What Volunteers Taught Me About Leadership

Some of the most useful things I have learned about leadership have come from places that, at first glance, have little to do with conventional organisations.

Volunteering has been part of my life in different forms and at different times, from involvement in a local kayak club in Denmark to the Dash for the Beads Fun Run in Dallas. In 2026, I volunteered for the first time at Roskilde Festival, joining the electrical test team responsible for checking temporary electrical installations across the festival site.

It is a technically serious responsibility carried out inside an unusual organisational environment. For a short period each year, thousands of people come together to build and operate what is effectively a temporary city, much of it through voluntary effort. Experiencing that organisation from the inside made me reflect not only on Roskilde, but on something I had encountered in other forms of volunteering as well: when some of the conventional mechanisms of organisational life become weaker or disappear altogether, other forces become much easier to see. What interested me was not simply that the model worked, but what its ability to work revealed about leadership.

In most companies, it is difficult to separate the effect of leadership from the structures surrounding it. People have employment contracts, salaries and job descriptions. They operate within hierarchies, report to managers and understand that certain responsibilities belong to their role whether or not they feel particularly motivated by them on a given day. Those mechanisms are necessary, but they can also obscure something. When people are being paid to turn up and a formal structure can instruct them what to do, it becomes harder to see what actually makes them want to contribute.

Voluntary organisations change that equation. The formal levers do not disappear completely, but many of them become considerably weaker. You can coordinate people, establish responsibilities and create standards, but the ultimate coercive power of the organisation is limited. If people repeatedly find the experience meaningless, frustrating or badly organised, they have a very simple option available to them: they can stop coming. That makes volunteering an unusually revealing environment in which to observe leadership.

Roskilde Festival is not without structure. Quite the opposite. An operation of that scale could not function without clear roles, processes, technical standards and coordination. But structure alone does not explain why people choose to give significant amounts of their time and energy to it. Nor does it explain why experienced volunteers return year after year, take responsibility beyond what is explicitly required, solve problems that nobody has formally assigned to them and help others succeed without calculating whether doing so falls inside their job description.

Part of it is purpose. People understand that their contribution is connected to something larger than the individual task in front of them. Testing an electrical installation may be a relatively narrow technical activity, but it sits within a much larger shared undertaking. The work matters because somebody needs to know that the installation is safe before thousands of people begin using the space around it. The connection between task and consequence is unusually visible.

Purpose is often discussed in organisations as something that needs to be articulated from the top. A statement is written, refined and communicated in the hope that people will connect their work to a larger ambition. Volunteering has made me think that the more important question may be whether people can actually see the relationship between what they are doing and what the collective is trying to achieve. When that relationship is clear, purpose becomes less of a message and more of a condition for action.

It also changes the nature of ownership. In a strongly hierarchical environment, responsibility can easily become something that flows downwards. Someone assigns a task, someone else completes it, and the boundaries of responsibility are largely defined by the organisational structure. In a voluntary environment, those boundaries can be more permeable. People notice something that needs doing and act because the shared objective makes the relevance of the problem apparent.

That does not mean everyone simply does whatever they want. Particularly in technically sensitive work, competence, coordination and standards matter enormously. But there is a difference between clarity and control. Clear boundaries can enable initiative because people understand where they can act, when they need expertise and when a decision needs to move elsewhere. Control, by contrast, can easily make initiative conditional on permission. This is one of the things that becomes easier to see when formal authority is weaker. Leadership cannot depend as heavily on the ability to instruct. It has to create enough clarity that people can exercise judgement themselves.

The distinction matters beyond volunteering. Many organisations say they want people to take more initiative, assume ownership and collaborate across boundaries, while maintaining conditions that continually encourage the opposite behaviour. Decisions are escalated because authority is unclear. People stay within their function because crossing a boundary creates friction. Initiative becomes risky because acting without approval can be punished more readily than waiting for direction.

