My Job

I’ve never been qualified for any job I’ve ever done when I was offered the job…until the one I have now. That’s an easier confession to make at this point in my career than perhaps a decade or two earlier, but it’s the truth for me and it’s probably true for many others. This makes no sense whatsoever until you understand the idea of potential. This is the fundamental concept that each and every one of us is full of it. And when I say “it” I of course mean potential. Really great employers and managers understand this idea and they know how to spot it, how to foster it, and how to let it go when the time comes.

The first job I can remember having was picking filbert nuts out of the backyard for my father earning the princely sum of $0.01 per nut. I had a string of jobs that followed but the first real tax-paying, above board, get a paycheck kind of job I had was working for a man named Jack. He was a general contractor and did high-end home remodeling. It was the summer that I turned fifteen and just before school got out for the summer Jack asked me what my plans were for the summer. I explained that I would be going to Scout Camp, and Band Camp and in between I would probably work as a lifeguard at the pool so I could earn some money to put towards a car the following summer. He gave a gruff smile and laugh and then told me that no, I would not be working at the pool that summer as I was coming to work for him.

That was it, that was my first official interview. Jack saw potential in me, sized me up, and decided I had the makings of the next great general contractor. I should also confess that he was my high school girlfriend’s dad. Later I would ask him why he chose to hire me as his apprentice, expecting him to share all the insights he had on my skills and potential. As it turns out he was a lot wiser than I had given him credit. He explained that every minute I was with him was a minute I was NOT with his daughter. And that at the end of the day, I would be too tired to spend any time with his daughter. And he was right. That summer I worked an average of 50-60 hours a week. I’m sure there was some labor law being broken as my overtime pay came in the form of cash in an envelope with my regular check.

That cash in the envelope was well earned. The first day on the job, Jack picked me up at 6:00 in the morning. We drove to the job site, and he slapped an extension ladder up against one end of the house. It was a one-story house that we were turning into a two-story house. In order to do that, we had to remove the roof. In order to do that, we had to take out all the blown insulation in the attic. Jack scaled the ladder and cut a me-sized hole at the peak of the roof line, one handed, with his circular saw. He came down, handed me a dustpan and a box of trash bags and told me to go up there, scoop up the insulation, bag it, and toss it out the hole. Apparently, he saw the potential in me to complete this task.

It was June in Oregon and summer had just arrived. Outside it was maybe 80 degrees, but in the attic, it was approaching 375 degrees, the same temperature you roast a turkey. And in Oregon in the summertime, 9 months of rain is being evaporated in the next three months so humid is a mild descriptor of what I was experiencing. At lunch that day I worked up the courage to tell Jack that I didn’t think this was going to work out and that I should resume my lifeguarding career at the pool. He looked at me, gave me the same gruff smile and laugh, and said “no.” At fifteen I was unaware that resigning your position was not a two-party consent situation. My limited understanding of employment law at that point left me feeling like unless your employer releases you from your bonds, you could not quit. So, I went back into the attic. This ritual repeated itself several times over the summer. Each time Jack said “no” and each time I resumed whatever terrible task I was working on at the time.

When school started in the fall I was once again back in the world of my peers. We compared notes from our summer vacations. Except for the one week of Scout Camp and one week of Band Camp, the other ten weeks of my summer consisted of working, working, and more working. My buddies had taken vacations, got tans, had summer girlfriends, basically they had an ideal fifteen-year old’s summer vacation. Most of them did some part time jobs, including several lifeguards (which is also where they got the tans and the summer girlfriends). A few mowed lawns, and one guy worked at our local go kart place and let his friends in for free until he got fired…for letting his friends in for free.

But then we started sharing how much we had earned. Between my legitimate paycheck complete with taxes and my supplemental cash overtime payments I had won the summer, and by a significant margin. Sure, the others made some cash, but my balance in the bank included a comma in the figure! Four figures was a big deal to a posy of fifteen year old’s and suddenly all the terrible jobs I had to do to earn that money drifted away from my memory. Also, my girlfriend and I were still going steady so if I could carry that into next summer, it would mean another ten weeks of employment and put me behind the wheel of my very own car.

