Builder or Custodian

In the world of big-time college athletics success on the field or court often results in ancillary benefits to the institution in the form of increased donations, an uptick in applications for admission, and in the case of so-called ‘Cinderella’ type schools that have not been traditionally strong, a surge in awareness and name recognition for the school to a wider audience.

In the college ‘money’ sports of (American) football and Men’s Basketball, a successful season or two, or a deep run in championship competition can be a springboard of opportunity for coaches at these smaller schools to make the jump to a larger school (and substantially raise their compensation), and can also create exposure for players at these small schools that perhaps might lead to a shot at professional contracts in the NFL or NBA.

Not unlike many industries or even geographies, there is a kind of hierarchy in college athletics; schools ‘know’ their place in the hierarchy by virtue of their level of competition, the conference and peer institutions that they choose to organize and affiliate with, and this hierarchy guides and influences the players they can recruit, and the quality and experience of the coaches they can employ.  Schools (and fans, alumni, students, etc.) all know their ‘place’ in the hierarchy, and while their is occasionally some institutions that ‘climb’ the ladder to higher levels of affiliation and competition, most of the upward mobility is personal, e.g., a successful coach at a lower level of competition gets a similar job at a bigger, top-flight school.

Last spring Butler University, a liberal-arts school with less that 5,000 students made a remarkable run to the Championship game of Men’s College Basketball, only to lose by two points to perennial power Duke, 61-59.  Butler’s coach Brad Stevens, was purported to be a candidate for several ‘bigger’ jobs (he stayed), and star player Gordon Hayward was seen as a potential NBA star (he left, and now plays for the Utah Jazz).  The movement of coaches and players from these small school successes is not really news anymore, and not terribly interesting (even to me).  

But another piece of employee transition news from Butler caught my attention over the weekend - the surprise resignation of Butler’s President Bobby Fong to take the over the same position at even smaller Ursinus College (I had to look it up too), a school of about 1,700 students located in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Fong has been President of Butler for 10 years, a period that has been marked by rising enrollments, a successful $150M fundraising campaign, and capped off last spring by the exciting run to the Men’s Basketball Final Four and the Championship game.

If Fong were a player or coach on the basketball team, we’d expect his next move to be ‘up’; to take over at a big school like Michigan or South Carolina.  But to drop down to a tiny, off the map school like Ursinus?  In sports, this would be considered a step back, a career hiccup, or even the first step on the road to obscurity.  But look a bit closer and we see that what matters to Fong is the job he will be doing, not necessarily who he will be doing it for.  After 10 years of building up Butler, Fong wanted to start all over again the process in an environment where he would have that opportunity.  The money quote from Fong - “"You always want to be able to help an institution improve, and I tend to be a builder. I am not a custodian."

Super line, and one that reveals much about Fong as a leader, and that can also help anyone better understand and assess potential career moves.  Sometimes moving ‘up’ only means you get a nicer office to sit in while you simply look after things and try not to screw up. Sometimes you have to take a step ‘down’ in order to keep building.

Good luck at Ursinus President Fong, and if you make the Final Four again, I will demand an NCAA investigation.

Disappearing Languages

Earlier this week I read a piece on Inside Higher Ed about the likely elimination of several language studies programs at the State University of New York at Albany.  Along with the elimination of the programs of study, it seems also quite likely that several tenured faculty and long time staff positions will be eliminated as well. As in the case of many institutional and corporate restructuring efforts and corresponding staffing adjustments and downsizings that eventually follow, there are the expected calls of 'How can we eliminate these programs?', and 'These programs are unique, they can't really beFlickr - swanksalot modified or adapted to reflect a changing set of budgetary and practical realities.'

I certainly don't know all the details of the decision to eliminate, or potentially eliminate, programs like Italian and Russian at SUNY Albany.  But at least on the surface it does seem kind of intuitive that the college student of today, staring at a ridiculously difficult job market for the foreseeable future, is not rushing to major in Italian at SUNY Albany, (at least if Mom and Dad are footing the bill).  How many folks reading this post were convinced/cajoled/forced to major in Business for the very same reasons.  My hand is up. Sadly, professors that have been carrying the flag of Russian and French studies to legions of undergrads in Central New York, some for over 20 years, will soon find themselves having to find a new way of making a living.  That stinks.