When this happens, the instinct is often to focus on the individual. People need to become more entrepreneurial, more accountable or more courageous. Training programmes are created to encourage behaviours that the surrounding system quietly discourages. Volunteering offers another perspective. Instead of asking why people are not taking ownership, it invites the question of what conditions make ownership feel natural.

The same is true of collaboration. A temporary organisation such as Roskilde brings together people with very different backgrounds, levels of experience and reasons for being there. Some possess deep specialist knowledge. Others are learning. People who would occupy very different positions in their professional lives can find themselves working alongside one another around a practical problem that simply needs to be solved.

Formal status still exists, but it often has less explanatory power than it would in a conventional workplace. What matters more immediately is whether someone has useful knowledge, whether they are willing to contribute it, and whether the group can combine different capabilities around the task.

There is something important in that. Organisations frequently talk about collaboration as if it were primarily a cultural quality: people need to become more collaborative. Yet collaboration is also produced by conditions. If information is guarded, incentives compete, functions are measured against conflicting objectives or status determines whose ideas receive attention, exhorting people to collaborate will achieve only so much. Change the conditions and different behaviour can emerge from the same people.

Compensation provides perhaps the clearest example. The volunteers around me were not there because the economic exchange made the effort worthwhile. This does not make compensation irrelevant in professional organisations, nor does it suggest that people should somehow be expected to work for purpose instead of being properly paid. Fair compensation is fundamental. What volunteering reveals is simply that compensation and commitment are not the same thing.

An organisation can buy someone's time. It can define what is expected during that time and reward performance against agreed objectives. What it cannot purchase as directly is the discretionary part of contribution: the attention someone gives to a problem that technically belongs to somebody else, the willingness to stay with a difficult issue until it is solved, the idea offered without being asked, or the care taken because the quality of the outcome matters personally.

Those behaviours are often described as engagement, but I increasingly think of them as evidence of the relationship between a person and the conditions surrounding their work. At Roskilde, some of the conventional explanations for those behaviours were stripped away. People contributed without the promise of promotion, salary progression or conventional career status. That made other motivations easier to observe: belonging, mastery, usefulness, shared purpose, responsibility, social connection and the satisfaction of contributing to something that could not happen without collective effort.

The lesson is not that businesses should try to become volunteer organisations. They should not. Companies have obligations, employment relationships and economic realities that are fundamentally different. The value of the comparison is that removing or weakening some familiar mechanisms allows us to see what those mechanisms can otherwise conceal.

A salary can secure attendance without creating commitment. Hierarchy can create compliance without creating ownership. Authority can produce action without necessarily producing judgement. None of those things is inherently wrong; organisations need compensation, structure and legitimate authority. The mistake is assuming that because those mechanisms can produce behaviour, they are sufficient to produce the kind of behaviour we actually want.

The more interesting leadership question is therefore not how to remove hierarchy or authority, but how much an organisation would still be capable of if their power were reduced. Would people understand sufficiently clearly what the organisation was trying to achieve to make good decisions without constant direction? Would they help across boundaries because the shared outcome mattered more than the organisational border? Would expertise travel to where it was useful rather than remain where the hierarchy placed it? Would people still bring energy, judgement and care to their work if compliance were not enough?

These questions are uncomfortable precisely because they shift attention away from the people we lead and towards the conditions we create around them.

Volunteering has not made me believe that people are intrinsically motivated under all circumstances, that hierarchy is unnecessary or that purpose solves every organisational problem. What it has done is make certain relationships more visible. When people have a reason to care, understand how their contribution connects to the whole, have sufficient clarity to exercise judgement and experience themselves as part of a collective endeavour, surprisingly sophisticated forms of organisation can emerge without relying exclusively on the traditional levers of management.

Perhaps that is the most useful lesson. Leadership is often discussed in terms of what leaders do to people: how they motivate them, direct them, communicate with them or hold them accountable. My first experience volunteering at Roskilde brought me back to a different question: what becomes possible when we create conditions in which people have reasons to lead themselves?