Roxy Allen

If I had $100 to spend on my cause career advancement

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:16:00 +0000

[This is a cross-post from Network DC, the blog for YNPNdc]

Let’s face it, if you’re launching a social enterprise or working at a small cause, your employer might not have a big budget for professional development, so you might have to fund your own. Here’s how I’d invest $100 in my cause career:

1. Discover thyself

$15 – StrengthsFinder 2.0 Test

Self discovery is the best thing you can spend your time on to advance your career. Inside the book is a code that unlocks an online test which upon completion summarizes your top 5 strengths and gives you advice about what type of roles to pursue in which you’ll be most successful, either at your current job or a new one.

2. Be taken seriously

$5 – Professional logo for your blog from Fiverr.com

Make the packaging around your ideas look as smart as you are with a professional logo designed by a freelancer. Add it to any wordpress, blogger, typepad, or other blogging platform to instantly professionalize your online image.

3. Grab a power salad

$24 – Lunch at Chopt with that girl whose job you want

Tweet that cool girl you met at Happy Hour, you know, the one with the red Toms, and treat her to a friendly lunch. Just be sure to work in some not too overly aggressive questions about how she landed her job and where one could find something like it, if one were looking…

4. Take your management skills to the next level

$15 – Career Tools Monthly Individual License – for just 1 month

Both the free Career Tools and Manager Tools podcasts are fantastic, but take Mark’s advice to the next level with access to the slides and show notes on casts such as How To Give A Decision Briefing that you can save to your computer and even share with your team. Use the documents for training others and referencing great ideas you want to champion at work.

5. Open a doorway to mentors, free conferences, and visits to the White House

$35 – YNPNdc Professional Membership

Imagine the networking you can do attending a speech on the economy at the Rose Garden by POTUS, the annual Center for Nonprofit Advancement Celebration, and an online networking roulette session with 50 nonprofit mentors in just one year. Plus way more.

6. Ask the right question

$6 – Coffee at Bourbon with mentor

Mentors are busy and important, so re-connect with one of yours over an 8am coffee. What to ask: How can I help you? Repeat as necessary.

Brazen Careerist is a Social Media Risk Management Tool for Gen Y

admin — Sun, 06 May 2012 23:51:00 +0000

Like traditional societies, associations, advocacy groups, memberships, and unions, there is strength in the shear number of people Brazen Careerist has organized on your behalf that want to grow careers using social media.

On Wednesday evening, Brazen Careerist was gracious enough to let me produce their first webinar to launch the Networks feature on their site. I set up the technology but also fielded questions from the audience to feed to Penelope & Ryan. It wasn’t your mother’s webinar, and it was a lot of fun. What a creative and thoughtful community Brazen has.

The webinar was for those who started groups in Brazen’s site. For example, I had started the Associations group to find other young professionals who work at associations. Brazen had just made the decision to change Groups to Networks and the webinar showed us how to be better Network leaders. (If you look at my group, you can tell I need advice).

During the webinar many people wanted to know why they should invest time in Brazen instead of LinkedIn. Penelope thoughtfully responded that Brazen is a network of bloggers and that blogging can help you land jobs because it publishes your ideas when you don’t have the experience to land a job right after college or grad school.

Participants responded, But blog writing is scary. My ideas? Out there? Isn’t execution and experience better? How do I know this is safe?

No, it’s not safe. Like anything new, it is risky. Brazen Careerist is genius because it helps you manage your social media activity risk.

This table shows you why social media activities like blogging are scary to you and explains the difference between traditional career networking and social media career networking.

Why Using Social Media as a Career Networking Tool is Scary for Gen Y
Traditional Career Networking	Social Media Career Networking
Resume	Personal Brand
Safe	Scary
Execution	Ideas
Feels like work	Feels like play
Work/Life Balance	Lifestyle Design
Exchange business cards	Follow each other on Twitter
Known & Reliable	Transparent & Risky
You will get a job	You could get your dream business partnership
Focus on getting promoted	Focus on learning through new projects
Happy Hours, Conferences, Associations, Speed Networking	Meetups, Blog Posts, Blog Comments, Online Social Networks, Facebook Groups
General skills like accounting = job security = good career	The more niche, specific, and bold your ideas are, the better but harder

Brazen Careerist manages risk for you.