And that’s just what happened. I did that for three summers, but the summer after I graduated high school but before I started college, I arrived at the conclusion that I had learned all there was to learn about construction and remodeling work and wanted more out of my working life. I had already been a teen volunteer at my local science museum, so it seemed like a natural next step to take a position as a camp counselor in their summer camp program. Despite the fact that my frontal cortex was not yet fully cooked, a jury of my betters saw fit to bestow me with the responsibility of tending a flock of 25 grade school children. I worked under the guidance of a legitimate teacher, but still, the lives and learning of the younglings was my responsibility.

Let’s be really clear here, technically speaking I was still a child myself given that I had a summer birthday. For the first half of that summer I was a 17 year old kid watching 9 and 10 year old’s. Who in their right mind looked at that situation and thought this was a good idea? I was not qualified, I had little to no training, and in less than three months I would be attending the university where Animal House was filmed and would be rushing a fraternity. But yeah, let’s give him a gaggle of kids to watch over and handle their young impressionable minds. The man who hired me would later become a mentor and dear friend. He is highly regarded in the museum community and someone I still look to for advice and guidance. I recently had a chance to talk to him about his decision to hire me. I shared how ridiculously stupid I thought he was and he stopped me short. He said, “Mat, I saw your potential. You had a natural gift with kids and look at you now.”

There it was again, that word. Potential. It was a word I could not escape. In high school I suffered from a bit of a disconnect between what I believed was my potential and what showed up on my transcripts. I wasn’t a horrible student, but I wasn’t going to win any full ride scholarships. My academic advisor may have been the only adult in my life that didn’t see my potential and she kept pushing me towards trade schools whenever I came in to discuss my college applications. The trades aren’t a bad choice, it just wasn’t where I wanted to go. Maybe it was too much time spent in a stinky attic shoveling insulation.

One of the rights of passage for any college bound high school senior is collecting those dreaded letters of recommendation for your applications. I decided to pursue letters from every teacher, coach, and adult in my life that wasn’t related to me in the hopes that out of the pile I would get one or two that lied enough on my behalf to be usable and make up a few decimals on my GPA. One of those came from my favorite teacher and the one that made all the difference to me in those difficult years of early adolescence. Mr. Siess was the guy who saw me, I mean really saw me. He pushed me to be a better version of myself and believed in what I could become. So I waited with great anticipation to read his letter.

I sat in my car in the school parking lot after school because I wanted to be alone when I read his letter. I was applying to his alma mater, so this letter carried extra weight. My dream at that point in my life was to study the sciences so I could pursue a career in medicine. I wanted to help people and I loved science so becoming a doctor was the clear pathway. Mr. Siess’ letter opened with the usual platitudes but then came the kicker. I still remember the gut punch. This is exactly what he wrote in the third paragraph: “while I know Mat plans to pursue a career in medicine and study biology, I believe he would make an excellent teacher.” What…the…HELL! That is not what we had discussed, and I was crushed.

My mom asked me at dinner that night if I had received Mr. Siess’ letter. I lied and told her that I had not. I wasn’t happy about lying to my mom, but as far as I was concerned this wasn’t his letter because it wasn’t the letter I had asked him to write. I stewed in class all the next day and avoided him during third period symphonic orchestra. After school before marching band practice, I worked up the courage to confront him, man to man(child)! I managed to convey my disappointment and handed him back the letter and asked him to write me a new one. He stood there, stared at the letter in my hand, and with a gentle grin he said “no.” He proceeded to explain that he had written an honest letter and that if I reread it, I would see that it was everything I had asked for and more. I did as he asked. He wasn’t wrong.

But I was left confused. I asked him about the whole teacher thing, and he proceeded to explain that he believed what he wrote. He believed that I had great potential for becoming a really good teacher. He explained that his alma mater was renowned for its teacher education program and that I shouldn’t dismiss it so quickly. He said he had spent four years watching me with my peers as a section leader, as a team captain, always seeking out positions of leadership not for the status but for the opportunity to grow others. That, he said, was what great teachers do naturally. I still have the letter Mr. Seiss wrote for me and it’s one of the most treasured items I own.

