I recently attended a farewell party for someone switching jobs, from one Jewish organization to another. The toasts were full of accolades, including this one: “While we are sorry to lose him, at least he is still working in the Jewish world.”
Though I appreciate this sentiment, it points to a common but harmful assumption I see at many nonprofit and social-change organizations: that all professionals will end their careers working for the same cause as when they started.
And yet, for the next generation of professionals, signs suggest this won’t be the case.
Data consistently show that employees are spending less time in their positions, changing jobs every three to five years, with more than 40 percent of those changes involving a shift to different sectors. The rates are even higher for younger employees.
After years of organizational leadership and work in talent development, I have come to believe we are missing the opportunity to expand the quantity and quality of talent because we have yet to figure out how to take advantage of the ways people actually build their careers.
Indeed, in my work I hear people talk about working in the “education-reform world” or the “Jewish world” as if these are independent countries complete with wrought-iron borders. And scorn to you if you consider leaving.
As a result, great people in organizations who don’t see a permanent place for themselves are inclined to leave and never return, while others don’t even consider joining these organizations in the first place.
It’s time to change how nonprofits think about and embrace the concept of permeability, so that careers at social-change organizations might become as fluid and dynamic as at some of the most competitive sectors in the world.
Take the technology business, for example. Companies like LinkedIn offer great models for how to navigate and ultimately benefit from the transient nature of employment. LinkedIn’s approach is explained in The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, written by its chairman Reid Hoffman, with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh.
The professional networking site hires people for “tours of duty,” two- to 10-year engagements that come with specific missions to meet the company objectives and the employee’s personal-development goals.
Employees talk openly with their managers about leaving to do tours at different companies, but many also talk about returning one day to LinkedIn.
Nonprofits can take a similar approach. Instead of battening down the hatches, clinging to our employees, and turning our backs to “outsiders,” we could send the message that while you are working as a member of our team, however long that may be, you will have an unparalleled opportunity to learn, grow, and lay the groundwork for the career you envision.
Nonprofits will need to change how they work to promote this new way of thinking about careers. They must be willing to have continuing and open conversations with rising stars about where their career paths may take them and to talk openly about the valuable skills and networks one can build working for a certain cause or company that is not our own.
This means, for instance, that instead of denigrating people who choose to leave a nonprofit, we should celebrate the fact that people outside our cause recognize the value of the skills that have been gained while working on a particular social-change issue. It means that even as we bid farewell to staff members, we continue meaningful relationships with them.
It means that we help them find new opportunities, engage their help in recruiting for our organizations, inspire them and help them become volunteer leaders at our organizations.
Equally important, it means that we welcome individuals whose previous employment experience comes from outside our own cause.
By empowering individuals to spend a few years in a position building skills and networks, enhancing their professional and personal trajectories, and investing in a long-term relationship with them, we will attract and retain more talented people to help us achieve our missions.
Indeed, the more open and supportive nonprofit leaders become of people who embody the practice of moving between jobs and causes, the more we will actually—perhaps counterintuitively—create more durable, attractive, and competitive opportunities that benefit our workers, our organizations, and, most important, the missions we all seek to carry out.