Category: People

Figure out what you want to do, versus what you want to be

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What is a “job”? It seems a very solid thing. Often it isn’t. There’s a job description, some records in the HR database, a payroll arrangement, a title on a business card, a set of performance objectives, a workspace, and a lot of assumptions and expectations spoken and unspoken.

As a container, a job is less like a box with hard sides and more like an elastic bag. It changes. It can shrink in places, stretch in others.

Late last year, President Obama came to town. In his wake, a remark he’d made about advice to young people became widely quoted. He said, “Worry less about what you want to be and worry more about what you want to do.”

This advice translates to the workplace. Ambition expressed as a desired job title or income level is uninspiring and empty. Better to study how your organization’s strategic goals align with what gives you meaning, and think how your role could evolve to serve that alignment.

Your supervisor might not be asking you what you would like to accomplish, what gives you joy, or what purpose you want to pursue via work. But you should certainly ask those questions of yourself.

Shiny objects, bright ideas, and your team

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Recently I read about a cool project in a magazine and shared it with one of my managers. Another university had had success with it, it was related to a challenge we were having that week, and honestly it was just cool. I had some level of self-awareness at least: I described it as a shiny object that I was just passing along for interest, and said I would not follow up. To her credit and mine, it has never come up since.

No harm done, I suppose. And ideas are good, right? But a supervisor’s ideas, even off-the-cuff ones, are hard to ignore. This manager might have moved my idea from pile to pile for weeks, unsure what to do with it but reluctant to throw it out. Like an appliance left plugged in that draws current in a steady trickle, it might have exacted a small but real cost in mindshare.

Better to jot the idea down and let it rest. I’ve always enjoyed musing aloud about cool things, but coming from the leader of a largish team, such talk may not read as blue-sky chitchat. Some people will give impulsively-shared ideas no more weight than they deserve; others will be alert for cues about what they should be doing. The latter will misinterpret notions as direction.

If you’re into brainstorming, it should be a planned event with ground rules and equal participation by all.

The problem with passion

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The advertisement posted above the heads of my fellow bus commuters read, “Follow your passion.” The ad was for a career college. We hear that phrase all the time, follow your passion. The poster caused me to reflect on its implication. Which is, I think, that everyone has a “passion,” that we know what it is, and that success lies in acting on what we know.

As if one’s passion is a door with a sign on it that you simply open and walk through.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience, as I have, of sitting in a staff meeting wondering what the hell’s wrong with you. You looked around the room and thought, “Jeez, all these people seem so into it.” You wonder if you belong there.

A wise colleague once warned me against the mistake of “comparing your insides with everyone else’s outsides.” People in a meeting show their carefully curated outsides. That does not make them fakes. It makes them just like you.

It pains me that anyone is unhappy and restless because they think they’re lacking the critical ingredient of passion. Some people burn with an inner fire driving them to great things; the rest of us are fuelled by a steadier flame, something less dramatic, less ephemeral.

In place of passion we need a grounding of care. When you are responsible for something that matters, when for this stretch of time that thing depends on you and your team, an ethic of care begins to build and strengthen. You grow into it, and it in turn makes you grow.

In caring we achieve the inner harmony that brings joy at work. But this requires discovery, and discovery requires time, and time requires patience. It’s very different from the notion of a passion stamped on your soul for which there’s one matching purpose out there in the world. That’s a tall order leading to anxiety and frustration.

No one should take career advice from me. But I’ve gone outside the comfort zone of my supposed passions many times, and there I have found a universe of things I’ve come to care about deeply.

People are not their job descriptions

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We attract and retain volunteers and donors when we connect their talents and interests to societal needs – when we satisfy their desire for meaning and personal growth. Why should it be different for the people we hire and work with?

Something changes during the course of a team member’s first months on the job. They are the same multifaceted person who was so appealing during the hiring process. But in the eyes of the organization they often become increasingly defined by their current role. Even as we get to know their personality, we forget about the less evident aspects of their skills and experience. This may be especially true of operations staff doing technical and clerical work.

Previous work experience, languages spoken, degrees and certifications earned, volunteer activities – do we remember these things, and do we provide ways for people to use them at work?

Who’s got a marketing degree? Who speaks Mandarin? Who’s volunteered for a homeless shelter? We could seek their advice on a project or program, or ask them to serve on a cross-functional team. Such opportunities to engage might be available to a broader range of team members than rewards, recognition, or promotion.

