Tag Archives: culture

Why You SHOULD Separate Your Personal Life & Professional Life Online

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This blog by Rosetta Thurman says you can’t separate your public and private lives online.

She’s wrong.

You can separate your public and private lives online – at least as much as you can offline. And, quite frankly, you should! She says it’s not cool to be two different people online. The reality is that, offline, you are at least two different people – and, in fact, you are probably a dozen different people. Offline, you already compartmentalize your life with regards to what information you share with others and what you do around certain people:

  • When you are with certain friends, you may talk mostly about sports, and when you are with different friends, you may talk about politics.
  • When you are at work, you might never bring up that you dress up for Renaissance faires.
  • There are people in your life that do not want to hear about your work. They either find it uninteresting or boring or too complicated to understand. So you don’t talk about your work with them. It’s not that your work is secret – it’s just not something you talk about with everyone.
  • When you are around your grandmother, you probably don’t use some of the colorful language you freely use with friends at a bar.

All those offline conversations and activities aren’t secret: it’s quite possible a co-worker is going to show up at a Renaissance faire and see you in costume. You may go to a conference and the speaker may turn out to be your socccer team coach, whom you had no idea was a lawyer specializing in risk management. But even when these worlds collide, they usually stay separate after the fact: your co-worker may greet you with “Forsooth, friend!” for a few weeks, you may be tempted to ask your soccer coach some legal questions after a game, but eventually, everyone will retreat to the roles in which they feel most comfortable.

Online, it’s no different:

  • You may have two Twitter accounts, one for your professional activities and one for your Star Trek convention activities. One account might allow anyone to see your tweets, even if they don’t follow you, and the other may require all followers to be approved.
  • On Facebook, you may have all of your Facebook friends in different lists (or, on GooglePlus, you may have all of your connections in different circles), and every time you post, you might include or exclude certain people or lists – you may target sports talk about your alma mater with other alumni, you may share your baby photos only with family, and you may exclude your in-laws from any of your political rants.
  • You may decide your Facebook account is only for real friends – that means you might be a LinkedIn connection of someone, but when you find that person on Facebook and try to connect, the person may refuse the connection. I’ve turned down friend requests from people on social networks I use primarily for personal reasons, and I’ve been turned down a few times by professional colleagues, who say that their Facebook account is to talk to family and close friends, not people they work with.
  • You may hide people you’ve friended online from your Facebook newsfeed, because you are fed up with all the cat photos or daily affirmations. You can still see news about them if you go to their pages, but you decide you really don’t need their religious comments daily.

The point: you are already being different people online – and you should be, just as you are offline!

Could a diligent person find absolutely everything you do online, despite these efforts and despite your online privacy settings? Absolutely! But outside of a stalker, that’s probably not going to happen; most of your professional colleagues will never know about your Lt. Uhura costume, because they aren’t ever going to stumble upon the Twitter feed you use specifically to talk about that. You aren’t going to bore your soccer teammates with online talk about the professional conference you attended, because they are going to unfriend you on Facebook if that’s all you’re going to talk about.

So, yes, you can separate your public and private lives online – at least as much as you can offline. And you should separate your public and private lives online, at least to a degree, just as you do offline, because not everyone wants to hear absolutely everything about you. Here’s how you do that:

