If I Only Knew Then: FLiP Editor Edition

A year and a half ago I walked from Grand Central to Wall Street with my friend and co-worker, Jessica Stannard-Friel. We talked (at length) about starting a blog for young professionals in philanthropy. Before Jess says a temporary goodbye to the world of “full-time employment” (she’s about to take Harvard Business School by storm) I wanted to be sure that she wrote down her tips and tricks for learning the office ropes.  In her day job, Jess was a Director in the Philanthropy Division of Changing Our World, the consulting firm that houses and sponsors the FLiP editors.

If you’re a FLiP getting ready to start your first fundraising, grantmaking, (or, like Jess, consulting) job, read on!

Jess wrote well over 40 articles for onPhilanthropy in her 3 years with Changing Our World. At the end of this post, please find some of Jess’s greatest hits. Jess, we’ll miss you. Graduate and hurry back!

When I started working at Changing Our World, five weeks after I graduated from college, I thought the biggest challenge of my new job would be learning about the then-unfamiliar world of philanthropy.  I quickly found, though, that mastering the information I needed in my job was fairly easy.  I successfully applied the same skill set that in college had allowed me to learn quickly about topics ranging from fairy tales to natural disasters and soon acquired a respectable understanding of my new field.  Learning how to HAVE a job, on the other hand, was a challenge I hadn’t expected.

Now that I finally think I’ve got it, it’s time for me to reverse gears and go back to school!  But with graduation season coming to an end and recent grads flooding into new jobs, I hope these lessons will help a few FLiPs make the transition.

• Your boss/clients don’t want to know everything there is to know about the topic at hand.  When I wrote 20 page papers for college courses, my professor was willing to delve as deeply into the topic as I could go.  Six sources?  Twelve?  Twenty?  The more, the better.  The value of the paper was not in the product, but in the process of researching and writing it. 

That’s very much NOT true at work.  When you write a memo, the purpose is not for you to have the experience of researching and thinking about the topic.  Instead, it’s generally to provide a decision-maker with the information she needs to make a decision.  Typically, having all of the information available about that topic not only is more than she needs, but it may also obscure the key facts and consume more of the decision-maker’s time than she has available for this particular decision.

This was a hard lesson for me to learn.  After all, I’d think, as a new employee, who am I to decide what information isn’t necessary?  And of course, when you’re first starting out, it’s probably appropriate for you to check in periodically with someone more experienced to ask if a particular tangent may be important, if you’re providing enough information to make the document meaningful, and how much is too much within the context of your organization and industry.  But keep in mind that a crucial decision isn’t likely to be made on the basis of a two page memo alone.  The document may serve as the starting point for a discussion in which you can interject additional information as appropriate, or the decision-maker may request additional details about the part of your research that is important to her.

• Similarly, more time isn’t necessarily better.  In college, papers were nearly always better when you spent more time on them.  If eight hours of work got you an A-, and sixteen hours got you an A, the professor grading the paper really only cared about the increased quality of the sixteen-hour paper, not whether putting in the extra eight hours was the most efficient use of your time. 

At work, of course, you want to meet and generally exceed expectations, whether they’re your boss’s or your client’s.  But suddenly, you don’t have four separate professors, each of whom cares only about the one paper you write for his class.  Instead, in many workplaces, you have multiple assignments, all for one supervisor, who cares about the quality and timing of each individual assignment.  Scoring a figurative A++ won’t impress your supervisor so much if it means that the other three assignments are lacking. 

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t aim for excellence on each assignment.  However, as a human being working within a 24-hour day, you have real constraints.  It’s better to meet or slightly exceed expectations on everything you do than to deliver the best possible product on one assignment and fall short on the others.  That said, knocking the ball out of the park occasionally, particularly on important assignments, may be good for your workplace image.

• Presentation counts.  As you’ll notice, I’ve learned all about bullet points, indenting, bolding, and other pretty formatting tactics.  However, this isn’t a case of document beauty that’s only skin deep.  In a work document, presentation does more than make something look professional – it organizes the information provided and helps the reader make sense of it.  It directs attention to the most important pieces of information, so that the super-busy executive can scan the headlines, while a slightly-less-busy middle manager can read it in full.  Learn to use formatting to break down your argument into clear and easily-digestible nuggets.

On the other hand, much to my dismay, within the context of business writing, presentation doesn’t matter, at least not in the way I was used to.  No longer did I get bonus points for having a varied vocabulary, using complex sentence structure, or otherwise playing with language to get my point across more prettily.  Instead, all that matters is clarity and conciseness.  You’re not competing in a writing contest; you’re trying to communicate something.  You have to pick the clearest way to say something, even if that occasionally means losing out on a particularly inspired turn of phrase.

• You are no longer an independent operator.  I’m sure all of you know that teamwork is far more important in the workplace than it is in most academic settings.  For many of you, as it was for me, that’s probably an exciting advantage of the world of work.  But remember that working in a more collaborative setting may require you to abandon a few cherished college habits.