I suppose the lesson in all this, and there has to be some kind of lesson, is that even the most secure, protected, and established occupations and positions are not immune to the inevitable shifts in markets, tastes, and organizational challenges. Ok, so that is not revelatory I know.  

How about this one then?

Ask yourself if what you are doing, and what you are bringing to the organization could be seen as the equivalent of teaching Russian to a bunch of 19 year olds.  At SUNY Albany it turns out that most of them are not all that interested in learning Russian, see no benefit in learning Russian, and no matter how great you are at teaching Russian, the market for your services has dried up. 

I confess when I read the piece I thought to myself, 'Why are these professors so surprised? No one in their right mind would think that teaching Italian and French to SUNY students still is relevant in 2010'.

But then I thought, most people don't see their passions and their expertise in the same way the outside world sees them.  In fact, I will bet many of us are safe and comfortable in what we are doing every day, and with the unique perspective and skills we offer to our employer and to society, while secretly, quietly, someone is looking at us like we are really teaching Russian.

My first day on the job (involves numerous beers)

October 2010 - Editor's Note - Today I am re-rerunning a post originally published in May 2009. If you make it to the end (good luck), I explain why.

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It's the weekend, (Note: I guess it was the weekend when this first ran), and I don't have the focus to craft a detailed, thoughtful post on HR Technology, so I thought I would tell the story of my first day on my first 'professional' job that I got after graduating college.

I was a recent Business/Finance graduate and after graduating landed a job at AT&T as one of what seemed like at least 5,000 folks trying to keep track of the giant corporations finances.

I'd rather not say the exact year, let's just say we were all still trying to get used to it being 'the 90s'.

So on the first day, I turned up to the offices of the division that I was to be supporting in beautiful downtown Newark, NJ.  The offices were fairly modern for the time, all the necessary amenities were present, and it was altogether a normal and sort of boring corporate office environment.

After a few hours of being introduced around the office, learning where the bathrooms and cafeteria were, it was about noon, and I was thinking about grabbing some lunch. Right about that time, two of the mid-level managers came by my desk to invite me to go to lunch with them. Ron and Frank were two 50 or so year old guys, with probably 25 years apiece in the company.  As I was brand new on the job, I did not hesitate to accept the offer and gladly went along.

We exited the building and hit the streets of Newark for the short two or three block walk to the place these two guys liked to regularly have lunch. The place was called Murphy's Tavern.

It was about as dive as dive bars could be.  Sort of tired looking, small, dimly lit, and with a nice, fragrant scent of about five million Marlboros and Lucky Strikes that had been smoked in there over the years.

But I was just out of college, and had spent more time that I should admit in similar looking bars while in school, so at first, the place did not phase me at all. I was feeling pretty good to get invited out to lunch by the leaders in the department on my first day.

As I said, this was a dive bar, not a restaurant, so the three of us took seats at the bar and were greeted by the bartender, a 60ish year old man named Jim. Jim greeted Ron and Frank (not much of a greeting really, the kind of hello that indicates it had not been a long time since they had last been in the bar), was introduced to me, and then immediately placed a bottle of Budweiser in front of all three of us.

That's ok I thought, it was summer, it was pretty hot that day, a cold Bud seemed like a good idea.  Besides, the two managers who brought me to lunch were having one as well, so I better to go along, try to fit in and all that.

After about five minutes of small talk and a few sips of the Bud, Jim the bartender puts a second Bud in front of each of us.  I had finished maybe half of my first beer, and number two was already there, queued up and waiting. Man, I thought, these guys aren't fooling around.  But I was ok with it, I was fresh out of school, and I did not have any problem tossing back a few beers, so I wasn't stressed. Ron and Frank seemed to make nothing of the fact that no actual 'ordering' had been done, the beers just simply appeared with not a word exchanged between us and Jim the bartender.