While I didn’t get into his alma mater, I did defy my guidance counselor’s expectations and I was admitted to a university. I enrolled as a biology major and struggled through the grueling first two years. While it did not dull my love of science, I just didn’t have the academic chops to survive the core curriculum and by my junior year I was stranded on the rocks and in search of a new major. As college kids so often do, I found myself moving yet again, and in the process came across Mr. Seiss’ letter. I gave it some deep thought, washed it down with a cheap beer and decided “what the hell” and enrolled in an education class the next semester for one of my electives.

Turns out Mr. Seiss was spot on in his assessment. I took to the class and the professor immediately started lecturing on the art of teaching. I was immediately struck by what she was saying and every word landed deep in my core. This is where I belonged. This is where my potential took me. I changed my major and began my journey to becoming a professional educator.

Throughout the next couple of years I would continue to work for the museum as a means to pay my tuition and support my young family. As it turned out, my guidance counselor was half right in that university classes were a tad more challenging than I expected and love arrived early when I met my wife. The combination of the two meant that achieving a bachelor’s degree in four years was going to take a few additional semesters. So I cobbled together a series of part time and seasonal jobs so that for all intense purposes I was working full time while I finished my undergraduate studies. Upon graduation from college, I was all set up to teach in an elementary school for the rest of my career, and my museum work would be a pleasant memory and minor point on my future resumes.

I had done some student teaching in an elementary school and had a chance to teach fourth grade. It was amazing. My students got really good at two things: kick ball and the Oregon Trail curriculum. Why those two things you ask? Because I was really good at those two things and enjoyed them immensely! I also really enjoyed fourth graders. They’re old enough to read and write, but they haven’t been bitten by the hormone monsters and still looked for your approval. As a man in an elementary school, I was also something of a rarity and as such, students would flock to me and it felt a bit like what I imagine it is to be a rock star. Unfortunately for my students, I wasn’t the great teacher as Mr. Seiss had envisioned and I was beginning to have an internal crisis. Maybe this wasn’t the calling I thought it was. And then potential showed up again.

The museum manager that I was working for at the time let me know that there was a full-time position coming up and that I should apply. No more part time or seasonal nonsense. This job came with a consistent salary, benefits, and paid time off! The job was still a teaching position, but of a different kind. This would be a traveling science teacher in their Outreach division. Basically, I would travel around in a van taking mobile versions of the museum’s education programs to schools and communities that couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise be coming to the museum. It included doing theatrical hour-long assemblies, intensive two-hour classroom sessions, and even delivering presentations inside a giant inflatable portable planetarium! That last one still gives me pause as I’m quite sure I may have made up a constellation or two along the way.

Here’s the thing… I was most definitely NOT qualified for the position. The folks doing this job had several more years of experience and more certificates, degrees and letters in their titles. But my manager saw something in me. She had watched me working in various part time and seasonal roles. A “utility” player she called me. She saw my drive and mentioned how she appreciated how I treated every task as an opportunity to learn and grow. She said I had potential. I applied and a few weeks later, I was a full-time museum professional.

That job was pivotal in my career for so many reasons. It was the flavor of education I had been looking for. Back in that elementary school classroom with my fourth graders we were having fun and doing experiments all the time, but I struggled to conform to the pre-ordained curriculum. Students were expected to learn x during y time of the school year. Teach it, test it, move on from it. That is the sad reality of so many classrooms in America. But in informal learning environments like museums, and the mobile version I was bringing to schools, the constraints melted away. We were in the inspiration business! I got to be at that special moment in a student’s life when you can see the light bulb switch on in their minds and brother I was hooked!

This job was significant for another reason. It was the first time that I realized that working in a museum could be a career reality for me. I was fortunate because I worked at a very large science center with hundreds of employees! As a result, there was a chance to see so many different pathways to supporting the work and mission of the museum. There were fund raisers, exhibit designers, and evaluators. There were human resources, marketing, and finance professionals. There were lighting designers, software engineers and even one guy whose job it was to curate and maintain a former US Navy submarine! This was where I would build a career and life for myself and my family, and all thanks to some potential and hard work.