I have made this error, overlooking the curriculum vitae – literally the “course of (one’s) life” – for the mere sliver of a whole person that is a team member’s job description. How to be more deliberate about this is something I am still thinking about.

Early thoughts toward an Advancement Operations maturity model

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A maturity model provides a qualitative assessment of where your group sits in relation to some ideal pinnacle of evolution. I suppose the people who come up with these models are business school academics and committees of senior professionals. I’m not aware that anyone’s developed such a thing for the field of Advancement Operations, so allow me to pretend to be smarter than I am – and propose one.

When I do a search on “operations maturity model,” the two dominant themes I see in the results are IT and process. IT is wide of the mark for us. “Process” is closer.

Yet a process focus is still too limited. In process-based models, maturity entails evolving from ad-hoc activities to development of repeatable processes, on up through levels of better definition of processes until one reaches the top level, where processes are optimized.

This is an industrial definition of maturity, where the ultimate goal for operations is efficiency. In a mission-driven organization, efficiency is desirable, but not as desirable as the overall effectiveness of the organization. We can be efficient at doing the wrong things.

Advancement isn’t a factory. Advancement needs all teams, including the so-called back office, to help separate the right things from the wrong things. That’s strategy. The maturity model must take into account a capacity to be involved at a strategic level.

Process is fine, but we must have the people. That’s the missing ingredient.

So here we go – my stab at a four-level Advancement Operations Maturity Model:

Level 1: People are task-driven order-takers with basic skills. Processes are ad hoc and undocumented. Service is by ticket, first-in-first-out, with limited sense of relative importance. The team is characterized by inertia, exhibiting blind adherence to customary practices that are misconstrued as rules.

Level 2: Some skilled problem-solvers have been brought on. The team has developed an ethos of customer service and increased responsiveness to needs, with some prioritization. Still largely reactive, driven by frontline requests, sometimes lacking context. Increased documentation and standardization of processes.

Level 3: Operations staff are tactical partners, involved early on in Advancement initiatives, not just in the final execution. Engagement and fundraising objectives to be achieved are known, leading to more creative solutions. Process improvement is embraced as an ongoing imperative.

Level 4: Operations is a strategic partner, with involvement in shaping Advancement direction. The team’s thinking is forward-looking, characterized by proactive identification of opportunities, leading Advancement in new directions. The team has a comprehensive view of the organization. Ops knows where it fits in advancing the institutional mission.

Note that efficiency increases as the team moves up the ladder, but simple efficiency is overtaken by flexibility. Some things are too important to routinize. The ability to tell the difference is a matter of judgment, which is a property of high-quality, well-developed, empowered people.

As well, as we climb the levels, people’s view rises to take in more and more of the road ahead. We use this metaphor a lot when talking about BI and analytics maturity, but as we’ve seen, teams such as Gift Compliance can be forward-looking.

Level 1 teams are order-takers, which does not imply that Level 4 teams are order-givers. An ethos of responsive customer service, once gained, should be retained. Ops can be a strategic partner while still primarily playing a support role.

The difference is in outlook, an evolution from understanding the WHAT to understanding and embracing the WHY.

Dare to shut down your “always on” culture

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While heading to work I see a line of city buses, emptied of passengers, their headsigns glowing “OUT OF SERVICE.” They are leaving downtown to reload in the suburbs.

It reminds me of the need for us, too, to be sometimes emptied and unavailable. We take vacations and the occasional holiday to rest, to renew mentally, to change perspective through distance. We empty out, to return full. We empty out, so we don’t burn out.

Leaders in an organization tend to be reachable all times and everywhere, and a certain ever-presence goes with the territory. But sometimes the behaviour seeps deeper. Middle managers are increasingly an email or text away. Staff responsible for critical systems or processes, too. It becomes expected, part of the culture, for everyone.

It can seem harmless. A staff person can triage her own messages, we presume, and respond only to the true emergencies. Unfortunately, although she may be on the beach, part of her brain is still in the office as she scrolls, thinking office thoughts. Every message strikes a blow against being where she is. Chipping away at future creativity, innovation, fresh thinking. Chipping away at her health.

Allow your team members to set up email rules and auto-responders that tell internal staff that the recipient is on vacation, that their message won’t be read, and that they can resend their query when the recipient returns. (No returning to an overflowing inbox.) If it’s an emergency, provide alternate contacts. (Because if a system or process is truly critical, you’ve planned some redundancy. Right?) And if something absolutely must reach that person, then have it go through a secret back channel such as a Gmail account set up for emergencies, which only one or two people know about.

Down time is important, so plan for it.