Your Social Media Career Networking Risks:

Someone might disagree with my ideas
I don’t have enough experience, and my ideas will be dumb, no one will hire me
What if my boss finds out and fires me
Blogging needs to be so niche, limiting myself to one topic will hurt me in the log run

How Brazen Careerist Manages Your Risks:

Network to show yourself, your boss, and others that blogging is a new career tool that normal people use
Advice at your fingertips from other smart people
Teaches you how to express your ideas to your intended audience and industry in a professional, thought-provoking manner
Has created a talent market of tech-savvy, entrepreneurial people – think strength in numbers rather than competing for the same jobs

Questions for fellow Network Leaders:

How can we leverage our Brazen networks to decrease our social media risk even more?
What could Brazen Careerist develop that would make us thought-leaders on the well-executed personal brand?
What type of education/training would help you be a better Network leader?
How can Brazen Careerist stand apart from LinkedIn as a career management tool for Gen Y?
Are we on Brazen an association? Union? Advocacy group? Society?
If we wanted 1 Thing in the world to change, what would it be and how would we do it?

Seeing Systems

admin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:07:00 +0000

What patterns and processes are developing in your organization (aka system) that could be blocking, frustrating, and leading to misunderstanding and unproductive conflict?

How do you even go about uncovering those issues without divulging into arguments or jumping immediately to solve only the surface problem?

Barry Oshry, a noted organizational anthropologist, has many answers in his book, Seeing Systems. He recommends we become anthropologists and analyze our organizations from a detached, scientific, objective perspective.

This is difficult when you are in the weeds of day to day work.

You need a mechanism for people to 1) tell the truth about issues without being blamed or arguing about the cause and 2) listen to other people without interruption.

A really great activity is to have a sacred cow BBQ. No, you are not cooking beef together. You host a company BBQ where people can eat lunch or dinner together to make it a space outside of regular business meetings. Then you ask people to write a sacred cow on a piece of paper. A sacred cow is something in your organization that never gets discussed and people have felt uncomfortable asking about. Usually they are policies, rules, formal, or informal, that someone doesn’t understand or something that is inhibiting their productivity. After everyone has written a sacred cow on a sticky note, stick it up on the wall and have a discussion about each one. As an organization leader, you can then see certain places where your system is stuck and ask either at the BBQ or later for advice on how to remove that barrier or take the opportunity to explain the sacred cow to your staff so they will at least understand the history and context behind it.

Non-profit Workers: We need to do less

admin — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:30:00 +0000

If you really took a look at your organization’s mission, you would probably find that enough urgent but not important tasks keep slipping into your days, then weeks, that you start to wonder what you actually have accomplished that month.

Is this because you are doing too much?

You will become overwhelmed and burned out if you continue at that pace.

We like to help and be super heroes but we can’t be effective if we spread ourselves too thin.

Carve out time to do the important – that which will move your organization’s mission forward. Carve out time to eat a healthy lunch, go for coffee with a colleague. You need to stay human while you do your human services work.

How does the aid community measure success?

admin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:46:00 +0000

I attended a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution this afternoon about the release of the new book, Catalyzing Development: A New Vision for Aid. You can read my tweet blurbs here.

At the end, an audience member posed the question, “how do you [the panelists] measure success?”

That’s a great question. I think the answer is “it depends on who you ask.”

Aid has a diverse customer base. If you ask the U.S. or UK government, aid is successful when it keeps our nation safe and helps us meet our foreign policy goals. If you ask the aid beneficiaries, it is successful when they have something to eat tomorrow or a tent to sleep in after an earthquake. If you ask the governments of the countries receiving the aid, it is successful when they can use it for their goals, which may or may not be successful for the beneficiaries or the entity giving the aid.

The reason aid reform is so slow, difficult, and game-changing is because we have so many different customers, who have different expectations, goals, and success measures.

The NGO community must hold the torch for the beneficiary customer because the rest have enough power on their own. I hope this will happen with enough representation from beneficiaries at the upcoming 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness coming up in Busan.

Read my new article on your nonprofit career strategy!

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 00:03:00 +0000

I hope you check out this month’s Monday Developments, a magazine published by InterAction, which is a large coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs. I have an article in this issue called, “How Young NGO Professionals Can Develop a Career Strategy: Practical Steps for Making a Plan That Works for You.”

