Breakfast with the Interns

I want to address something many people working in urban centers with lots of university students encounter: interns. You may know some after your own stint as a young starving étudient. They come to work with and learn about the professional world for a brief time before they set out on their own careers as young professionals. In this brief reflection, I ask for some creative liberty in comparing internships to a beautiful omelet and explain how to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships through internships.

Before I begin my breakfast analogy, remember that internships mattered to you in your young professional career. During my time at Boston University, I held a number of different part time jobs to pay for school: sailing coach, ice hockey referee, baseball umpire, radio station street teamer, etc. In each role, I learned new skills but none taught me the business skills my internships at Intralinks and Marchon Partners instilled. My managers played the greatest role in my development by rewarding good initiative, challenging those areas I needed improvement (including falling asleep in an important meeting! Yes, it happened) and encouraging me.

Internships present an opportunity to help someone mature in their career and, believe it or not, in our own too! For some, working with an intern allows them to cultivate strong managerial skills in a low pressure environment. You can learn how to balance workloads, offer critical feedback and manage a team for the first time. This should excite everyone!

Now to the most important part of the blog, the meal. First, when you meet an intern, think of an egg sitting in your perfectly sterile, clean and cool refrigerator. This egg came from a locally grown farm where it grew under the close watch of a mother hen and the farm team. For your intern, they may only know a similarly incubated, protected classroom. They take notes and repeat whatever ideas their professor spits out at them. In your business, if you hope to maximize their experience, you need to transform this raw egg into something unique and delicious.

To manage the raw egg, you need to crack the shell and find the core yoke. In professional settings, we seldom think of “cracking” an employee as a good thing! Usually this comes from working long, strenuous hours in an unhealthy setting. In your intern’s case, you want to gently crack the shell on the edge of a bowl, removing the yoke without the shell fragments. This delicate process means orienting the student to the customs and rhythm of your work. It means welcoming them with hopes that they feel empowered to contribute meaningful work every day. These small gestures allow you to reach their core and begin to transform their professional outlook for the better!

This transformation takes place in a cooking process. You cannot cook an egg by itself! You need to add butter and pepper to the pan and beat water and milk with the yoke to prepare a proper batter. At work, interns should experience different areas of your company to understand the larger business. Working in other areas and exposure to other raw materials might not make sense to them at first; but we know from our own experience, the more we expose ourselves to other areas of the company, the better prepared we are to serve. Introduce your intern to as much as you can.

After this initial exposure, you need to turn the heat up. Interns can’t sit as raw batter forever. Throw them in the pan, turn the heat up and watch them take shape. To draw further comparison between the cook and manager, as cooks cannot abandon the eggs in the pan, managers cannot abandon interns! Eggs burn and become inedible without attention! Chefs need to move them around, turn them and plate them after they cook. Managers need to stay close to their interns, watch, offer strong, critical feedback and adjust to their needs. As a first-time manager, interns allow less senior full time employees to develop these skills for later in their careers. The cooking process makes great results when given proper attention.

Last counsel to remember as the internship concludes: you need to plate the “omelet” and present it to the world. As a manager, encourage your intern in his or her development. Consider endorsing them on LinkedIn and offering a letter of recommendation. Refer them if you hear of other opportunities in the future. Maintain an intentional relationship with them beyond the internship. Grab coffee. Talk about the changes in your field. You never know when you need to rely on one another.

Internships present an exciting opportunity. Get engaged and see for yourself. What advice would you add to my thoughts?

Mission Impossible?

We recently affirmed our company’s mission statement at an all hands meeting. Our employees valued this short expression of who we are as a company and went so far as to clamor for it to hang in a visible place at work. Why does t he mission matter?

