of the organization has to soft-shoe around them, or the Board has to kick them out.


#2 is assessment. Competence and reliability. Hardly needs to be said, a competent manager is going to figure that out all by himself, because it's a labor saver for him. If you figure out this guy's a painter from Boeing, that's a bunch of stuff you don't have to teach him about paint. You need to have a pretty good sense of when you need to bird-dog this guy, and when you can loose him.


#3 is training. If he's not getting trained, that's all on you, manager. If you don't have the foggiest clue what you should be teaching him, then get help. That's what RyPN is for. In my experience, the vain ineffective manager types hate asking for help.


You think the volunteer craves haste and a sloppy job? I don't think so. I think he craves experience, camaraderie and accomplishment.

If they are truly fresh minds, managing them should be easy. (Much easier than managing a guy who already "knows how to do something" and is wrong.) But you do need to lead of with "this is the method we use here"... so that you're NOT letting them run amok until they mess up and then yelling at them. A real good method is to work alongside them.

WRONG: "We need that caboose painted red. Awkward silence. Um, why are you still in my office?"
RIGHT: "Those boxes over there have gloves, dust masks, goggles and paint stripper. Let's grab em and head out to the caboose."



#4 is staging. (implicit: planning.) Preparing the logistics so things are ready for volunteers to work. Projects at a variety of skill levels* are "cued up and ready to go". Supplies are on hand, tools are in working order, parts are not scattered all over the shop... the project has clear standards and clear finish line. So when volunteers come, you can put them onto the projects, have them be effective and leave feeling like they did something.

* by which I mean a variety of projects each suitable for different skill sets/levels. And just because a guy is a master mechanic by trade doesn't mean he won't stoop to picking up a paintbrush. Some folks don't want to do their day job as their hobby.

How are they going to spend the first four hours before lunch? If the answer is "trying to find things and making supply runs", that's not great. Crew's ready to cut brush, but the weedwacker is broken and the chainsaw needs sharpening. Those sheets of steel still need to be ordered. Newsletter stuff-and-mail party is standing around waiting for you to correct the mailing list.

Course, if a job's cued up, it's real temping to Just Do It. Must resist the urge and cue up other projects. That's what it is to be a manager rather than a worker.

Dave Johnston has told me he takes 3/4 of his time during work sessions managing other volunteers. He did "semi-secret Tuesday work sessions" just so he could actually get his hands on projects, only a few core regulars came who didn't need a lot of management. Indeed, he and Al spend a lot of off-session time doing procurement and planning. Dave has been an endless fount of good quality mechanical drawings.


The "amok painter" again. That can be a manager problem if not enough direction is being given. Otherwise it could be a volunteer problem but a manager shouldn't leap to that conclusion, they should soul-search and make sure they are doing a proper job directing. Management is hard.


Managing is actually a harder and less rewarding job than being a frontliner. If you are not actually a competent or happy manager, then put the badge down and find a role you love, and yes that does mean letting somebody else manage, and you respecting their rank same as you demanded everyone accept yours. It's easy for me to say that: My profession (Internet) is a highly technical field, where the best of the best want a career path, but their skills would be wasted in management. So the industry created career paths that keep "the best" coding and developing and innovating. So I don't have a problem with not being a manager. It's not a rank to me, it's another kind of job.

"You think the volunteer craves haste and a sloppy job? I don't think so. I think he craves experience, camaraderie and accomplishment."

Unfortunately...yes, I have met people who want to get something done fast, don't seem to see that it's sloppy, and want to run on to the next thing. This is especially of people who were "volunteered" by juvenile court or who need to show community service hours for school. The bad chaperones I mentioned are the same way: they want to run in at ten o'clock, impose their own system on whatever is going on (whether or not it's appropriate or safe), get their group picture taken with the completed project by eleven forty-five and be on the bus at twelve, period.

The distinction here is that none of the unhelpful help is after "experience, camaraderie and accomplishment." They're not even after the organization's goal. They're there because Court Says So or I Need Fifty Hours To Graduate or I'm Important. My favorite comment from an indignant break-everything chaperone was "Well, if you all knew what to do, why did you have us come in?" Uh, because you asked and our manager somehow thought you would listen to him?

Forgetting what you came to do is another common problem. We all know the joke about the alligators and draining the swamp, but it's true. Several of my friends who run (non-rail) projects can't slow down long enough to do anything. I really don't think it's intentional; they've developed hurry sickness to such an extent that they cannot stand seeing someone step back to sweep up around a work area or take a drink of water on a hot day without rushing up to "instill a sense of urgency," and they stop caring about hat's done right so long as everyone is frantic, upset and in motion. By the end of half a shift, everybody is mad and nothing is getting done right. In those cases, a senior volunteer has to think of a long, long errand to send the boss on so something can get done.

Robert -

Regarding your recent posts on the Strasburg thread:

As a professional non-profit executive I have been directly involved in non-profit paid staff versions of Preservation Paradise done well in arts, history, education, eldercare, and museum settings. And I have been hired to clean up twice where it was also done poorly and resulted in a Money Chase when suddenly the music stopped. In both of the Money Chase cases it was possible to re-balance and move forward again as a Paradise with paid staff using an improved business plan.

I am curious to know what direct experience has led you to your conclusions regarding the perils of paid staff in a railway museum setting.