  • Think of everything you post online as publishing. You are producing a publication – the same as a newsletter, a flier, a newspaper, a pamphlet, a holiday letter to friends, etc. – every time you create an online account and start posting information. When you post online, you should be thinking about who the audience is for that publication – you don’t write exactly the same letter to your grandmother than you do your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, do you? Then why try to have a one-size-fits-all message every time you post online?
  • If you associate or use your work email to create a social media account, then that account is part of your job, period. In fact, your company may require you to give up that account when you leave the company, since you associated it with your work email. If you want to use a social media account and not always be talking as an employee of a company, use a personal email to create or associate with that account.
  • You may say no to Facebook friends or Twitter followers. You have that right. Just always have an alternative to offer someone. For instance, I use LinkedIn to link to people I have worked with or whose work I am familiar with. Period. I do not link to people I haven’t worked with or whose work I am not familiar with – if I did, then LinkedIn would become a meaningless phone book. When someone I don’t know wants to friend me on LinkedIn, I encourage them to, instead, like my Facebook page.
  • If Facebook seems to be the place where all of the online activities of your personal friends, family and co-workers are intersecting – it’s the primary place you are interacting with people from all of those groups – then get all your contacts into lists, and be mindful every time you post. Should a political rant go to everyone, or should you exclude anyone you have coded as a co-worker? It’s a courtesy to not bombard your professional colleagues with baby photos, or to bombard your family and friends with your latest conference slideshow presentations, offline as well as on!
  • Consider creating a Facebook page for your professional life, rather than friending co-workers on Facebook. A page is different than a profile: with a page, anyone can “like” your page, but people that like your page can see only what you post to that page, as opposed to seeing what you share on your profile timeline (if you have set your privacy settings so that no friends can see that content).
  • Share personal things with your professional colleagues online via the online profile you’ve chosen primarily for professional activities only as much as you would offline in the office: would you pass around vacation photos at lunch? Would you invite all of your co-workers to your daughter’s wedding? Would you talk about the Renaissance faire in the break room? Would you tell your office mates about your new drummer boyfriend? It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share personal things with professional colleagues and clients – I know that sharing my photos from my motorcycle trips has gone over quite well with co-workers and clients, and perhaps even contributed to their image of me as adventurous and outgoing (hence why I don’t share photos of myself in sweat pants, watching “Buffy” marathons, which is something I do as much, if not more, than motorcycle trips).

Can it get messy, can boundaries get blurred? Of course, just like it can offline when you’re rocking out at a concert and look over to see one of your clients in the audience, spell bound by your dancing abilities. Even if you aren’t violating any policies or doing anything illegal, your offline actions can have consequences. That’s life. A board member at a nonprofit where you volunteer may get angry at seeing you on the front page of the newspaper participating in a demonstration against something he or she supports – or seeing that you “liked” a political candidate on an online social network that he or she opposes. If you are not a spokesperson at your organization, and there’s no written policy against employees expressing political beliefs outside of the office, you should be as fine in the eyes of the organization regarding what you do online as what you do off.

Should you keep professional activities and personal activities absolutely, completely segregated? Of course NOT – clients, co-workers, and even potential employers, want to see some of your personality. Sharing photos from my personal life built a lot of bridges with my co-workers in Afghanistan once-upon-a-time.

What about creating accounts using pseudonyms? Or should you keep certain things about yourself off the Internet entirely? There is nothing at all unethical about this in certain circumstances: perhaps you are on a private online group for victims of domestic violence, because you are one yourself. Or you are an aid / humanitarian worker that visits ultra-conservative regions and would be in danger if people there knew you were gay. Perhaps you are a teacher that also writes fan fiction, and you aren’t sure all of the parents of your students would be able to separate you as a teacher from you as an author. In those cases, you have every right to use a pseudonym for certain online activities, or to not share certain information online at all.

Type your name into Google or Bing a couple of times a year and see what comes up – are you comfortable with an employer, or potential employer, or your neighbor, seeing the first 10 links to your name? If not, then start thinking more deliberately about your online behavior.

In short: once again, offline rules apply online. Be as mindful and deliberate online about information sharing as you are offline, tell the truth, just as you would in any printed publication, and you won’t worry about your integrity or image. And please – keep your online activities separate so I don’t have to see your baby’s potty training.

Do departments at your org hate each other?

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I once had lunch with a friend of a friend who worked at a very large, well-known company in Silicon Valley. She worked in the marketing department, and had been charged to create policies and activities around employee volunteering, product donations to nonprofits and schools, financial grants to nonprofits and schools, and all other philanthropic activities the company untertook, or wanted to undertake. Since I had run such a program at a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley back in the early 1990s, she wanted advice.

