Getting Something From Volunteering
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
My first job out of school was working for a bank in the United Kingdom. I was assigned to a small branch in a country town where there were just seven of us. T
he company wasn’t doing very well, and there was a sign on the staff side of the customer service counter: “This is a non-profit organization. We don’t plan it that way, it just happens.”
At the time, I just thought it was a humorous sign (and I still don’t know which of my colleagues put it up). But with hindsight, I see it differently.
The people who worked in that branch, and the people in other parts of the bank that I interacted with, weren’t particularly happy. They wanted to give of their best for their customers, but the fact that the company kept losing money, that there were no annual bonuses, and that there were talks of a takeover on a regular basis (which eventually happened), sapped morale.
I didn’t realize that at the time—it was my first experience of a work environment, and for all I knew the next 40-odd years of my life were going to be spent miserable because apparently that’s what work was like. It was only when I moved on to something else that I realized that branch environment wasn’t a normal reflection of what work was like.
Why do I recount that story now? Because it’s an example of imbalance. Sure, as employees we …
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"It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them." - Mark Twain |
