What I Learned Managing 40+ Volunteers at 22

In my second year of college, I walked into a small room above a community space in Bangalore on a Saturday morning. Twelve kids, ages seven to twelve, waiting for me to teach them English.

I had no lesson plan. I had never taught anyone anything. The person running the center — U&I Trust, an organization working with underprivileged children — had given me thirty minutes of orientation and a textbook.

That was my start. A year later, I was running a new center from scratch with 40+ volunteers under me. None of them were people I'd picked.

What nobody tells you about leading volunteers

You can't pay them. You can't fire them. You can't promote them. If they have a bad week, they just don't show up — and there's no HR process to invoke.

Every management lever you're taught about — compensation, performance reviews, org structure — is gone. What's left is the only thing that actually works: people show up when the work matters and the environment respects them.

That was the education.

Lesson 1: Structure is kind, not controlling.

My first instinct was to be laid-back. These were volunteers — I didn't want to be a taskmaster. So I kept things loose. Showed up, taught, went home.

The center fell apart in six weeks.

Volunteers didn't know what to prepare. Kids got different lessons on different weeks. Attendance — both volunteer and student — dropped. Everyone was trying, nobody was aligned.

What fixed it: SOPs. Weekly lesson plans. A curriculum calendar that mapped what we'd teach for the next three months. A WhatsApp group where volunteers shared what worked. A Saturday prep call. A Sunday debrief.

Structure isn't the opposite of warmth. Structure is how you respect people's time. A volunteer who drives 45 minutes to teach wants to know their effort lands on something real. Ambiguity wastes their weekend more than any meeting would.

I carried this into every team I've run since. “We're casual” usually means “we're disorganized” — and the disorganization costs your best people first.

Lesson 2: The best management is removing obstacles.

The kids were eager. The volunteers were capable. My job wasn't to do the teaching — my job was to make sure nothing got in the way of it.

So I spent most of my time on logistics. Were the books stocked? Were the markers dry? Did every volunteer have a lesson plan they understood? If a kid was falling behind, did the volunteer have a way to flag it?

This sounds small. It isn't. When people show up ready to do their best work, the manager's job is to make that easy. Every time I failed — a missing textbook, an unclear plan, a scheduling conflict — I saw the effect immediately. Volunteers got frustrated. Kids got restless. The energy in the room shifted.

I've applied this in every PM and leadership role since. The best thing I can do is remove the thing blocking someone else's momentum. Most of the time, that's what actually moves the work.

Lesson 3: Data makes the intangible real.

Teaching feels intangible. Did the lesson land? Did the kid actually learn? It's hard to know.

I started tracking everything. Attendance per kid, per volunteer. Lesson topics covered. Concept retention checked week-over-week. Student progress mapped against curriculum milestones.

Volunteers resisted initially. “This is a weekend thing. Why are we filling in spreadsheets?”

Because three months later, we could show them: “Riya was at a second-grade level in September. In December she's reading third-grade texts. *You did that.*”

Volunteers stayed longer when they could see their impact. Fundraising improved because donors could see outcomes. New volunteers trained faster because we knew what worked and what didn't.

Data wasn't bureaucracy. It was how we made the invisible work visible. I still believe this is the single most important thing a team lead can do — especially in work that feels soft or qualitative. Instrument it. Measure it. Show people their impact.

Lesson 4: The job is the people, not the output.

50% of the volunteers selected to lead the *next* year's centers came from my team. That's the statistic I'm proudest of.

Because the real work wasn't the English lessons. The real work was building people who could do the work without me. The kids got teaching. But the volunteers got mentorship, responsibility, a first taste of leadership — and many of them took that into the rest of their lives.

A manager who ships without developing the people around them is extracting value. A manager who develops people while shipping is compounding it. The second one is rarer, harder, and dramatically more impactful over time.

I think about this every time I hire, mentor, or run a team. The output matters. But the people you build are the thing that outlasts the output.

What it adds up to

Three years. 40+ volunteers. Hundreds of kids. One center built from scratch.

I was twenty-two. I had no idea what I was doing. But the work forced me to figure out management before I had any title that gave me management authority. I had to earn the room every Saturday, or nobody would show up next week.

That's the best apprenticeship I could have asked for. Every team I've run since — ed-tech program managers, content teams, automation engineers, cross-functional product squads — runs on these four things:

1. Structure respects people's time. 2. Remove obstacles so others can do their best work. 3. Make the intangible visible with data. 4. Build people alongside shipping the work.

The tools change. The stakes change. The core of it doesn't.