Use Your Passion to Craft Your Personal Brand

The traditional career path is largely sequential and structured. The trajectory of the average job is a linear one, and it will typically take you 10-12 years to be promoted into a role where you manage other people. On an individual level, the point at which you will exercise leadership is thus actually quite late – in your 30s or 40s.

However, if you start or join a nonprofit on the side, you open up the option of jumping straight to a leadership role. Not only do you have the autonomy to shape the capacity of your involvement to be as small or large as you are comfortable with, you’ll also be forced to think of yourself now as the leader. When you frame yourself as a leader, your personal growth will be exponential. From the types of skills you acquire to even the types of books you read – you’ll approach things very differently.

There’s also a monumental difference between being a leader in a corporation and in a nonprofit or volunteer-based society; the two types of leadership will demand different skills from you. Suppose you’re a director in a corporate entity. While people may disagree with your way of doing things, they also know that you’re the boss. People do what you tell them to do because you’re in charge: you have the power to give them their bonuses or fire them. Your employees will obey you, but they may not necessarily like or respect you. In my view, this is management, not leadership.

In a volunteer-run nonprofit group, you’ll need to come from a different approach. Your volunteers only show up because they care about the mission, and nobody is obligated to do anything. In order to motivate the team to deliver results, you can’t offer bonuses or threaten punishments; you need to inspire them. This is a very different skill set that you’ll need to hone, where you’re able to successfully convince people to give up their free time, hit pause on Netflix, and use their free time and skills to work towards a cause that won’t give them financial gratification. That type of leadership skills are invaluable.

Ultimately, you hold the reigns and can design your leadership path based on the variables that matter to you. When I graduated from college, I joined a few of my friends in the newly-formed Debate Association (Singapore) as its Vice President. We had no real plan at the start, and we were all learning. When we got more comfortable, we realised we could take on a larger team and lead others. We started persuading other volunteers to join us to train students, run competitions, and do more.

Eventually, the few volunteers grew to hundreds of volunteers, which eventually reached out to thousands of students. I became the President, and we grew faster and bigger than we had ever dreamed; we were training the best student debaters to debate at international competitions (and our students ended up ranked top in the world!); we co-created a debate TV show that got nominated for an Emmy award; and most importantly - we made a positive difference to so many students. As a leader in that setting, I had to work with each volunteer to design a role that made sense for them, excite them about the potential impact we could have, and motivate them to do their best. We created our mission together. You won’t always have this kind of leeway in a corporate setting.

And taking on nonprofit responsibilities won’t be frowned upon by the organisation you’re working for full-time either, so there’s no hurdle from HR! From the company’s perspective, they’d love to have people on board who are able to corral teams and motivate them. When you bring your whole self to work, the organisation also benefits. You have a spark, you bring cross-sector insights, you are driven by a deeper purpose. When you bring your entire self to work, you enrich your life as well as those of the people who work with you.