NYNP blog post 2-21-10

Advice for career success
Find a job where you fit, you care, and you accomplish with a team you respect

Last week's Leadership and Strategy class (see my post from 2.3.10 for more info) focused on understanding how organizations work, in order to make good decisions.

Professor Sermier led us through a comparison of the private, nonprofit, and government sectors using the following lenses:
1) The bottom line
2) The complexity of processes
3) How success is defined and measured
4) The value of evidence vs. the value of opinion when making decisions
5) The role of competition
6) How CEOs are evaluated
7) The impact of the press

Career advice
Sermier, whose career has included jobs in each of the sectors, shared the advice that in order to give ourselves the best possible chance to succeed in our careers, we need to choose the right sector, the right part of the sector (for nonprofits, that means social service, cultural, university, foundations, or health care), the right size organization, and the right organizational culture and structure. Perhaps most importantly, we need to find the right fit for our passions, because it's difficult to succeed at something that we don't care about.

Whatever the sector, when we've chosen a job, it can be helpful to keep our thinking simple and remember that any organization is basically a bunch of people trying to get something done together. With that in mind, some keys to success at work include:
* treating people fairly
* encouraging enough dissent to know that you're doing the right thing
* setting up rewards for doing well and penalties for doing poorly
* creating a common statement about what you're trying to accomplish as a group
* avoiding creating too many rules, while at the same time establishing basic systems that help people understand their common interest