I'm Going Outside...

In 1989 I was given a one-year rotational assignment as an operations manager in AT&T's equipment business in the Chicago Loop.  It was supposedly a rounding experience.  Coming from the long distance services side of AT&T, this nuts and bolts world of installing and maintaining telephone equipment inside a customer's business was a culture shock.

I was in the middle of an IBEW union shop where everyone (1) came from Chicago's south side and (2) had to have a first name that ended in "y" or "ie."  My boss was Eddie.  I worked with Mikey, Jimmy, Randy, Denny, Tommy, etc.  For the first and only time in my life I became Stevie for a year.  You wouldn't find any of these extra letters on our business cards, but their use in conversation, both in second and third person, were constant.

More importantly, I learned about a place called "Outside."  When I was a kid, my Mom would send us outside when we were too rowdy to be inside.  We learned early in school that we had inside voices and outside voices.  During my teen years, I definitely saw that it was better to be on the inside than on the outside.  But this outside was different.

A large part of all of our jobs was to be on-site at a customer location, managing expectations, diffusing tensions, and overseeing the work.  Rather than saying a person was at a customer's office or facility, the whole organization just said that he (all male) was outside.  Is Denny around?  No, he's outside.  Will Mikey come to our staff meeting?  No, he's outside.

This was an era before cell phones.  We had pagers, but if you were outside, no one should bother you.  If you were outside, you were making money for the company.  If you were outside, you were doing the job.  There was pride and status for going outside.  You were unquestionable in your commitment to the job.  The outsiders had the cool job.  At least we thought so.

There were times when we said we were outside, but it was really a long group lunch.  Maybe Taste of Chicago was going on.  That was outside.  Maybe meeting a buddy or a customer for a beer was a good reason to go outside.  There really wasn't much rationalization.  You just went outside, and all was good.  No one got mad at your for being outside.  That was the job.  But it was also an attribute we could use to our advantage, and at times we felt we deserved it.

If you weren't outside, you were inside--that's where the staffers were, the overhead.  The insiders (who could never reach us--we were outside) knew that we outsiders sometimes took advantage of our privilege, so cross-team cooperation was not high.  That didn't bother us too much.  We were focused on the great things we were doing outside.

Fast forward thirty years, and I am in a very different externally-facing job:  a major gift fundraiser in higher education.    I am grateful to be part of a close-knit team of fundraisers where we don't have to add suffixes to our names and pretend like we all grew up in the same neighborhood.  However, at least twice today I explained my absence from an on-campus meeting by stating,  "I was with a donor," or "I was with a prospect."  In other words, I was outside.

My job description states that I may have to travel up to 50% of the time--of course I'm outside!  I like going outside, being a bridge between the organization and its external constituents.  With three decades of professional successes and failures, though, I now appreciate that the same job requirement dictates that I need to be inside at least 50% of the time: to build the internal relationships needed to get the whole job done, to understand the value of other roles, to be firmly rooted in what's happening on campus, and to do my homework before going outside.

We fundraisers sound so official and formal with our titles of major gift officers, but I remind myself that going outside is not a badge to wear, not a signal that we're doing the real work.  I know that when I go outside, I'm not the hero.  Rather going outside is a gift, a gift from all the work of others who are inside creating a story for me to take outside, a gift from the other roles in a complex organization that are just as important as my role, and most more so.  When I go outside, I am providing a window to the inside and that is where the real work gets done.  When I return inside, I need to pursue what I missed, to stay relevant, to stay connected.

To my colleagues, I look forward to working with you on the inside.  To everyone else, I'll see you on the outside.