Most project managers build their leadership inside a single structure: one organization, one reporting line, and one set of incentives that makes people at least appear to follow the plan.
That structure is useful for delivery, but it hides a question every project manager eventually faces, which is how much of their influence belongs to them and how much is borrowed from the org chart.
Volunteering in professional communities, with PMI chapters as the most common entry point, is one of the few settings where that question gets an honest answer early in a career. It removes formal authority, reduces resources to almost nothing, and puts the project manager in front of people who owe them nothing except the time they chose to give.
In a corporate project, part of the team's compliance is structural. People respond because the project manager shapes priorities, reports progress to their managers, or controls access to budget. (Sometimes...)
Volunteer teams remove all of these levers, since contributors join because they believe in the goal and can leave at any moment without consequence.
This is close to the condition Allan Cohen and David Bradford describe in Influence Without Authority, where influence depends on understanding what the other party values and offering something of equivalent worth in exchange.
In a volunteer context those currencies are rarely money or status. They are purpose, learning, recognition, and the chance to work on something the contributor cares about, and a project manager who cannot identify them usually loses the team within a few weeks.
The PMBOK Guide, Seventh Edition, lists "Demonstrate leadership behaviors" among its twelve principles and treats leadership as something any team member can exercise, independent of title.
Volunteer work is a practical environment to test that principle without the safety net of positional power. Leadership developed where authority is absent tends to hold when authority is present, while the reverse is far less reliable.
PMI's Talent Triangle groups the competencies of a project professional into Ways of Working, Power Skills, and Business Acumen.
Certification preparation covers the first reasonably well. The second, which includes communication, collaborative leadership, and problem-solving, is much harder to develop in a classroom, and volunteer projects exercise it under realistic pressure.
Adaptability under scarcity. Volunteer initiatives routinely combine firm deadlines with rotating contributors and free or improvised tools, and delivering under those conditions trains the habit of simplifying scope, reprioritizing quickly, and protecting the core outcome, which is what PMBOK 7 describes in its principle on adaptability and resiliency.
Networks built on shared work. Mark Granovetter's 1973 paper on the strength of weak ties showed that connections outside a person's immediate circle carry a disproportionate share of new information and opportunities, and volunteer teams create exactly those ties across industries, seniority levels, and countries, with the added trust that comes from months of joint effort.
Clarity for mixed audiences. A single volunteer initiative may require the same project manager to brief a chapter board, coordinate a student volunteer, and report progress to community members in the same week, so jargon fails with at least one audience and plain-language status updates become a constant discipline.
The widely cited 70-20-10 model, associated with research at the Center for Creative Leadership, suggests that most leadership development comes from challenging experience, with relationships and formal coursework accounting for smaller shares.
The exact proportions are debated in the literature, but the direction is consistent. Stretch assignments are where leadership capability grows, and early-career project managers rarely receive them inside their organizations, because stretch assignments tend to go to people who have already demonstrated the capability.
Volunteering interrupts that loop. A second-year project manager can lead a chapter event, a mentoring program, or a content initiative with real stakeholders and real deadlines years before a comparable role would be offered at work. That was actually my case in my early years as a volunteer at PMI.
The value, however, depends heavily on the role chosen. Passive membership (attending events and collecting professional development units) produces little of what is described above. The benefit comes from roles with delivery accountability, where there is a defined outcome, a team to coordinate, and a date that cannot move.
The most accessible place to find those roles is usually the nearest PMI chapter. Chapters run events, mentoring programs, certification study groups, and community initiatives almost entirely through volunteers, and most of them have open roles at any given time that nobody has claimed.
For an early-career project manager, the local chapter is a portfolio of real projects that requires no promotion to access, only the decision to ask for one.
The practical step is small. Contact the chapter's volunteer lead or check its website, ask which initiatives currently need someone to own delivery, and choose one with a visible outcome within the next three to six months.
That single commitment gives influence, adaptability, and communication a place to develop now, instead of waiting for a corporate role that may take years to offer the same exposure.
Every project manager's career will eventually test whether their leadership depends on the org chart. A chapter role lets that test happen early, on a smaller scale, and on the project manager's own terms.
Posted on: October 19, 2026 01:00 AM |
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