My advice was, more or less, this:

You’ve got this great resource already at your company, I’ve no doubt: it’s called the BNA Index. Your human resources department or your corporate library has it. It’s a series of notebooks that has samples of just about any policy or procedure you can think of. It’s frequently updated. I used its samples as models for the policies we developed at such-and-such company for all of our philanthropic activities. It’s awesome! 

(note: BNA stands for Bureau of National Affairs, the early name of what is now Bloomberg BNA).

She smiled in a wow-that-is-totally-not-helpful way, and said, firmly, “The marketing department is in charge of our philanthropy activities, NOT the HR department. HR would really like to be in charge of it. So I’m not going to them. That’s out of the question.”

I gently pointed out that she didn’t have to tell the HR department why she wanted to see the BNA Index – just that she wanted to look up a policy. And that I didn’t see how telling HR staff what she was looking up would somehow give them the power to take the activity away from her. That just made her – well, kind of hysterical. The rest of the lunch was super awkward and we haven’t spoken since.

I wish I could say departments not getting along is unusual, but it’s not: I find this story again and again from people that work for corporations, as well as people that work with government agencies or nonprofits. I’ve encountered it at many organizations where I’ve worked as well. The siege mentality that so many individual departments have is unhealthy to the organization and counter productive to everything that organization is trying to accomplish.

I’ve always wondered: are executive directors of these organiations aware that departments within their own agency are refusing to work with each other? Not one to mince words, I have brought up such circumstances in meetings: “That’s a great idea. Do you think the IT department will support us though, because based on such-and-such incident, I’m not sure they will help out with this.” Awkward silence follows… but what’s funny is that the department in question is then usually shamed into helping because their past non-support has been talked about so openly and officially.

I look at fellow employees as my customers. They have needs, and part of my job is to support those needs. In any position, I look at the requests of fellow staff members as priorities, and I treat them as I would like to be treated. It’s but one of my many wacky approaches to working.

I’ve also suggested at several organizations that staff performance reviews include rankings of all departments by all other departments:

  • are the staff charged with evaluation providing your department the data it needs in a timely manner?
  • is the IT department supporting you with the tools and resources you need to meet your department’s goals in support of the organization’s mission?
  • on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being an absolutely perfect score, how would you rate the customer service of the human resources department?

I’ve been turned down every time…

Are you brave enough to explore how well employees, volunteers and consultants, grouped by department, get along with each other?

The volunteer as bully = the toxic volunteer

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This blog was originally posted 16 August 2010.

So many people — media and corporate people in particular — like to talk about volunteers in the most flowery language possible: volunteers as selfless and hard-working and nice and sweet and huggable. Gosh golly, don’t you love them?!?

I’m not fond of using fuzzy language to talk about volunteers, because I find it degrading and disrespectful. It devalues volunteers and their role in organizations.

While in Australia leading workshops on volunteer management earlier this year, one of the very hot-topics that volunteer managers wanted to talk about was volunteers as bullies. So many were facing a toxic volunteer at their organizations who used abusive language with other volunteers, paid staff and even clients, disrupted meetings and plans that other volunteers were leading or organizing, and were uncooperative regarding following policies and procedures. These toxic volunteers were capable of bringing meetings, planning, events, and even entire programs to a halt.

The volunteer managers felt powerless to deal with the bullies, because these volunteers had often been at the organization longer than the volunteer managers had, because the volunteers were also financial donors, because the volunteers had been honored in the past regarding their service, or because the staff was afraid of the volunteers and didn’t want to provoke them further. Volunteer managers told me that just one volunteer complaint — including complaints about being reprimanded for not following policy —  would result in senior leadership displeasure with the volunteer manager. One person said that her supervisor, in regards to complaints by a long-time volunteer who did not want to follow policy, “I just don’t want to hear it. Make her happy.”