So 10 or so minutes pass, I am now working on beer number two, when Jim puts a third beer down in front of all three of us.  To this point no one has seen or asked for a menu (I was actually wondering if the place even served food), and I thought to myself, 'Dang, these guys don't even eat, they just go to lunch and get bombed'. Finally, a minute later Jim comes back over with a pad to take our lunch orders.  I don't remember what I ordered, but I imagine it was the same thing as Ron or Frank had, as I had never been in the place before and apparently there were no menus. While we were waiting for our food, I excused myself to use the restroom, and on the way to the back of the bar where the restrooms were, I finally got a chance to look around a bit more.

The walls of the bar were covered in large poster-size photographs, all black and white, of various celebrities and athletes.  James Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Robert DeNiro, Clark Gable, (Clark Gable?, that's pretty random), were some that I remember. Again, nothing too strange, just an old, dingy dive bar where these two old-timers seemed to eat lunch in all the time.

The lunch finally came, along with beer number four, and three of us finished up, paid the bill (the guys, or Jim or some combination paid for my tab), and we headed back to the office. After four beers and a greasy lunch, I was pretty much ready for a nap, and I don't really recall anything else about the afternoon.  At about 4:00, Ron and Frank came by my desk to let me know they were stopping for a 'quick one' before heading home, and that a few of the higher-ups in the finance department were planning on meeting them, and I should probably come along and get introduced to these 'important' colleagues.

So we headed back over to Murphy's, which was at this point pretty empty. Jim the bartender was still there, we had more Bud (I was fairly confident at this point Bud was the only beer served there), and made some small talk.  I was feeling really glad to be commuting via public transportation at this point as well, as were Ron and Frank.

About an hour passed, and the 'important' colleagues turned up, more middle-aged dudes who liked to drink Bud, and we proceeded to hang out for maybe another hour.  I am now about seven or eight beers in on the day, but even in that condition I was able to notice that the bar was getting more crowded, and the clientele was exclusively male.  And the folks who were coming in to the place were not the middle-aged office worker types that I was with.  No, the new crowd was much younger, more racially diverse, and not dressed in white shirts and ties like we were.  Soon, disco music started to play and some of the patrons started dancing in a small area near the back of the bar. About this point I had to make my way to the restrooms in the back and as I walked past the posters of Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, etc, and through and around the small crowd of guys dancing with each other, it finally hit me: Murphy's Tavern is a gay bar! I did not have a problem with that aspect really, but it is the kind of thing you typically mention to someone when taking them the first time, don't you think? I had maybe one more beer, and left, somehow making it to the train station for the train back home, still sort of amazed about the day and night.

So my very first day as a 'finance professional' was spent filling out a few forms in the morning, getting loaded at lunch with two of the managers, then returning to the bar with these same managers and some of the executives in our group, and finally realizing we were in (what I later learned) was a famous 'office worker' bar by day, and 'Newark's primary gay bar' by night.

I am not an expert on employee onboarding, but I do know this, it is probably not a good idea to take your new employee out for a four-drink lunch in a dive bar, then bring them back to the same dive bar/gay bar after work to 'network' with the execs, all the while not letting them know the 'unique' aspects of the place.

(Original) Note: If you have read this ridiculously long post, thanks for indulging me.  The story is 100% true. I changed the names of the specific individuals mentioned in the post, although I am pretty sure there is a zero chance any of them will ever see this.

October 2010 - Editor's Note -  One of the unnamed principals in the story, I am grieved to say, passed away last week and I was just informed about the sad news today.  While the little tale above is presented as a bit of a laugh, I fondly remember Mr. Roy Baker as an early mentor, guide, and great spirit.  He was one of the slowly disappearing 'company men', loyal to his wife, family, and company for decades.  Farewell, my old friend.

Career Summiteering

My friends Mark Stelzner and Laurie Ruettimann, are taking a page from some of those classic 'Our Gang' episodes, the ones where Spanky and Alfalfa and Darla decide to put on show for their pals, by launching a new, and unique event called The Career Summit.

