The honeymoon is officially over.
After nine months at my new job, I've finally encountered my first rocky patch. Unfortunately, I have found it to me more than simply a rough patch but rather a sign of things to come from this point going forward.
I guess I should give some background to the situation. As a first year director, I am evaluated every quarter, or three months. After my second evaluation in January, I was given two areas to focus on as a director: My own calling and what were called foundational practices. My own calling related to my director fundraising, for which I am required to do 8 hours per week. At the second evaluation, I had the goal of calling at 25% above expectations, which was a goal set by my supervisor. During my second evaluation, I was told that I reached this goal and that I was trending in the right direction. For my third evaluation, it was determined that my goal as a caller was to be 40% above expectations.
The second area of focus is what is called foundational practices. My supervisor defined these as things relating to daily office management like properly collecting and filing paperwork, processing returns, and evaluating employee performance. At our second evaluation, this was stressed to me due to an incident that happened in December. Each time we hire a new employee, we collect tax forms as well as I-9 forms from them and immediately fax that information to our national office in Boston. Every so often for whatever reason, our national office fails to receive a form and they immediately e-mail the directing team to locate the form. Nine times out of ten, we either check the employee's file for the form or get them to re-fill out the form their next shift. Unfortunately in December, one of our employees quit during their training week right after we realize we were missing her I-9 form. Since I was the one who collected the form, it was my responsibility to track her down and get her to fill out the information so we could give her her final paycheck. However, she did not return our calls and thus, we had to figure out how to pay her without having her information. It served as a prime example as to how and why these foundational practices were so important.
So this past Thursday when I had my third formal evaluation, I was well aware of the expectations. In starting the evaluation, my director asked for my feedback as to how things were going. I was honest in that I felt I was calling better and that I was also making a conscientious effort to do better with foundational practices. My director said that for the last two months I had been calling at 48% above expectations, which was moving in the right direction. She also mentioned that ever since the December incident, I hadn't lost or misplaced any new member information, which was a also a step in the right direction. However, despite both of these improvements, she told me that I was going to be placed on a director improvement plan for the next month for both my calling and my foundational practices. If these both did not improve, I would be terminated.
I was absolutely blindsided by this.
When I politely asked for the reasoning behind this decision, my director told me that even though I was calling better my performance since the start of my tenure still wasn't where it should have been after nine months of staff. She also mentioned a couple of foundational concerns, including the aforementioned December incident. When I told her that I felt good that that mistake hadn't been repeated, she essentially told me that while that was true it still should have never happened in the first place. She also mentioned some other things that I considered irrelevant like one time in February where one of my interviews had taken longer than expected and she told me that the interview had lasted too long. I took note of that and made sure that all of my interviews from that time forward where done in a timely manner, which they were. Overall, when I left the evaluation I was dumbstruck as to how and why I ended up on the improvement plan.
The past forty-eight hours have left me reflecting long and hard about my job. It's not that I can't take criticism, I can definitely do that. However, what struck me the most about the evaluation is how short-sighted it seemed. The message was essentially this: We expect you to be a great fundraiser who never makes mistakes. To me, that is an unrealistic expectation, especially for a first-time director. For me, I know that it took me a while to become a good fundraiser and I've talked about this struggle in previous blogs. I also think that with any new job there is a learning curve where unintentional mistakes are made. What's important with these mistakes is that they are addressed and corrected and that they don't happen again.
In addition, I am also concerned about how this will affect my job going forward. Not only will I have to worry about being under the microscope for the next month but I also now have reservations about how the organization sees me. Do they see me as someone who is incompetent? Do they see me as someone who is an inadequate fundraiser? Or do they see the intangibles I bring to the work? The things I do that are immeasurable like building relationships with the staff and helping office performance improve over 12% from where it was last year?
For now, the main question I am considering is whether or not it's worth being with an organization that potentially doesn't value the work that I do for another 15 months. I am a man of my word and I want to finish my two-year commitment to the job and the organization. However, if they don't see what I bring to the table, especially after giving up my previous career for the job then I don't know if it's worth my investment. I believe in what the organization does and what it stands for but if I'm in a position that limits my professional growth for the next 15 months then I am going to have to take a long, hard look at whether or not it will be worth it.
In other words, I'm going to be doing a lot of soul searching between now and Monday.
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