One avoidance tactic upper management uses regarding bullies is to require everyone to go into a conflict management workshop. Those workshops can be really great for other issues, but don’t solve the problem of a bully. In fact, volunteer managers report to me that bullies either come up with a way to beg off attending such or are brilliant at hijacking such workshops, portraying themselves as victims and using the tactics they learn at the workshop to divert responsibility from themselves regarding bullying behavior. And I have to admit that I’ve seen it happen myself.

Since those workshops in Australia, I’ve kept my eye out for good resources regarding bullying in the workplace. One that I found was a blog from the Open University, Office conflict: the impact of workplace bullying. Another terrific resource is How to deal with workplace bullying and how to tackle bullying at work, also from the United Kingdom. My favorite resource, however, regarding petty tyranny in the workplace is the book The No Asshole Rule—Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, which I’ve blogged about before. His book is about paid employees, but it most definitely applies to volunteers.

My own advice as well:

  • Document, document, document. Have dates, places and details about the actions of a toxic volunteer in writing. Have details in writing on the consequences of the bullying, such as other volunteers not participating in activities if the toxic volunteer will be there, volunteers dropping out of participation altogether, little or no new volunteers participating in certain activities, and complaints from other volunteers, paid staff and clients. Be ready to present these to your supervisor, the head of your human resources department, and even the head of your organization. Don’t wait to be asked to present this information, and don’t be discouraged if your initial presentation of such doesn’t prompt action; it may take several presentations to get the message across that the toxic volunteer must be let go.
  • Be consistent in applying the rules to all volunteers, so there is no possibility of a toxic volunteer claiming you are singling her or him out, something she or he will be tempted to claim to other volunteers and to paid staff she or he has a long-term relationship with. This starts to create an atmosphere where the toxic volunteer will start to feel unwelcomed and will indirectly encourage her or him to move on.
  • Be willing to lose the bully, as well as her or his allies among your volunteers, and to answer questions from staff or other volunteers who express displeasure at their departure. If you create an environment where the bully cannot engage in toxic behavior without having consequences for that behavior, that volunteer will probably leave your organization, but not without a dramatic exit, like a fiery letter or email or an emotional final meeting, and she or he may successfully encourage other volunteers to leave as well. Say goodbye and wish them well and calmly move on, focusing on your remaining volunteers, reaching out to volunteers who left because of the toxic volunteer, recruiting new volunteers, staying dispassionate and staying positive.
  • Never, ever trash talk the bully to other staff or volunteers, even if you consider those staff or volunteers sympathetic to you. Those words could come back to haunt you. Be above reproach in any comments you make about the toxic volunteer, even among allies. It’s fine for volunteers to share complaints with you regarding a bullying volunteer, but keep it dispassionate and don’t allow them to cross a line where they could be accused of being bullies themselves.

Be on the lookout for misinterpretations and misrepresentations of your actions, and ready to respond to such immediately, quickly and decisively.

Don’t think that the situation will somehow work itself out. It won’t.

Also see:

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Excuses, excuses

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Here’s a conversation I had this week as a member of a certain city’s citizen’s committee regarding bicyclists and pedestrians:

Me: “I’d like for this link to the state agency name redacted web site to added to this web page on the city’s site. I’ve sent two emails requesting it, but no one has responded.”

City representative: “We don’t have money in the budget to do that.”

Me: “You don’t have the money to add a link to a web page?!?”

City Rep: “Actually, it’s because the decision makers need to review that change first.”

Me: “Okay, who are the ‘decision makers’?”

City Rep: “Oh, we don’t have a policy yet on how those decisions will be made.”

THIS IS WHY I DON’T BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES INVOLVING THE GOVERNMENT.

This is also a perfect illustration of the change of mentality that’s needed for effective online communications. Using web pages and social media has nothing to do with budgets or policies – it has to do with mindsets.

Fear-based management – it’s a customer service KILLER.

Why don’t they tell? Would they at your org?