The article walks you through how developing your career is like strategic planning for organizations. It also is a great way to find out about what’s going on in the Young Professionals Forum at InsideNGO, where I work. The article is in the May 2010 issue, which was just published and should be mailed out very soon if you are a subscriber. Otherwise, you might consider subscribing.

How did this peacebuilder start a revolution online?

admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:10:00 +0000

[This is a cross-post from Peacebuilder Magazine Online]

Regina Holliday dedicates the 73 cents Mural in Washington, DC; photo by tedeytan under CC license

Regina Holliday was at work teaching art when she got a call from her husband, Fred. The doctor had just told him he had growths and tumors in his kidneys. She rushed to the hospital to process the news with him and understand the diagnosis. Before she got there, Fred’s oncologist had left for a 4-day medical conference. Fred had kidney cancer and would die within months, but neither he nor Regina knew that because Fred was transferred to another medical facility and was not given a proper diagnosis nor his medical records for the next doctor to use.

When Regina went to claim Fred’s records, she found they would cost 73 cents a page to print (they were several hundred pages), with a 21-day wait. When they did get copies, the records were inaccurate and incomplete. Frustrated by a lack of information from medical providers and the U.S. health care system, Regina reached out to her friend who suggested she talk to a patient advocate on Twitter, @ePatientDave, a stage-four kidney cancer survivor.

Through Dave and other friends, Regina got answers and connected to the health advocacy community online. An artist, Regina painted a mural in DC about her ordeal, called 73 cents, which she promoted on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog. Soon CNN, BBC, CBS, and other traditional national news media picked up her story and she became part of the national health care debate in May 2009.

Regina did not know what Twitter was when she received the phone call from Fred in the hospital. However, she took a chance and with one tweet made connections to health advocacy groups she would never have found otherwise.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs are tools that can amplify the message and build the network of any peacebuilder. Many of these tools even let you send messages from email or your mobile phone, so you do not always need a fast internet connection to use them. Your stories and ideas can spread to the right people further and faster than ever before. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Create a Twitter account: You can follow interesting people and talk to them using special characters in your messages. You can even send messages called tweets using your mobile phone texting service.

2. Create a Facebook account: Either for yourself personally or your organization (to create an organization account, you will need to first create a personal account). You can add friends you already know, post pictures, videos, and stories to share with other people.

3. Start a blog: There are many free services, and I suggest Blogger, WordPress, or Posterous. You do not need to spend a lot of time or know much about technology. Just write a few articles about what you are passionate about and tell your friends and colleagues about it.

The world needs to hear your stories. In July 2010, a year after Fred passed away, Regina got a standing ovation for her speech at the Health Information Technology conference, on a stage with the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. How far can your story go if you use these social media tools?

You can learn more about Regina Holliday’s story in The Big Book of Social Media Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives by Robert Fine. Her mural, “73 cents,” is located at 5001 Connecticut Ave, Washington, DC 20008.

How to be a Freak in a Hollywood World

admin — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:54:00 +0000

I caught two movies this weekend that reminded me why it’s so hard to play to your strengths.

A Reformed Arrogant Drummer

Drumline was on reruns on MTV, and it’s actually a really good movie so I watched it again. This time I had a new lens to watch it through thanks to Dave Rendall’s Freak Factor blog.

Nick Cannon plays Devon, a cocky, superstar drummer in one of those great college bands who gets a scholarship to A&T in Atlanta. He wows the crowd with his amazing drum solos and entertainment power. It turns out that he can’t read sheet music so his arch rival calls him out and gets him kicked out of the band.

It also doesn’t help that he’s arrogant and doesn’t want to be a team player. He is better than the whole drumline.

After a fight with Sean, his rival band member, Sean admits Devon is the best but gets him to focus on being more of a team player:

Sean: “You’re the best, Devon! But when we’re on the field, nobody hears you! They hear the band.”

Devon becomes convinced he needs to change. He teaches himself sheet music and focuses on becoming a team member of the drumline. This proves to the band director that he has developed his character and he lets him back into the band, (spoiler alert) just in time to win the final band championships.

The band director and school system certainly socialized Devon into working with a team, but what will happen to his confidence in his ability to come up with new sounds independently? No longer a freak, how will he be able to stand out again?

