“It’s Not My Job” Part I: Development Professionals And “Job Creep”
I have always hated it when someone says, “That’s not my job” when asked to help with a task. The reason usually stems from privilege and superiority; they saw themselves as “too good” to complete whatever they perceived as a menial assignment.
As my career has advanced, however, I realize that sometimes “That’s not my job” can effectively protect a person’s time from what I call Job Creep: the never ending cascade of tasks that get added to – and often subsume – essential job functions.
Development professionals seem to suffer from an epidemic of job creep as they quickly become the Jack- or Jill-of-all-trades for their organization.
While I wholeheartedly believe that everyone can perform any task – nothing falls below their station, I also believe that continually asking development professionals to complete tasks that fall outside or beyond their job descriptions and expertise contributes to the dearth of individuals in the profession and misperceptions of the role and impact that development professionals can have on an organization.
I come to this conclusion after talking to numerous development professionals – from small, medium, and large organizations – over the last few months and hearing them talk about spending a significant amount of their time engaged in tasks like:
Managing IT for the organization
Writing the organization’s history
Running the organization’s Angel Tree program
Designing and managing staff t-shirt orders
I have no qualms about the value of each project. However, they do not fall under the purview of development. Still, it seems like these types of assignments often fall to development staff. Why? I believe that because development professionals (1) like to please others, (2) work well with others, (3) have amazing organizational and time management skills, and (4) have a job that few managers truly understand or like, it becomes easy to ask the development person to take on these extra tasks.
“So what?” you might ask.
Every minute a development professional spends not raising money hurts the organization, the person and the profession.
Let’s look at the Angel Tree program organizer as an example. Let’s assume it takes the development professional 100 hours over the course of 6 weeks to identify families, gather their Christmas lists, recruit shoppers, gather gifts, deliver gifts, and thank donors. During that 100 hours, he or she could have met with 15-25 major donors or major donor prospects, perhaps raising $10,000 for the organization’s priorities, not to mention effectively sent the year-end appeal as well as timely and meaningful thank you letters to donors. In addition to this immediate cash, these donor meetings may have turned a first-time donor into a lifetime donor or solidified a relationship with a long-time donor to consider a planned gift, both of which would raise the long-term financial impact of those 100 hours exponentially.
Now let’s look at the cost. If this development professional conservatively earns an annual salary of $50,000, those 100 hours cost the organization $2,403. Together, asking a development professional to run this program cost the organization at least $12,000 this year alone and likely more in subsequent years. The yield to the bottom line: $0 as none of the donations benefit the organization directly.
While 100 hours may not seem like a lot, with only 2,080 hours in a work year, it amounts to 5% of this development professional’s time spent away from the main task of raising money. (10% if he or she works on development only part-time with marketing or another formal responsibility.) Unfortunately, for most professionals, they do not get pulled away for only one task of this type but dozens.
In addition to the direct financial cost to the organization, these types of assignments personally and professionally hurt development professionals. At the end of the year, how do most organizations assess their development professional? The amount of money raised. Will they ask how many families got Christmas gifts because of their efforts? Maybe … after asking how much money they raised and if they raised more than the previous year. Continually diverting development professionals’ time and attention away from their central responsibilities decreases their key productivity metric.
Personally, it can also become demoralizing to have your manager continually ask you to engage in tasks that fall outside the scope of your job description. Development professionals choose this vocation because they have a passion for the organization’s mission and like to raise money to support that mission. I believe that many who leave the profession or change jobs do so because they cannot spend a substantial part of their time engaged in the central activities of their profession. Instead, they spend their time engaged in these random assignments.
Finally, this mentality hurts the profession. Too often I hear executive directors and board members talk about development professionals as the organization’s financial life saver: “If we hire a development person, we can solve our funding deficit.” Many have no idea how much time it takes to effectively raise money or the need to develop relationships. When managers keep diverting a development professional’s time away from raising money, it only serves to widen the gap between reality and expectations the board and executive directors have for the profession.
What can development professionals and their managers do to help stay on task and raise more money?
The next Nonprofit Tips & Tidbits will provide 6 suggestions that development professionals and managers can use to minimize Job Creep and its impact on their organization.