Wesley

Well, you're asking me to explain to a professional executive how having a professional executive can be a "fault" condition. You can certainly see where such a discussion would be fraught with difficulty.

After all, you have a dog in the race: Show me a professional in Field X whose entire purpose of being in the field is to help, and he believes professionals in field X do a lot of good. That is true. But what a Board member must contemplate is whether they do enough good to justify their cost. That is an area where professionals and board members tend to disagree, especially on the edges.

Here, take an executive director, whose salary is $50,000/year, so to follow my rule of thumb, the total cost of having him as an employee is about twice that. He brings in $100,000/year of NEW money (not member support we would've gotten anyway.) This guy is "at the balance point" fiscally, he neither helps nor hurts, and we must look at non-fiscal issues as to whether to keep him. Is he driving off volunteers? Has he "put us on the map" for institutional donors, even though those haven't paid off yet?

Obviously, there is a tendency for a professional in Field X to overprescribe the use of professionals in field X. Hence all these "hire a professional" comments we get here.

One of the great cliches in railway preservation is "run it like a business" - well, it's not a business, it's a nonprofit. You are approaching it from the opposite extreme, "run it like an art museum", and here is where you err. Your example cases don't map. Railroad museums have a fundamentally different customer relationship, and also a significantly different capital structure.

The customer relationship is different because our customers don't come for our mission purpose - they come for a fun train ride, and we slip them the history once they're here. And we're an abberration because we actually have to make it on the gate.. Follow the money. Each of the institutions you named actually have a variety of "alternate" funding sources, and they live in an ecosystem where that is normal.
- Art museums: the $15 admission fee might pay for bricks and mortar and maybe some staff. It damn well doesn't buy Picassos. That comes from patrons, endowments and loans of art.
- Eldercare: the money flows from Social Security or Medicare.
- Education: government aid, or at the higher end, endowments and alumni gifts.

When you say "suddenly the music stopped", I'll bet you're referring to one of those alternate funding sources, what I call ghost money. The only reliable ghost money is an endowment, and those don't exist in railway preservation because car-barns are a much more productive use of capital.

Railway museum funding is dominated by the farebox: private money willfully given in trade for a service of value. Earned money. And just like these other institutions, our enterprise cannot make it on farebox alone. (If we could, there'd be a lot more for-profit Strasburgs.) However unlike these others, lavish amounts of ghost money do not exist in our ecosystem.

(and believe me, whole networks of nonprofits magically appear in a feeding frenzy when there's ghost money to support them. Look at Erie, PA nonprofits after the huge gift to them, or the NGOs doing work in Africa. Or heck, solar installers feasting off the subsidies, not nonprofit but you get the point. How about all those nonprofits that maintain the old Navy fleet, like the United States and Texas and the Suisun Bay fleet? What, you say there are no such nonprofits? Right, because there's no ghost money in that sector!)

Railway preservation, however, is a freak, in that human passion has created "ghost support" of a different sort: Voluntarism. This labor-of-love negates the need to pay salaries, which makes our operations fiscally possible on farebox alone. A for-profit can't duplicate the feat (unless worker-owners subsidize the labor in same fashion, or their business people are truly extraordinary.)

All due respect I think you are taking ghost money for granted, and wondering why we railroad museums don't just grab from the magic stream of ghost money like everyone else. That's because there is no magic stream of ghost money. We would not exist, except that our ghost support comes in the form of voluntarism. Treat volunteers AS our ghost money, and it all makes more sense.


As far as the significantly different capital structure, a railroad museum needs to OWN its railroad in many cases, but in all cases has a very significant maintenance cost. In any case it needs to OWN its exhibits, and while they may be cheap compared to a Picasso, they are not cheap to move or maintain or house. An art museum only needs a museum building, and the real estate market has thousands for sale. A railroad museum needs 1) a railroad; 2) a rather large site with proper geometry right next to their railroad; and 3) carbarns to have the remotest chance of keeping up with the rust. These are rather unique reqiurements, so it's gonna be custom. The capital requirements are so immense as compared to revenue, that no museum is complete. Seriously IRM is doing well, but if an art museum's facilites were equivalent, their exhibit halls would be a quonset hut and a tent.

Why? Because volunteers don't directly map into cash money... and even if they did, that would go to the most basic facilities. That means our places look kinda rough-and-tumble, not the spiff architected buildings in which to hold wine-bar fundraisers to romance the big dollar donor. This puts us further behind the curve in chasing ghost money.


So, short answer: apples and oranges.

I point to VMT's departure from the restoration business after their state funding was cut; KyRM's fiscal meltdown last year (yet remarkably, fully staffed on any random Tuesday); California and Nevada state museums' budget cuts; Mid-Continent's forsaking of steam and warring with its own membership for control. Most well discussed on RyPN. The common theme is a professional management moving in, a crisis following, and the mission suffering due to the burden of the overhead costs of that management.

Regarding magnificent buildings: Back when Orange Empire was young, visitors would come down "A" St. in Perris, looking for the museum, and see an old farmhouse and a field with an assortment of old trolley cars sitting on rickety tracks. They'd ask whoever was working that day, "Where's the Museum?"--because they were expecting, as I used to tell people, "a large building with Roman-style columns and a pair of stone lions on either side of a grand stairway". Today, we are planning a library/exhibit building, and our colleagues up north at Rio Vista Jct. (BAERA near Fairfield CA) have a splendid structure inspired by Southern Pacific stations in major cities.