As anyone who has worked in a museum before, or even a nonprofit can attest to, battlefield commissions come often. While I probably would have been content serving as a traveling science teacher the rest of my life, opportunity again came knocking. I was asked to slide into a program coordinator role managing a series of after-school programs. Again, not qualified. Again, potential showed up and secured the offer. What was happening? Did this museum hire anyone who was qualified? Turns out the answer was both yes and no. I was working at a place that was full of opportunities for those that had potential. This was a lesson that had not fully taken hold in me yet, but one that once set would dictate my organizational leadership for decades to follow.

This pattern repeated itself over the next 17 years. One opportunity led to another, which led to another. I climbed the ladder from a seasonal camp counselor, through program coordinator positions, to management, to an eventual appointment as a vice president and senior leader in the organization. There was only one rung left on that ladder. I was reporting directly to the President and CEO of the museum. This last position was less about potential at first and more about convenience. I was tapped to step into the role in an interim status. It was the first time that both my boss and myself agreed that I had no business holding the position for real, but that I could probably do it for a short period of time while we went and hired someone who was qualified for the job. It was expected that this arrangement would last no more than six months.

Nineteen months later after two failed search attempts one of my peers gave what was arguably the worst recommendation of a candidacy for a job that I have ever received. While debating our next move regarding another search, he cleared his throat and said (and I swear I’m not making any of this up) “Mat’s been doing this job for more than a year and half and he hasn’t screwed anything up too much so why don’t we give him the job for real?” Not exactly what I would call potential, but I took the compliment for what it was and managed to parlay that into a permanent posting.

While this feeling had shown up on the first day of every job I’ve ever had, after receiving the offer letter for the role of Vice President I was immediately struck with panic. I would learn latter that this is a scenario often referred to as imposter syndrome. I felt like I was really faking my way through the job even though, to my colleague’s point, I had been doing it for 19 months and hadn’t “screwed anything up too much” in the process. Still, it was a big job and there were plenty of others who shared my feeling that I was not qualified and that while potential is great, skill and knowledge were necessary elements to success in a role like this. So, I did what any other reasonable person would do. I enrolled in grad school full time while working a senior level position…full time.

The next few years were a blur of work and school, work and school, work and school. Our children were pretty young, so I justified my absences with the comfort that this was a means to providing for my family. Upon successfully defending my graduate thesis, I entered the world a Master of Public Administration with an emphasis on nonprofit leadership. I emerged from the cocoon of the previous three years as a great big beautiful and arrogant butterfly. I showed up in meetings citing the work of Deming and Collins. I asked about the P values in data sets presented by evaluators. I closely examined the return on investment on our paper products that the facilities department was ordering. Yes, I was assessing toilet paper. I had a toolbox full of tools and I was walking around like a rookie handyman finding problems where none existed just so I could use my new tools. In a word, I was an ass.

But after the new graduate smell wore off, and I had learned a few lessons and been knocked down a few pegs, I found my groove and potential showed up again. I was given the task of master planning our museum’s expansion project. Budgets were assigned, blue ribbon commissions empaneled, and site visits around the country were scheduled. For two years I was able to focus on this project almost exclusively and build the basic architecture that several years later would define the museums growth and expansion.

And that’s when it happened. After 17 years of working for the museum I grew up attending, the day arrived when it was time to move on to the next great challenge. I had done just about every job the museum had to offer but one, and my boss was not leaving. So to become a chief executive, the next rung on my particular ladder, I needed to break up with the museum and look for an opportunity somewhere else. It was not an easy decision, nor did it come without heartache and challenges, but it was the right thing to happen at the right time. Opportunity was calling across the river and up the hill. I eventually left the comfortable confines of my work home for the past 17 years and assumed the role of executive director at another museum in my hometown.