Missions help us press on at work tying together the best and worst parts of our jobs into a beautiful tapestry. In many galleries, woven tapestries tell great stories of the past. In Bayeux, France, the town’s world renowned cloth measures more than 230 feet and depicts the great Battle of Hastings. In this grand work of art, we see victory and defeat, life and death. Similarly, in a week at the office, we see the mega deal close while someone else seems frustrated with a failed effort. Missions help propel progress forward and renew those struggling. No matter the sentiment at work, missions fuel the work that forms tomorrow’s great story.

Although you share my grand hope for mission statements, we know some might seem cliché, distantly conceived in the board room or irrelevant. We hope ours beats across the heart of the company:

“Our value driven approach to staffing transforms how businesses and employees succeed together. We believe hard work in a balanced professional environment affords everyone the opportunity to thrive.”

Let me explain each element:

Value drives our company in two ways: first, we want to improve the bottom line for our clients and members of our team. On the client side, we pride ourselves on our ability to save you money through our efficient staffing solutions. Relative to our competitors, we provide more value through our unique process. For our employees, we want to enhance their career and help them realize their professional goals, which, by the way, may lie beyond Marchon Partners. We help our consultants find strong roles with the clients they work with on site and beyond. We help people excel and develop long term relationships.

Second, values, that is our commitment to ethical practices, informs every decision we make. Two examples of abuse in our industry we avoid: in our employee relations, we treat our internal and external employees the same. Our benefits do not change around where you report to work. Another example flows from our consultative approach. Many staffing firms focus on solutions that immediately generate revenue. At Marchon Partners, we learn about your needs and culture to propose tailored solutions for you, no one else. We neither recruit nor manager any two accounts the same because each client brings very different needs.

In every business venture, we believe that we can and should succeed together. When our consultant lands a great role at a new firm, we gain an opportunity to continue our relationship in a new setting. When a client saves energy and resources finding great people for their new wave of growth, we work together to ensure the next round of hiring builds on their culture and business needs. Business hinges on a great inter-dependability that we facilitate through our relationships.

We cultivate relationships and results through hard work. Nothing we discussed above matters without hard work. That said, Marchon Partners recognizes that balance lends to the best professional results. Finally, returning to the theme of inter-dependability, our professional environment must provide everyone the opportunity to thrive. Often people measure themselves with the word “success.” We challenge everyone to advance that mark. We hope our employees and client succeed by achieving their goals, sure; but we work tirelessly to help them think beyond what they dreamed for their talent resources. They can then innovate new, creative solutions to address any challenge.

Celebrate ONE Boston Day

Mayor Martin J. Walsh of the City of Boston announced his intent to permanently mark today, 15 April, as One Boston Day to commemorate the attacks at the 2013 Boston Marathon. The Mayor described his desire as ” an opportunity to recognize the good in our community and reflect on the spirit of grace and resilience of the people of Boston that was exemplified in the response to the loss and the tragedies of April 15, 2013. The new tradition will put a mark on a day honoring the strength of our city, its people and their acts of goodness toward one another.”

As a Boston-based firm, Marchon Partners would like to devote today’s post to the victims of the Marathon Bombing, first responders and those who helped them that day. Your bravery and courage inspire us both professionally and personally. Thank you for your example.

Culture Flourishes Despite Management: The Boston Globe

Across organizations in every industry, company culture anchors and supports businesses during the most difficult times. Its strong force reminds everyone of who they are, what they do and, most importantly, why they do what they do. A struggling business’ reliance on its culture should win major kudos and more importantly, help it to overcome human failure. This week, the Boston Globe deserves such praise amid some of the worst management decisions of recent memory.

Ironically, one of the most important 2016 New England news stories involved the region’s most storied news outlet. A less than successful transition to a new delivery vendor left much the Globe’s readership without their morning edition the last few weeks. After the issues persisted, the Globe’s leadership publically apologized to customers and offered a polite explanation around the problems. Many vocal opponents canceled their subscriptions while others continue to wait for a solution.

