The Operations team deals with technical issues, difficult vendors, software downtime, data complexity, tight timelines, and high work volumes. These challenges affect the work of our colleagues on the front line, in development and engagement. Whether our colleagues really understand these challenges is another matter.
Should they?
If you work in Operations and find yourself feeling that your front-line colleagues don’t appreciate the issues you face, then ask yourself this question: Do you appreciate the challenges faced by your front-line colleagues?
We want our colleagues to recognize that operational realities exist. Lack of understanding can lead to unnecessary risk and unreasonable expectations. But I’m not sure it’s deep understanding we should aim for. We should try to build credibility and trust in ourselves instead.
Bad things happen when an organization ignores operational realities, it’s true. The way to prevent bad things is not to educate the whole organization on the fine points of risk, but to speak to risk from a strong base of credibility and trustworthiness. This applies not only to Advancement Operations but other offices – legal, audit, procurement – that advise on risk.
Trust is built when Advancement’s support function demonstrates that it really gets what the organization is trying to accomplish and knows how the world looks through the eyes of fundraisers and alumni officers.
It’s important that Ops staff internalize departmental strategy – that they be able to connect their daily work to the goals of advancement. And there’s a more personal element: Each of us should feel a little of what it’s like to be a fundraiser.
Sometimes I wonder if we should be sending Ops team members to conferences for development and alumni relations instead of advancement services. Would a change in perspective lead to stronger partnerships?
We can start by listening to understand the business end of advancement – not just react to what we might think of as its whims. Being responsive instead of reactive will help build a relationship that will remain friendly when the next disruptive technical issue comes along, or when a project is forecast to not be completed for another six months, or when a serious risk is flagged.
This responsibility for lens-shifting is not reciprocal.
It is more important than the Ops employee shift to accommodate her perspective to that of the fundraiser, than it is for the fundraiser to return the favour. The Ops employee looks through the fundraiser lens in order to provide more effective support and to build credibility and trust. There is no clear benefit in asking a fundraiser to see things through an operations lens.
A driver needs to learn how to drive the car; she doesn’t need to know what’s going under the hood. (Fine if she does, of course.) But no driver would trust a mechanic who has no knowledge of what it’s like behind the wheel.
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