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Over the years, more than one person observed Jerry Sandusky, head of the nonprofit organization The Second Mile and former Penn State defensive coordinator, having sex with boys. Yet none of those people called the police, and none of the people in authority that they told about what they saw called police.

Why?

A leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the USA is being accused of sexual harassment by women who worked for a business association he lead, and by a woman who claims when she asked for help getting a job, he pressured her for sex (and, yes, the latter is sexual harassment – a coercive request for sex in exchange for a job, a good grade or other non-sexual “reward”). But people looked the other way, this latest accuser didn’t say anything at the time and for many years, and this man kept moving up in his political party to where he is now.

Why didn’t people in the know say more?

I have the answer to both of those questions: the consequences for the accuser or witness of saying something to people in authority or to the police seemed greater, and worse, than saying nothing. Consciously or unconsciously, people said to themselves, I don’t want to deal with this. This makes me uncomfortable. I may lose my job / never get a job if I say something. I don’t want this to define me, to follow me at this job and all jobs in the future. Maybe he’s better now or maybe someone else will deal with this. I don’t want to be the bad guy. It’s easier for me and this organization not to say anything.

I am not at all excusing the behavior of all the people who didn’t speak out. Penn State’s Athletic director and one of the university’s vice president have not only lost their jobs: they face possible prison time for lying to a grand jury and for not reporting to proper authorities the allegations of sexual misconduct. And that is exactly as it should be. Shame on them! It’s a shame that people in the Catholic Church who knew about sexual assaults by many priests weren’t similarly punished.

But I am challenging nonprofits, non-governmental agencies, universities, government departments and other mission-based programs – and particularly aid agencies with staff members in the field! – to take a hard look at not just their policies, but their culture.

Are you never hearing about inappropriate behavior by employees or volunteers at your organization not because nothing is happening, but because people don’t feel comfortable saying anything?

The consequences of a culture that, intentionally or not, discourages victims and witnesses from coming forward can even be deadly: Kate Puzey, a Peace Corps volunteer in the west African nation of Benin in 2009, was murdered in apparent retaliation for accusing a local Peace Corps staff member of child sexual assault. Her murder, and the poor reaction of the Peace Corps administration to this and to reported sexual assaults on Peace Corps members themselves, lead to a volunteer protection act, passed by Congress this year, establishing sexual assault policies and training to protect victims and whistle-blowers.

What about your organization?

  • Are you going to look at not only your policies, but your practice?
  • Do you do trainings and awareness activities for employees and volunteers regarding sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior every year?
  • What do you do to create a welcoming environment regarding the reporting of inappropriate behavior?
  • What do your individual employees and volunteers say about your organization’s culture, particularly in how comfortable they would feel reporting suspected inappropriate or even criminal behavior by someone, particularly a person in authority?

And in case you are wondering – yes, this is a personally important issue to me.

It’s About Respect

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This is a followup to my blog A Stupid Name for a Service for Nonprofits, regarding the unbelievably-poorly-named online volunteering service, Pimp My Cause.

The issue isn’t just about a service using language that is anti-women and, indeed, anti-children. It isn’t just about this service using a phrase that means to market women and children for sex. The issue isn’t just about lack of respect for women and children.

The issue is about respect for the third sector.

The work of nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities and other mission-based organizations – the third sector – isn’t a pastime. It isn’t a hobby. Indeed, sometimes a nonprofit cause does become fashionable – suddenly, the media and celebrities may want to talk about getting rid of landmines, or HIV/AIDS, or immunizations, or breast cancer, or returning war veterans, and lots of flavor-of-the-day social entrepreneurs want to jump on the band wagon, with everyone wearing a particularly-colored ribbon, with lots of bumper stickers for the cause showing up on cars and SUVs, lots of shirts or shoes sporting a particular logo… but that spotlight doesn’t last. Long after the high-profile campaign by the department store or the software company or the talk show host or the singer or the actor has ended, these organizations will still be working, day-in, day-out, on a variety of worthwhile, even vital, causes.