For instance, you may know that, no matter how late you started a paper when you were in school, you always got it done by the deadline.  You might not have slept the night before, and you might have subsisted on chips and soda from the vending machine because you didn’t have time for the cafeteria, but you always got it done.  Sadly, this doesn’t work in the office. 

Now that you’re working, you’re probably not the only person involved in producing a document.  You might do the bulk of the work, but it most likely isn’t ready for your client, or for your boss’s boss, until your colleagues or supervisors read it, give input, shape it, and sign off on it.  If you have a 9am deadline, you may be willing to stay up all night to meet it, but you’re supervisor probably doesn’t want to wait up with you, ready to review it when you hand it off at 3am.  After years in which you were the only person who bore the consequences for stressful study habits, your actions now impact your team, so plan accordingly.

• Good little employees are not only seen but also heard.  When you start working, everything is probably going to seem very new, and maybe very confusing.  Like me, you might think your subject area will take forever to understand, so in meetings, you might be inclined to keep you mouth shut and your ears open. 

In many cases, this is a very, very good strategy.  Unlike in class, you don’t get points for participation, so there’s no need to make an obvious or irrelevant point just to get a comment in before the end of the hour.  That said, maybe sooner than you think, you’ll probably be in a meeting where you have a thought that no one else has, and that would actually add a lot to the discussions.  SAY IT.  Remember, in many workplaces, it’s the junior level employees who are the closest to the information that makes up the backbone of many businesses, so you might have noticed a pattern or have conducted research that no one else did. 

Take your time with this strategy.  You don’t need to make a brilliant point in your first meeting, particularly if people outside of your immediate team are present.  Make sure you understand the culture and customs of your organization and observe how other people, especially your peers and immediate supervisors, behave and speak (or don’t speak).  There are certainly meetings in which it might not be appropriate for you to comment, and there are certainly organizations in which it might not ever really be ok. 

For me, though, I know it would have been appropriate, even desirable, for me to share my thoughts in client meetings far sooner than I did.  You might not feel like you could possibly have a valuable thought in the company of far more senior and experienced colleagues, but remember that you perform a role within the organization that these more senior colleagues don’t perform, and that may give you a unique perspective.  Keep an eye out for opportunities to contribute to the conversation.

• You might not know much, but don’t assume that everyone else knows more.  Over the past three years, I’ve conducted a lot of interviews – interviews with nonprofits to determine if they might be an appropriate grantee for one of our corporate clients, interviews with academics and government officials to determine specific needs within a particular geographic or issue area, and especially interviews with companies to determine exactly how they conduct their charitable giving, so that we can benchmark our clients against their peers and help them learn from trends and best practices. 

For a long time, in these calls, I was afraid to ask questions.  I’d ask the questions on my script, of course, but when the interviewee gave an answer that didn’t make sense to me, I’d move on, assuming that the answer was perfectly clear and I just didn’t know enough to understand it.  After going over these answers with my colleagues, time after time I found that the answer just didn’t make sense to begin with.  I had to conquer my fear of sounding stupid and just ask for clarification, sometimes over and over again, until I understood.

Don’t make the same mistake.  Sometimes, when the people around you don’t make sense to you, it’s because they just don’t make sense.  Be tactful, of course, but probe – don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions.  You’ll either learn something new or learn that you knew more than you thought.

In many cases, the lessons that served you well through sixteen-plus years of education may prove to be maladaptive in the workplace.  For awhile, you may feel stupid:  You can do multivariable calculus with the best of them, but it takes you five tries to make double-sided color copies from single-sided originals?  You can write a paper comparing Marx and Smith in your sleep, but it takes you seven drafts to write a two-page memo?  Join the club. 

Since you were five years old, you operated within a fairly consistent world with a fairly consistent definition of success.  Now, the rules are suddenly changing.  You’re being asked to play a very different role and to produce work products that will be used in a very different way.  Don’t feel dumb when things that you think should be easy take a little while to get used to.  Request feedback from your supervisors, ask for advice from colleagues who were in your shoes a year or two ago, and know that you’re in the very good company of thousands of school-smart, workplace-less-smart fellow graduates starting new jobs all around you.

Some of Jess’s Greatest Hits:

FLiP Posts:

Starting Your Own Foundation

February 23, 2007

Prove Yourself Beyond All Obstacles: Grantmaking

August 10, 2006

onPhilanthropy Posts:

Troubling Questions on Future Leadership for Nonprofits

April 18, 2007

A Role for Corporate Philanthropy in Capital Funding?

January 27, 2006

How Employee Volunteers Multiply your Community Impact

December 2, 2005

MBAs at the Crossroads of Corporate and Nonprofit America

December 3, 2004

Proving the Win-Win Strategy of Cause Related Marketing

November 5, 2004

Comments

[Divine]

Great send-off, Jess. Truly, you will be missed. I wished this was something I could have read three years ago when we were school-smart, workplace-less-smart! Hurry and graduate so that you can come back to us.

[Elisabeth Anderson]

I second Divine. New grads, listen to Jess; she has the power to make you smarter - seriously, I sat next to her at work for almost two years and think I gained IQ points as a direct result :)