KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

leadership

Is it time to bring back the club leadership course?

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leadership clip art
I tried to find a better piece of clip art to illustrate leadership, but came up short. So, instead here’s something dopey. :)

This afternoon, I was talking with a fellow who approached me about providing leadership training for ham radio club officers. Back in 2012, when I was the Michigan Section Affiliated Club Coordinator, I developed just such a course, based on my work as a facilitator for the Rotary Leadership Institute. The topics I covered included:

  • Leadership Characteristics
  • The World of Amateur Radio
  • The Amateur Radio Club and its Activities
  • Membership: Recruiting and Retention
  • Leadership: Team Building
  • Leadership: Setting Goals
  • Evaluating Your Club
  • Moving Forward

I conducted this training here in Michigan a couple of times, and it was well-received by those who attended. I offered to do this for the ARRL, but that proposal went nowhere. I guess they decided it wasn’t worth the bother.

After discussing how we might revive this training program, the talk naturally drifted to the support—or lack thereof—that the ARRL provides to clubs. One of the items my friend mentioned is that he hasn’t seen an issue of the ARRL Club News for a while. I hadn’t thought much about that, but I checked, and the last issue was published in April 2024, more than a year ago. I guess they’ve decided that supporting clubs is less of a priority than making draconian election by-law changes.

This sticks in my craw because I volunteered to produce a newsletter for clubs free of charge about a decade ago. It was heartening to see it start up in November 2021. It’s equally disheartening to see it go by the wayside.

A new leadership training course

At any rate, I’d be interested in hearing from you if you might be interested in participating in some kind of club leadership training. When I did this back in 2012, it was all in person, and we covered the material in one, eight-hour-long session. And, it was a fair amount of work to find a place to hold the training, and arrange for lunch and coffee. Now that the use of Zoom and other online meeting apps has become widespread, I envision doing this at least partly online and only one module at a time.

If you would be interested in attending these sessions, please let me know, and I’ll keep you up to date on when we might actually hold this course. I envision this happening sometime in the fall. Also, if you have any suggestions for what we might cover, please send me your ideas.

ARRL to offer training for club officers

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Ten years ago, I developed a leadership seminar for amateur radio club officers.  We held a couple of session here in Michigan, which the participants found to be useful, and I suggested to the ARRL that they offer this—or something similar—to club leaders across the country. In typical ARRL fashion back then, I never heard back from them.

Well, in yesterday’s ARRL Club News (October 18, 2022), I found the following item:

Call for Instructors

ARRL is embarking on a journey of training for club officers and members. The new club development webinar series will include live Q&A, and the live sessions will be available to everyone. The webinars will be recorded and available to ARRL members through the ARRL Learning Center. We’re looking for ARRL members to help us produce, create, and deliver the webinars.

The purpose of this program is to offer a series of short webinars that offer training for the skills needed to build and run a successful club. Topics will include leadership, activities, finance, and recruiting. Envisioned is a series of 10 or more webinars, all lasting from 20 to 30 minutes.

The hope is that club officers and members will view the series as an opportunity to learn from others that have been able to put those skills to use. To do this, we need the help of membership. We’re looking for instructors to help with building the training. We’re also looking for members that can present in a standard format and have the skills necessary to do the training. If this sounds like something that you are interested in, please contact Mike Walters, W8ZY, at [email protected] for further details. We hope to start this series in late January 2023.

It’s great that the ARRL is starting to work on this, but even better is that they’re asking for volunteers to help. I’ve always said that there is a wealth of talent and experience among the ARRL membership, but that most of the staff members were inflicted with not-invented-here syndrome. That is to say that the prevailing opinion always seemed to be that if an idea or program did not originate in Newington, it wasn’t worth much. Soliciting volunteers like this  is not something that the ARRL would have done 10 years ago.

It’s been very satisfying to see the ARRL come around on things that I proposed years ago. Next on my list that I’d like to see the ARRL tackle: setting a membership goal of at least 25% of U.S. licensed radio amateurs.