Often, the work of nonprofits not only doesn’t catch on as fashionable or hip – it may even make people uncomfortable, because it addresses a not-so-hip issue, like child sexual exploitation and human trafficking – but nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations keep working year-after-year, without big-time donations or media campaigns.

The third sector isn’t perfect, but it serves society and the environment in ways that the for-profit or public sector cannot. Some causes are best addressed by the for-profit sector, some are best addressed by governments, and some are best addressed by mission-based organizations – and many are best addressed by all of these sectors working in partnership.

People that work for nonprofits aren’t simply nice people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. They are often highly skilled and experienced experts in their field – child psychology, emergency logistics, crisis communications, theater and dance as tools for community education and empowerment, arts management, social media to build awareness about HIV/AIDS, maternal health, organic agriculture, and on and on. They deserve to be listened to and consulted on actions that are going to involve them or effect them – and that includes being consulted by donors about new programs and projects donors want to fund.

The third sector has its own jargon, its own lingo. And different fields within the third sector each have a jargon or lingo all their own. And when you are talking to the third sector, you had better know that lingo and that culture: For instance, when you are standing in front of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, you don’t talk about drunk driving accidents; you talk about drunk driving wrecks, crashes… deaths. To do otherwise is highly offensive. If you use the term SME, you need to know what it means to the organizations and third sector experts you are talking to: Small and medium enterprises? Subject matter expert? Social Market economy? A Linux firewall?

In summary: if you are going to work with or for mission-based organizations, whether as a volunteer or as someone marketing services to them, you need to do your homework about the sector’s work, it’s language and it’s culture. The third sector deserves respect from the for-profit sector, including corporations, from the media, from the government – from everyone. To not spend time researching the sector and consulting with its members shows profound disrespect for the people working in such, and the people being served by such.  

No one who respects nonprofits, NGOs or other mission-based organizations would ever name their service Pimp My Cause.

Also see: How to Do Market Research–The Basics. I hear there’s some really good books and classes on this subject as well.

Finally, a shout out to the nonprofit FAIR FUND, a leading girls empowerment and anti-human trafficking organization that works to keep girls safe from exploitation. When I let FAIR FUND know about “Pimp My Cause”, they were ALL OVER IT. Follow @FAIRFund on Twitter and consider supporting them with a donation!

 

Is your organization a buzz kill?

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Is your organization a buzz kill to new ideas? Does your organization cry “It’s against our policies/It’s not in our policies!” when an employee member or volunteer suggests an activity – and the response isn’t because what’s proposed isn’t good idea, but because somone at the organization is afraid of… well, something?

Stephen Colbert has been trying to start a political action committee (PAC). At first, his parent company, Viacom, said it was illegal. So Colbert consulted with a lawyer and came up with a way to make creating a PAC legal. But the parent company for his show, The Colbert Report, still said no, sent Colbert a letter explaining why, and asking him not to read the letter on his show. So Colbert paraphrased the letter thusly:

We are stupid lawyers who hate fun. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and everything, and everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Admiral John Q. Buzzshackler, Esq.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I have gotten this message myself, not from lawyers, but from colleagues at organizations where I’ve worked or where I’ve volunteered – one fairly recently, when I made a very simple suggestion regarding a one-time social media activity to a very well-known nonprofit organization I won’t name now, but will be happy to if you buy me a beer. The emails I’ve gotten over the years, including most recently, can be paraphrased similarly:

“We are stuffy nonprofit/NGO/international development agency senior managers who hate fun and new ideas. If you do this, we’re all scared because people might get mad at us or someone somewhere may say something negative about it or we might have to work differently. Or we might have to actually work. I think we just peed a little. So, even though we know it is totally legal and that thousands and thousands of organizations are doing this successfully and it could lead to more volunteers and more support, and most everybody wants you to do it, we’re not going to let you.

Sincerely,
Secretary General John Q. Buzzkill

Happy Friday, everyone!