But instead of a half-baked, amateur show starring a dog, Mark and Laurie's show will be a valuable, relevant, and information packed experience and resource for job seekers and folks currently working, but quietly, secretly, thinking about doing more. Heck, that is pretty much everyone.

Details?

From October 26 - November 17, Career Summit attendees will get access to over a dozen live webcasts on important career management topics, and continued access to the recorded archives of each session. Session leaders include Jason Seiden, Paula Caliguiri, Alexandra Levit, Jonathan Fields, and many more.

What is great about the format of the career summit is that it brings in such a fantastic collection of experts on career issues, packages the content in a way that is accessible, and provides incredible value, dozens of hours of content at a really reasonable cost.

Sure, I agreed to post about the event because I want Mark and Laurie to succeed, but they, and the 20-odd experts that are participating in the Career Summit want you to succeed.

So if you are looking for something new, or think you could use some help and guidance in trying to find that dream job (who doesn't?), I encourage you to check out the Career Summit.

Or, you could waste more time on 'Our Gang' DVDs.

Your call. 

Postscript - If anyone can verify that is a young Mark, Laurie, and Seiden in the picture on he right, I would appreciate it.

No one asked me but...

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, we will welcome Alison Green, the creator of the fantastic 'Ask a Manager' blog.  

The show is live at 8PM EDT tonight, September 9, and can be listened to from the show page here, using the widget below, or by calling in on 646-378-1086.

On the show Alison will take calls and field questions live much in the spirit of the 'Ask a Manager' blog, and listeners are encouraged to call in or Tweet their questions (use the #HRHappyHour tag).

To try and make my 'show preview' post a bit less boring, I asked Alison to forward to me a random reader question from the 'Ask a Manager' files so I could take a shot at giving the answer. 

So here goes - and in the way of disclaimer, I am totally unqualified to give serious advice, please follow my guidelines at your own risk:

A reader writes:

I've been invited to an interview for a senior-level job by a potential employer who is only willing to cover part of my travel costs to the interview. Because the invitation was silent on this topic, I had to raise the reimbursement issue. I was surprised about this based on my prior experiences as a job seeker and on my own HR experience. Based on my application materials, it should have been clear that I would have to fly to the the interview.

I initially responded asking about whether they wanted me to make travel arrangements and submit receipts or have them make the airfare purchase directly. They responded that I should make arrangements directly, and that I should send them the cost so they could decide what portion they could cover. I submitted my projected costs and asked if I could interview two days later in order to obtain a lower price. They replied that they could cover 60%.

I've already accepted the appointment, since delaying to negotiate wouldn't work in my favor as an applicant, and could make my share of the expenses go up if fares increase. But I'm concerned that if the
interview goes well, it may spell trouble down the road. (E.g. have I put myself at a disadvantage during salary negotiations by signalling desperation? Once on the job, will I be working in an institution
where reasonable expenses aren't built into budgets?) Obviously, I haven't gotten to that bridge yet, but these concerns are real.

Is this a red flag, or just par for the course in an employers' market?

Let's see what we have here - an interview in a different city, no real indication of the likelihood of landing the gig, and having to reach in to your own pocket (at least 40% of the way down), to even get the interview.  

Here is my simple answer - it sounds like a major red flag, and unless this is a dream-type job that you have been after for ages, or will set you up in your career progression or personal life, I would trust your instincts and take a pass. The fact that the employer knew that your participation in the interview would require airfare and other transportation expenses and waited for you to mention reimbursement comes off as unprepared, inconsiderate, and/or cheap. And then arriving at a seemingly arbitrary 60% reimbursement factor seems bizarre - either cover all the costs for your travel, or simply state there is not available budget to cover the costs and leave it up to you to decide.  How about a video interview for gosh sakes?

At any rate, it reads fishy, smells fishy, and quite likely is fishy.

Well - that's my answer - what do you think?

I wonder what the 'real' Ask a Manager would think?  Tune in tonight to find out.