On the first day that familiar feeling showed up as I was settling into my new workspace. The imposter was here for his first day of work. My greatest fear is that someone will wake up some day and realize that what I do for a living is not a real job and I will have to go work for a living. Let’s face it, I was not cut out to be a worker of any kind and this is not a prospect I warmly welcome. But here I was, once again unqualified but full of potential. The stakes were big and being the number one meant that there was no one to blame if things went south.

There was something else with this new role that never existed before. For the first time I would be tasked with creating the vision for the entire organization and dictating not just what we would be doing, but how. While my team was much smaller, they too were full of potential. That’s when it occurred to me that I could codify the professional growth experience I had gained and make it part of the DNA of the organizations that I would lead for the next chapter in my career. I had been doing this without even knowing it at the previous museum but had never put words to the practice or declared it as value and stated goal.

There are only a handful of moments in our lives when we can identify an exact moment when we learned an idea or concept. Most often we learn parts and pieces and it just kind of congeals in our brain until we just wake up and understand it better than we did yesterday. I had one of these moments while sitting in a class in graduate school. I was taking a series of courses in a strand called “values-based management.” They were taught by an adjunct professor who was himself a chief executive of a nonprofit that dealt with kids who were homeless, drug effected, sex trafficked, and more. He talked about having edgy staff that worked with edgy kids. He was a clinical psychologist by trade and became a nonprofit executive during his “second act” in life. He was the second most impactful teacher in my life after Mr. Seiss. We’ll call him Denis because that’s what his mother named him.

Denis was leading a lecture introducing the idea of a values-based leadership model. He posed a question to the class, something about how many of us were engaged in or providing on-going professional development to our staff. It was a set up question. One of my peers took the bait and sprung the trap. “Denis, we’re all running nonprofits. We have no money, no resources, and no time. Plus, when we do give staff new skills, they leverage these for better paying jobs and leave our organization!” That was the basic premise of his thesis. “How many of you agree with what was just said?” Denis asked the class. Immediately most of the hands in the room shot up. My spidey senses were tingling, plus I did not agree with my peers, so I kept my hand down. It did not go unnoticed by both Denis and my fellow students.

“You’re absolutely right.” Denis confirmed the thesis. Judas had betrayed me and I started to feel heat in my face. “You can train people, give them new skills, and they will leverage those skills for higher compensation and more responsibilities. “But…” I could hear the springs in the trap straining with tension. He was about to deliver the death blow. “…If you don’t invest in these people and you don’t give them new skills and abilities, AND they stay…now you have a real problem.” Have you ever wondered what it sounded like in the dark ages when someone’s head was lopped off by the ax of an executioner and if fell in the basket? Me too, and I imagine it sounded like that classroom. A giant thud of reality followed by the sinking realization that they had been going about this all wrong.

The takeaway from that lesson, and how I have chosen to understand it, goes something like this: people are our most expensive asset ergo we should get the most out of said asset. Here’s another way to think about this. I have a building engineer who every week goes on our roof and inspects the HVAC units. We do regular maintenance, invest in simple repairs, and spend time to make sure they are operating properly. It’s expensive and not the most exciting thing to spend our money on, but they are critical systems and its significantly more expensive to replace them if we didn’t do this regular service. The cost of maintaining those HVAC systems is a fraction of my total monthly payroll. So why wouldn’t I do the same thing when looking at my single largest expense? Shouldn’t I want to invest in small repairs, maintain the systems, and maximize performance of our human assets? The answer of course is yes!

Now that I was sitting at the head of the table I could put this idea out there front and center. I wasted no time in putting some language around my philosophy and before long I had my first new direct report to spring my idea on. On her first day during our very first meeting I said the following: “My job is to grow you out of your job. Hopefully I will grow you into another job here, but it’s entirely possible we’ll grow you right out of the organization, and that’s perfectly fine!” I was very proud of this idea and progressive approach. What I failed to realize is that what my new employee heard on her first day, in her first meeting with me was “I’m trying to get you to leave this organization.” So, my timing and delivery needed a tad bit of refinement, but this idea, this message is alive and well in every organization I have led since then.