The Globe leadership, under the direction of the company’s ownership, sought cost-saving initiatives to address its annual budget gaps worth millions. The paper sold its flagship headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard relocating its newsroom to a leased space in the Financial District and printing operation to the South Shore. The Paper crippled itself when it chose a less expensive delivery vendor that lacked the proper staff to execute. After weeks of cyclical issues, members of the newsroom team and others in the organization took matters into their own hands Sunday morning personally volunteering to deliver papers to their customers.

What fuels these employees to work well beyond their normal job descriptions? Culture.

Clear, well defined organizational culture prepares businesses for any challenge including poor, cost-saving management decisions. The people at the Globe understand who they are:  a journalistic resource to their subscribers. They know what they do: report on the most pressing matters of today. And, after weeks of difficulties, they remembered why they do what they do: The Boston Globe exists to share the news with everyone and inform the public.  This mission needs support from a strong vision that is the road map towards achievement. In this case, when the management team’s vision changes to cut costs no longer satisfying the mission, the culture kicks in. These women and men step up for their company to realize the mission.

When your business falls upon difficult times, can you rely on your people to act above and beyond? Cultural fit becomes increasingly important in these situations. How can you, as a business leader, empower recruiters and talent acquisition professionals identify and win talent that aligns with your culture?

 

 

Safety in Professional Settings: Protecting Yourself and Your Team

Safety continues to play an increased role in office spaces. In the last 15 years, think of the attacks in office settings: 9/11 in Manhattan’s World Trade Center, the Sandy Hook School Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and countless workplace shootings across this country. Most recently, our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of San Bernardino, California and the families who lost loved ones. In addition to tragedies people chose to create, think of how difficult weather or natural disaster spurs professional crises. As an engaged professional or a responsible employer, you need think about the worst scenarios, communicate an actionable plan to those involved and seek out ways to improve your process.

During my summers growing up, I taught sailing at a camp in Boston. During our staff orientation, the most difficult, tedious part always proved to be the emergency action plan. This plan, written in a binder thicker than two encyclopedias combined, described what everyone from student to program director did in the event of any catastrophe including, but not limited to: nuclear attack, natural gas explosion, tsunami, earthquake, hazardous chemical spill, etc. While we never walked through every situation (of which there were hundreds), the team annually reviewed one crisis situation chosen at random. This exercise always excited me as a rather serious person but the tedious steps seemed to take too long and bore everyone.

“What’s the point?” we always used to ask.

Although the drill hardly simulated the nerves and speed of a real situation, it readied our team and helped us understand the critical steps. We grasped what kind of resources each situation required and left more equipped to handle disaster.

How can you respond to a crisis effectively in your office?

First, plan to understand. As you think about your business consider your work setting and its associated risks. Obvious danger settings might include construction and factory workplaces with heavy machinery but, even in the 8a-6p law firm, what procedures make sense to protect everyone in an emergency? Can you access a defibrillator in the event of a heart attack? Do you empower your employees with specific information about exit points in the building? While the confusion may seem laughable during the fire drill, you could lose lives without a strong Emergency Action Plan.

Second, when you find yourself amid a crisis, ask yourself, “What kind of emergency are we talking about?” Some choices that come to mind include: medical, attack (i.e. a gunman), fire, natural (i.e. weather). Understanding the situation and gathering the facts enables everyone to make better decisions.

Third, remember your plan, execute it and leverage your critical resources. Turning to a written process in your emergency action plan, you can act knowing every step. We often forget to communicate with an important person or complete a critical step without a checklist. What ever you decide to do in an emergency, you must work to keep everyone safe. If allowing employees to work from home saves them from a dangerous commute to and from work, do it. If maintaining good medical equipment could save an employee suffering from a stroke, do it. These steps mitigate many workplace risks and protect the most important part of your organization: your people.

Last, after every incident, take time with your team to recap and address any lingering questions or issues. This evaluation stage allows everyone to process the event, understand what went well and improve upon those things that did not. The experience helps in the future and initiates the preparation we discussed earlier. Safety in workplaces can become compromised everywhere. You need to empower employees to protect themselves in light of a disaster.