A Reformed Womanizer

The other movie I watched was Nine (2009) about an Italian film director named Guido who couldn’t come up with a new script for his film because of his personal problems with all of the women in his life. It turned out his other movies were successful because they were about all of the personal problems he faced in his life.

(Spoiler alert): Without giving too much away, Nine resolved by Guido making a movie about apologizing to all of the women in his life for how he’s treated them.

The movie implies Guido was a good storyteller and film director because of the practiced he had in telling good lies to all of the women in his life. Now that Guido is morally better after he stops womanizing, what will happen to his storytelling? Can you change for the better as a person without losing your unique talents? I think so, but thought it was an interesting question. When should you allow yourself to be socialized and when should you not change?

Hollywood Makes it Hard

Enjoyable Hollywood movies make it hard to stand out because so many plots focus on the drama of society morally reforming a confident outsider. What’s interesting to me is that there would be no movie without this outside, or freak, character. Think of all of those nerd makeover movies. That’s who the movie is about. No freak, no movie. But it’s up to you to decide if you will become more like them or more like yourself.

How I Got Into Oprah’s Magazine

admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:44:00 +0000

A little over a year ago this appeared in O Magazine:

After reading Suzy Welch’s article, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth. For years Oprah’s show has been encouraging women to say no and to put ourselves first. Welch’s article tells us to say yes and to put our careers first. Other pieces in the issue encourage us to slow down and even to take a break from e-mail! I’m confused-should we say no or yes? I work for the consulting firm that chooses Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in America, and we favor employers who encourage a work-life balance, yet I don’t know of anyone who ever became a CEO by putting that into practice. How do we find the right balance for us? Is Welch suggesting that a woman can’t have it all?
Roxann Allen
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

Suzy’s response:You’ve hit the nail on the head, Roxann. Women’s lives these days can be confoundingly complex and filled with contradictions. My intention when I wrote the article wasn’t necessarily to urge women to put their careers first by always saying yes; it was more to explore the reality that when you say no, there are consequences. The best decisions are always informed decisions.

Jack Welch’s wife, Suzy Welch, wrote an article contradictory to what Oprah has been empowering women to do – balance a crazy life full of competing responsibilities like work, family, and “me” time. I emailed my note but did not expect to be put into the letters to the editor section or even to receive a response from Suzy herself!

How I got into the magazine

Obviously, it wasn’t my good looks because they couldn’t see me.

Looking back, these are the components of my very short note that got me noticed by O Magazine‘s editors:

Wrote for her audience – women
Wrote about a topic Oprah cares about - women and life/work balance (even if you don’t think there is a distinction, Oprah’s audience still does
Kept it short & to the point
Established credibility – mentioned that I worked on a high profile magazine article in Fortune Magazine
Established history with Oprah – that I’ve followed her for years and know what she cares about, that women should be empowered to balance all aspects of life
Interesting content – even Suzy Welch felt compelled to respond!

Some of you might think:

A) Any crazy person can get into the Letter to the Editor section or
B) No one ever reads that section anyway

And I might say:

A) The section is only a few pages away from Martha Beck’s column and
B) Baby steps, small actions, that you can test and learn from get you closer to a big goal

I may not have had a full column or been a favorite thing but I got to dissect and test what Oprah’s editors are looking for to give their audience.

What baby steps are you crossing off your list to get to your goal? How are you leveraging what, how, and who you know to push yourself farther?

I think you’ve been getting by on your good looks til now. What if you used that brain of yours to drive up some attention and move yourself forward?

Nonprofit HQ should stand for Hind Quarters

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:03:00 +0000

International nonprofit technology visionary Bill Lester of EngenderHealth and NPOKI would like us to start referring to nonprofit HQ’s as Hind Quarters instead of Head Quarters, a term that came out of a recent project management summit by NPOKI in DC.

For most international nonprofit programs our mandate is to create some sort of change or offer a service in another country. An organization’s HQ activities support rather than dictate how a project should be carried out in that country.

This could also be true for domestic nonprofits.

How much does your HQ understand the environmental constraints your programs operate under? Does your organization have proactive policies that allow HQ staff to visit field projects to understand a program from a different perspective enough to make changes to operations back at HQ?

What if your organization started to refer to HQ as Hind Quarters? What difference would it make?

Let me know in the comments.