Quick aging tips

I have just finished my first quarter at the Headwaters Foundation and I think I have found the fountain of old age, not the fountain of wisdom but the fountain of aging more quickly than I even thought possible. Ultimate responsibility sounds fun (or maybe it doesn't) but feeling personally responsible for the global economic meltdown and its impact on the foundation's endowment is not a good time. On a side note, I have found out that my new gray hairs are an unsettling shade of white and my curls turn into a hard zig zag pattern. I am really looking forward to a whole head of this. Despite all of that, I really am loving the new job. I get to work with staff, donors, and nonprofits that are making the world a better place everyday. The longer I am in philanthropy, the more appreciative I am of that fact.

Rowing the boat or steering the ship

This is my first week as the Executive Director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, so I thought it would be a good time to write about managing a job promotion. I have moved from a front-line position where I have a responsibility for a specific task that moves the organization's mission forward (grant review) to a position where my job is to figure out what our strategic direction is and make sure that my staff has the resources and systems to support them in doing that work. I have always loved strategy work and have been preparing for the last month or so by learning as much as I can about the organization's operations and the landscape of the community foundation and social justice fields. What I have realized, now that the job has started, is that you have to mentally adjust into that role as well. Here's what I have been doing to manage this mental transition:
Set aside large chunks of time to do strategic thinking- I have found that there is a adrenalin high that I got from finishing a specific project (or a grant review) because it was complete and I could check it off of my to do list. Strategic thinking is never finished, so I have been breaking it into small areas that I am developing plans for.
Talk to others that have been in your shoes- There are lots of great philanthropic leaders in my community and nationally that have been amazing sources of advice and support. I am using these sources to learn more about how they managed the transition from front-line staff to strategic thinker.
See the forest through the trees- Being new on staff allows you the opportunity to see the organization with a fresh perspective. Those fresh eyes only last so long, so I have been writing down any trends or processes that jump out at me as areas that might need work in the future. Rome wasn't built in a day but it is important to have a long-term blueprint so you remember what needs to be fixed or created.

Do you have any advice on how I manage this job transition?

The Generational Divide at Work

*Image courtesy of Flickr

This week I will be posting some of the most requested New Voices of Philanthropy posts while I am at an ABFE convening. This post pretty much sums up my reason for starting this blog.

The Great Generational Divide or the Cross-Generational Solution to Work Satisfaction?- Originally posted June 2007

I have been in what some people would call a “generational rock and a hard place” for the last few months. I am a young person in the foundation field and one of my passions is helping young people learn how to advance in the philanthropic sector but one of my professional duties at the foundation is managing a project on older adult civic engagement. A big piece of this project is figuring out how to keep baby boomers in my community engaged as they begin to retire or change careers. Talk about competing priorities. On one hand I know how important it is to keep baby boomers engaged, on the other hand I am hearing from young people on a daily basis that they can’t advance because baby boomers won’t leave the philanthropic sector and make room for young people to advance. I have finally realized that this isn’t an “either, or” proposition. Baby boomers at foundations and in the nonprofit sector as a whole have great expertise that they contribute to the field but they have created positions for themselves where they work 80 hours a week and refuse to take vacation (or sick days for that matter), with the idea that “this whole place would fall apart without me”. Young people want more responsibility but would also like to have a life outside of their job. There are lots of explanations for why this is but one of the most probable that I have heard is that Gen X was raised as latchkey kids and saw the family sacrifices that their parents had to make to slowly climb the career ladder. They also saw their parents lose their pensions in mass layoff and Enron scandals, so they know that the old paradigm of work hard for the same company for 40 years and retire is no longer realistic.

What if a new way of working was created that still kept baby boomers engaged but allowed them to reduce the number of hours that they work so that they could keep health benefits and stay involved in a career that they love? What if this same new way of work allowed Gen X the flexibility to spend time with their families or take on a second job (to pay down the massive student loan debt that so many have)? If we started thinking of the program officer position (of any other foundation or nonprofit staff member for that matter) as a collection of tasks that can be completed by one or many people depending on the time available for each worker. How much more effective would a foundation be if instead of one program officer, they now had three sharing that same 80 hour a week position? The foundation would now have 3 times as many connections in the community, 3 diverse perspectives on how to solve social problems, and 3 great ambassadors for the foundation’s work.

What refinements (or significant changes) do you think are needed to create a foundation workplace that is supportive for multiple generations?

