Voluntary rescue work is where leadership gets tested for real. When someone is missing, nothing is settled in advance: information arrives in fragments, resources are whatever happens to be on site, and decisions have to be made now. You learn things there that you don’t learn in a meeting room.
Motivation is built on what people already have.
You can’t give volunteers orders
This is the heart of leading volunteers, and it’s also the most valuable lesson in it. Nobody is employed. Nobody turns up because a manager said so. The only way to make things happen is to build on the motivation people already have — and steer it in a shared direction.
In practice that means participation. People take part in deciding how things are done, rather than just carrying out a finished plan. When someone has helped shape a way of working, they also stand behind it when the situation tightens. That isn’t soft leadership — it’s the only leadership that works when you have no authority to command.
Why this matters in paid work too
At work you can give orders. But an order produces compliance, not commitment — and in quality work that difference is decisive. A quality system or new way of working handed down from above goes unused by exactly the same logic that keeps a volunteer from turning up: it doesn’t feel like theirs.
The same remedy works in both. Bring people into building it, and they don’t need to commit to the outcome separately — they’re already committed. This is exactly what I do when guiding and training staff on the work side as well: I don’t roll out something finished, I build it together.
How I ended up here
In 2020 I attended a Vapepa basic course run by Tommi Mattila, readiness manager of the Finnish Red Cross Häme district. That started a spiral that has changed the whole shape of my spare time — and the pace has only increased.
In the first years I joined the Red Cross Kihniö-Parkano branch and its response team focused on missing person searches. From there the path led to SAR incident commander training, and since then it has grown to include the branch treasurer role, operational command duties, local committee communications and the vice chair role on the regional committee.
Current roles
- SAR incident commander — leading search operations on scene
- Readiness trainer — Vapepa basic, search, communications and welfare courses
- Resource trainer
- Training coordinator, SVAP ry — involved in founding the organisation in November 2024
Training the trainers
Most of my time now goes into getting new trainers into the field. The problem is familiar across volunteer organisations: the average age rises, experienced people step back, and new ones don’t appear at the same rate. Traditionally a readiness trainer was expected to have a long history before joining the trainer path — a good aim, but a poor barrier.
So in Northern Pirkanmaa we coach new trainers by guiding them alongside us. It’s enough to have done the basic course, to be interested in training and to have a little time. The rest is built together — the same principle as everywhere else: low threshold, support close at hand, responsibility growing as competence grows.
Why this shows up on the work side
The same systematic approach used to command a search works for developing production quality and information security. Maintain situational awareness, share responsibility, keep things moving even when not all the information has arrived — and have people involved from the start, so they don’t have to be persuaded later. One of the training packages I offer grew directly out of this: operational command under incomplete information.