7 years, minus the itch
22. Feb, 2008 
4 Comments
This week marked my 7-year anniversary with Common Hope. That’s the longest I’ve spent with one organization, though truth be told, it wasn’t my intention when I arrived. I thought this would be a stepping stone toward something else, part of a grand career plan I had worked out in grad school.
Things don’t always work out how you expect.
In fact, when I think about it, very little of the last seven years has been what I expected. More to the point, a fair amount of it has been totally at odds with what I had intended, yet I ended up just where I wanted to be.
A few examples of this odd path: I’ve had several different jobs at Common Hope, and I didn’t really seek any of them. When John Huebsch first offered me a job, I turned him down. I had just come from a year and a half volunteering in Honduras for a post-Hurricane Mitch reconstruction project, and taking on another one was the last thing I wanted to do. I had seen my time there as a distraction from what I came to do, and wanted to get back on my intended path. But he’s a pretty persuasive guy, and two months later, I was being introduced as the new head of construction at New Hope.
Then came a kind of odd period in which I was named to an operations role that wasn’t really created yet, though it had the greatest job description I’ve ever had. John said my role was to be oil and glue — keeping the different parts running smoothly and all the pieces stuck together.
Finally, almost by accident, I became our strategic planner. It helps to have a sense of irony here.
We were in a management retreat hammering out a list of things the organization needed done, assigning a fair number of them to me, and shifting some of my current responsibilities to others. There came an awkward moment when we realized my role had been radically changed, and would need a title that fit. I sat there dizzy at the thought of how much my job had changed over the course of an afternoon, when Kathleen (Director of Finance), ever alert, read off the list of responsibilities and said “sounds like a strategic planner to me.”
That may not be a textbook way of doing things, but I think the evidence shows that it worked out pretty well.
John Lennon said that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, and I think he’s right. I never would have set out to be a strategic planner — to tell the truth until shortly before I became one I hadn’t even heard of it — but it’s the best job I’ve ever had. And I think it suits me.
A couple of years back my intended path wandered back in front of me. A friend was trying to recruit me to a job that, when I was in grad school making my grand career plan, I would have thought of as just what I was looking for. But then I realized, I already had what I was looking for. My stepping stone had already taken me just where I wanted to be.
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I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.
Lovely piece, Jeff!
Jeff, Thanks for the thoughts. It truly makes me jealous of what you are doing. I wish I were there with you. Keep up the great work.
Strategic; sure. Thoughtful; definately. Analytical; almost to a fault. Brilliant; consitently. Planner; didn’t see that coming. At least not when you so often forgot your key to our locker.