Dare to Share

Share In a Way that Helps Everyone

Share In a Way that Helps Everyone

Today is “Dare to Share” day at Cheetah Learning. When looking at sharing your time and talents, we contemplated all the reasons that stop us from sharing with others. Sometimes it’s fear of the unknown – like in how much of my time is this going to take, do I have the skills to really help out in this situation, am I opening myself up to liabilities that I am not prepared to cover? When you become conscious of the reasons why you don’t want to share, you can create strategies to reduce your risks so you can share your time and talent with others in a way that helps everyone. Lets look at how you can best share your time and talents with others so it enhances everyone’s life:

1. Your time (well and other people’s time as well). For any project, be it one that is voluntary or one for which you are getting paid, it literally pays to do a project agreement. As part of the Project Agreement you identify how much each party can contribute to doing the project. You can get a free project agreement template on the Cheetah Learning Free PM Tools Download. And committing to how much time you can spend on any one project can be as simple as stating up front how much time you can commit to helping them. For example, I perpetually get asked to “look at someone’s computer.” Now I am NOT a computer tech support person, but yes I do know a lot about computers. When I get asked to look at someone’s computer – I now say – if I can’t get it fixed in 15 minutes, it is most likely beyond my capabilities. I can take a quick look at it, but I might not be able to help you.

2. Your talent (and other people’s talent) – For many professionals who have consumer oriented skills, you are probably used to others asking you for free advice, help on their projects etc. It is a VERY GOOD idea if you have a policy up front on how you are going to share your talent with others in a non-paying way. For example, a friend of my daughters is very good at fixing Subaru’s. So good that now he actually gets paid to do it. However, he gets requests all the time from people who don’t have the money to fix their Subaru’s to fix their cars for free. You can set a friends and family rate and parameters on how you are going to share your talents with folks who might expect you to do the service for free. Sometimes, you’re trying to get experience in a new field so you volunteer your time to learn new skills. Make sure you are upfront with people on your capabilities so you don’t over promise and under deliver.

3. Your risk – this is a look before you leap situation. Helping people by loaning them equipment or loaning them your time and talent does create risk for all parties. I had to create a standard hold harmless contract with my neighbors who were asking me to borrow this or that piece of equipment and the expectation that it was returned to me in good working order. When doing scholarship programs, we have a third party administer them to reduce our risks. Consider the risks that could happen from your sharing efforts and make sure you work to reduce both the chance of those risks occurring and the impact if they do occur.

If by your very nature you are a generous person and would like to stay that way, do some upfront work on the impact of your generosity and you’ll create a much better life for yourself and others. To learn more you can:

A. Listen to my “Dare to Share” podcast.
B. Download our Free Project Agreement template.
C Share a story of how you have helped others and earn a free 5 PDU course on building your Project Management Strengths. Your story will be entered into our competition to win our 60 PDU online Establishing a PMO course.
D. Participate in our survey of how you share with others and get 50% off our most popular 40 PDU online course Project Turnaround.

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