Running the Show Is Different Than Doing the Chores

Saturday morning was the pig show at our county 4-H fair. I sent my husband and the kids ahead at 6:30 while I finished packing the last of their other exhibits.

On the way to the fairgrounds, I realized I had time to stop for iced lattes for everyone. By the time I arrived, they were well into getting the pigs ready without me.

After eight years of hauling feed and washing pigs, I'd finally graduated to coffee duty.

My daughter's going into her sophomore year; my son is 11 and in his fourth year of 4-H. When they first started, they could do a job if you told them exactly what it was and stood right there while they did it. Fill this bucket. Wash this pig. Carry that feed over there. Spray them down, it's hot.

After a while, they could do those things without me hovering. Then they started remembering them on their own — the pigs need feed and water in the morning, there's a whole checklist before the show, and if it's hot, you cool them down before anybody has to say so.

My daughter's past that now. She's the one telling me what feed to buy because she's mixing it differently for pigs gaining at different rates. If we're going to be gone, she can hand my parents the whole plan and trust they'll follow it.

Pretty soon I'll be out of the pig business entirely. I'll just pay the bills and deliver the coffee.

There's a progression in there.

First you can do a task with help. Then you can do it on your own. Then you start seeing what needs doing before anyone tells you. And eventually you can decide what matters most, tell other people what to do, and own how the whole thing turns out.

We take that progression for granted with kids. Nobody would hand my 11-year-old the entire pig operation, walk away, and check in once a week. That would be a bold management choice, likely resulting in a gadget-filled pig pen and a swine crime scene.

I see organizations do this with their communications staff.

They hire (or contract) someone who can write, or design, or shoot photos and video, or post on their social accounts. They expect that person to walk in and immediately know what the organization should be saying, what matters most, who needs to hear it, what can wait, and how all of it fits together.

Those aren't the same skill. Someone can be terrific at producing the work and still not have the experience to run the function. That gap is where the frustration starts.

After a couple months, the executive director thinks, "Why am I still deciding what needs to happen, filling in all the background, setting the priorities, and reviewing every draft? I hired someone to handle communications." The employee thinks, "I'm doing exactly what I was asked. Why does everything keep getting rewritten?"

Sometimes it's the opposite problem. The employee has plenty of ideas and initiative but doesn't yet know the organization well enough to tell which ideas actually serve the bigger goal. So the director spends as much time steering the work as they'd have spent just doing it themselves. One person needs constant instruction, the other needs constant correction, and either way the director never gets promoted to coffee duty.

And it costs the organization more than a little frustration. While everyone waits for that person to catch up, communications are willy-nilly. The organization's program work stays every bit as good as it was. It just stays invisible.

At BowerComm we say it takes about two years for a new person to really hit their stride, and we warn them not to take a do-over too personally. They're producing good work well before then, but what takes longer is the judgment. It takes time to learn our clients and our standards, to know which questions to ask, to notice when something's off, and to hear what a client's really trying to accomplish even when they're not explaining it well.

I'm thankful that 10 of our 15 people have been with me more than five years. (It's the reason I can take an annual two-week vacation.) These days they're the ones telling ME what I should be doing. That kind of judgment takes years to build; you can't hand it to someone in their first week.

The tricky part is that organizations hire based on the level they can afford and expect the level they need.

The fix isn't to decide junior people are bad hires because you're annoyed. It's to be honest about what level you actually hired and what support that person will need. Did you hire someone who can do specified communications tasks? Someone who can run familiar work without much hand-holding? Or someone with the experience and judgment to own the whole function? Those require very different levels of experience and judgment.

And sometimes the honest answer is that the level you need costs more than the budget currently holds. That's a fundable gap. Grantmakers are starting to treat communications capacity as exactly the kind of investment they'll back, whether you use it to hire up or bring in outside help.

None of this happens in a week. My kids and staff both needed years. But it happens — and when it does, you can finally set down the bucket and pick up the coffee.

Lori