This idea is so much more than just promoting from within. Lots of companies and leaders take this approach and it’s not altogether a bad idea. But the approach I like to take is this idea of growth and that we, the employer, are tasked with the careful curation of the development of skills and abilities that make you primed and ready for the next opportunity when it shows up. Timing is always the tricky thing here as you may not have an opening when someone is ready. This happens to me on a regular basis. While I would love to create positions and compensate people according to their growth, that’s not a particularly sustainable model. I have “lost” some amazing people along the way because they grew quickly and were ready for the next thing, and that next thing was outside our organization.

It’s always a bittersweet moment when the day arrives, and that amazing person walks into your office to let you know they have applied for another position. Let’s pause and talk about that for just a minute. So many leaders and managers get blindsided by the resignation of great employees. They say things like “I never saw that coming,” or “why would they leave us?” If you’re doing this job right, you’ll never be surprised when someone leaves your organization. You really know you’re doing things right when they tell you ahead of time that they’re even looking. So many of us have worked in places where this information is kept confidential until the last possible moment and a decision is made. Mostly this comes out of a place of fear. We are taught that loyalty is a bond that once broken cannot be mended. Retaliation is real in the hands of a weak leader or manager. I would suggest that if you have employees who aren’t telling you if and when they’re considering a move, you need to examine your approach to leading.

Back to that moment when they let you know they’re looking. There are two ways to respond. The first, and most common, is “oh crap.” We go into panic mode and begin to try to determine how to keep this great asset from leaving. The other way to respond is “awesome, what can I do to help?” This doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t try to find a way to keep your employee. But the growth and support model only works if it’s consistent, transparent, and is present at every step from their first day to their last day working at your organization. It’s entirely possible that as you’re helping them take this next move, you’ll discover a new opportunity or idea at your organization that you can move them into. If not, there is little to be gained by standing in their way. But if you stand up and support them, the reputation of your organization will grow, and lines will form as you open the recruitment process for their replacement. This is how great places to work are created.

This approach is not for the faint of heart. The leader that deploys this approach must operate with a degree of patience, quiet confidence, and tenacity. Consistency is the key to long term sustained success. Plus, it feels good. The reason teaching as a professional was so appealing to me was because I liked the idea of helping others grow and development new skills and understandings of the world around them. As a father, my proudest moments were sitting on the couch and helping both my kids learn to read, or play their first notes on the piano, or kick a ball into a net. I loved teaching fourth graders, but my fear was that I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t want to fail my students.

Years later as a first-time supervisor I realized all the skills I developed as a teacher were applicable as a supervisor. I just swapped out the Oregon Trail curriculum for learning a new assembly program, or how to create a program budget. I have employees for a period of time, and while I have them it is my job to fill them up with as much knowledge and skills as possible, knowing full well that the day will come when they leave my classroom and graduate to the next grade in their career.

Today I have three dear friends who all are serving as chief executives of nonprofits. All three worked for me at some point in their career. One for more than a decade! Like me, they too practice the value of growing and developing their staff. And also like me they regularly feel the bittersweet combination of pain and pride when someone that works for them moves on to their next great adventure. We talk about this from time to time as we commiserate over the occasional loss of an amazing employee. It’s funny because those stories of loss are always balanced by stories of folks we’ve been able to promote into new roles and watching their success, and the success of the organization as a result.

We always come to the same conclusion, there’s no other way to go about our work. I owe my entire career to people who saw potential in me and took both the risk and the time to foster that potential. I hope and believe that I never squandered those opportunities. While it took me a long time to recognize what others have done for me, I have made it a point to thank each and every one of them and share how their impact on me is being paid forward to the next generation of great organizational leaders.

I never grew up to be a carpenter, but I have remodeled a few homes and I’m pretty handy around the house thanks to Jack and the investments he made in teaching me some skills. Mr. Seiss didn’t crush my dreams, he pointed me to the path that would define my life and career. For almost seventeen years I worked at an organization that gave me one opportunity after another. We both benefited from that experience, but at the end of the day I’m the bigger winner as that experience has defined the success of every organization I have worked at since. Denis was right, “…If you don’t invest in these people and you don’t give them new skills and abilities, AND they stay… now you have a real problem.”