Putting out lots of small fires

I am a big fan of batching tasks, which is doing similar things like responding to email at the same time to increase your efficiency, since you lose time when your brain has to switch between doing tasks. I had a great opportunity to practice batching this week because I was out of the office all of last week for an out of state funeral and when I got back I had a ton of messages. I help manage our foundation's scholarship programs and we are right in the middle of deadline time. Students don't seem to have any questions in the months proceeding the deadline but the night before the online applications are due, the questions seem to come out of the woodwork (Procrastination can be a topic for a future post). Since we have a variety of deadlines, I usually spend the days proceeding the deadline fielding a ton of calls and email. Each answer takes 5-30 minutes as I try to figure out what the student's issue is and address it. Being away for such a long period of time meant that I had hours and hours of problem solving in my in-box. Looking at this mound of work I realized two things:
1) Most of the problems, when looking at them from the 20,000 foot view of my packed inbox were remarkably the same. Students (or their parents) were either having technical issues with on online system that were usually caused by not using the right internet browser or they had very general questions about our scholarship programs.
2) Most had probably already resolved themselves with time or were solved by our super capable scholarship assistant whose contact information was on my out of office email responder.

First I talked to our assistant about what questions she had answered and for those that were left I developed very generic answer templates that were either a technical support answer or a link to our frequently asked question sheet and answered a ton of questions in less than 45 minutes. Now I also have a resource that I can use for future problems and it only takes me a second or two to send it out.

This got me to thinking about other questions or issues that come up repeatedly like when are grant deadlines, how does the grant process work, and is my idea a good fit with the foundation guidelines, that might also benefit from more of a 20,000 foot view.

What are questions that you get constantly that might benefit from a more generic view?

My favorite raving lunatic

Timothy Ferris has become my favorite lunatic. Tim is the author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek, which is a book about how to escape the 9 to 5 so that you can travel the world and become a national champion in Chinese kick boxing or learn to scuba dive in Hawaii. You might find it a little bit strange that someone who loves philanthropy so much that she stays up late at night and writes a blog about her field would enjoy a book about how to escape the work world. While I do sometimes dream about leaving my overflowing inbox behind so that I can go on safari in Kenya, I am much more interested in his tips for increasing your effectiveness by focusing on the essential. Tim talks about how your work expands to fill the amount of time that you have to complete it. I got to live this lesson recently when my son got the flu and I was out of the office for 3 days. When I returned I had a full inbox and a pile of work to do. Somehow 3 days worth of work was completed in an afternoon.

Focusing on the important lets you spend time doing the parts of your job that you love, ignoring the parts that are unnecessary (do you really need to get a CNN update every half an hour?), and having more time with the people and things that you care about outside of the work world. Viva la work-balance!

20 Hour Work Week, the Future of Foundation Work?

I know that you are reading the title of this post and laughing. When you think of the pile of grant reviews that are threatening to break your desk in half and the long list of phone calls that you need to return to grantees and potential grantees, the idea of a 40 hour work week seems laughable. The website Web Worker Daily has a post about how a shorter work week may be what is needed as baby boomers begin to retire and Gen X staff members rethink the idea of work-life balance. What if we could use technology to improve the efficiency of our work? Could we use shared positions or completely change the idea of our work to make it possible for a person to hold a job that they love, while still having a life outside of work? Do you think this day will ever come or is work-life balance something you can only fantasize about while you are answering your Blackberry during your daughter's dance recital? What do you do to keep your work life from taking over your entire life?

The Great Generational Divide or the Cross-Generational Solution to Work Satisfaction?

I have been in what some people would call a “generational rock and a hard place” for the last few months. I am a young person in the foundation field and one of my passions is helping young people learn how to advance in the philanthropic sector but one of my professional duties at the foundation is managing a project on older adult civic engagement. A big piece of this project is figuring out how to keep baby boomers in my community engaged as they begin to retire or change careers. Talk about competing priorities. On one hand I know how important it is to keep baby boomers engaged, on the other hand I am hearing from young people on a daily basis that they can’t advance because baby boomers won’t leave the philanthropic sector and make room for young people to advance. I have finally realized that this isn’t an “either, or” proposition. Baby boomers at foundations and in the nonprofit sector as a whole have great expertise that they contribute to the field but they have created positions for themselves where they work 80 hours a week and refuse to take vacation (or sick days for that matter), with the idea that “this whole place would fall apart without me”. Young people want more responsibility but would also like to have a life outside of their job. There are lots of explanations for why this is but one of the most probable that I have heard is that Gen X was raised as latchkey kids and saw the family sacrifices that their parents had to make to slowly climb the career ladder. They also saw their parents lose their pensions in mass layoff and Enron scandals, so they know that the old paradigm of work hard for the same company for 40 years and retire is no longer realistic.

What if a new way of working was created that still kept baby boomers engaged but allowed them to reduce the number of hours that they work so that they could keep health benefits and stay involved in a career that they love? What if this same new way of work allowed Gen X the flexibility to spend time with their families or take on a second job (to pay down the massive student loan debt that so many have)? If we started thinking of the program officer position (of any other foundation or nonprofit staff member for that matter) as a collection of tasks that can be completed by one or many people depending on the time available for each worker. How much more effective would a foundation be if instead of one program officer, they now had three sharing that same 80 hour a week position? The foundation would now have 3 times as many connections in the community, 3 diverse perspectives on how to solve social problems, and 3 great ambassadors for the foundation’s work.

What refinements (or significant changes) do you think are needed to create a foundation workplace that is supportive for multiple generations?