Charitable soliciations should put well-meaning donors on alert
by Jan Quintrall, President/CEO, BBB
jquintrall@spokane.bbb.orgfor the Spokesman Review, 10/04/09
‘Doing more with less” is one of those phrases everyone seems to use during these lean times.
There might be some small point on the scale of productivity where this rings true, but it is a spot the size of an iota. We are really doing less with less.
Face it, we are asking more of the staff we have not laid off, management is working longer hours, and each day we make choices about what will and won’t get done.
I have heard leadership refer to what we do these days as triage. We access what requires immediate attention, and frankly let a patient or two die because we simply can’t get it all done with less. Sometimes the staff, already too small, is further reduced by illness. And the stress continues to grow.
I am always on the lookout for ways to lighten things up at the office. We spend way too much time dealing with unpleasant, unreasonable individuals. A laugh and a smile are critical counter measures to all that negativity. In the spirit of fun, we have an NFL Football office pool each week during the season. And an interesting thing happened on the way to a touchdown this year.
Week one is always meager in participation, and this year was no different. Those who think they know all about who will and won’t win hover on the sidelines, waiting for indicators and trends. Those who could not care less about football are not yet participating because there is little buzz about the process. This year I decided to help the cause and add to the fun, so I completed my entry plus one for the office dog, Itsy. I had a whole lot of fun with Itsy’s choices. Of course she did not like anything with a large predatory bird as the mascot; it was too frightening. She liked any kind of fish and chose the Saints for religious reasons. I have to admit, my reasons for the choices were fun all by themselves! The staff got a kick out of Itsy and her choices, and it added one more dollar to our tiny pot.
Monday rolled around and Bob the BBB Football Commissioner reported the weekly standings. You guessed it, Itsy won hands down! She even had the best record in a much larger pool Bob participates in outside the BBB! I have to admit, I was a bit shocked at how arrogant she was that Monday. But she soon returned to behaving as the kind-hearted office dog we all know and love, leaving her winnings in the pot for the following week. And that is where Itsy again taught the BBB a lesson.
Itsy made it OK to be silly, to not be an expert and to have fun anyway. So, the next week we had two fish, a dog and a cat enter the pool. But more important, we had more of the staff joining in the fun, the gentle ribbing and the laughter. And that is what makes life just a little easier in these days of doing what we can with what we have.
There is an abundance of challenge in life today. As leaders we need to look for ways to take the edge off anything we can. Giving your staff something to look forward to each Monday like a multi-species football pool is an easy diversion. We are all in this together, might as well get in the huddle and laugh! And if you want to follow Itsy and her football picks on Twitter, go to bbb.org and sign up. Oh, a human actually won the pool the next week – perhaps with the advice of his three live-in canine companions.
Jan Quintrall is president and CEO of the local Better Business Bureau. She can be reached at
jquintrall@spokane.bbb.org or (509) 232-0530.
We're Unsure About You - But Don't Leave
by Jan Quintrall, President/CEO, BBB
jquintrall@spokane.bbb.orgfor the Spokesman Review, 10/18/09
When the BBB board of directors hired me from Colorado Springs in December 1998, I spent the first couple of months just meeting business people in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. They often told me that Spokane was a steppingstone and I would move on to bigger and better things in five to seven years.
I bought into that, as the general consensus was that this place is a just a stopover. Boy, what a statement! I took that to mean anyone who moved here from elsewhere and didn’t leave simply was not good enough to get out of the Inland Northwest. Weird, to say the least. With that kind of PR, who in their right mind would ever want to stay?
But then I saw something contrary happening in the business and government world. Individuals who did move on to bigger jobs in bigger cities were chastised for leaving Spokane. And it has not changed. The message borders on “How dare you abandon us!” The discussion about Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick interviewing in San Francisco reminded me that this strange double standard still exists.
We are critical of those who stay – they are not quite good enough. We are critical of those who leave – they think they are too good. This finger- pointing ignores the large group of talented, capable people who stay here because of a distinctive quality of life choice, not a last resort. And there is also the group that left to take the big jobs, only to return when the lights of the big city dulled.
I admit I catch myself in the “that person is too good to settle for Spokane” mentality every once in a while, but then I catch myself. Life in the Northwest is a choice to be enjoyed, not a sentence to be served.
But why are we so critical when someone wants to take the big job in another city? Do we feel like we can’t hang on to talent? Are we afraid we drive people away? Does it make all of our leadership seem all too temporary? Are we jealous that someone chooses to fight crime and traffic in a large city rather than sample the gifts this area has to offer?
Let’s reduce the argument to a lower common denominator. How do we as managers and leaders feel when a staff person leaves our business to take a promotion at another company? What about when a customer leaves us to buy a different product from someone else? Do we resent them? Are we angry? Do we sit back and think about the ways we could have kept them? Perhaps it is a good time to look at our product compared to the one our customer selected. Are we doing all we can in these troubling economic times to make our employees feel valued and validated? Can we do any of these things without emotional bias, with education as our goal? Big questions, but we cannot have it both ways.
When an employee, customer, police chief or community leader makes a choice that does not favor us or our agenda, it is simply an opportunity to start asking questions. We will never keep every customer, all our staff or each community leader, no matter what we do. But there are lessons in each choice. We just need to be open enough to listen without prejudice or attack. We can’t win them all, but what we see reflected in our losses may teach us something important about ourselves, our community or our culture.