A ReCAP of my first week at RCAP

A note about the title: The organization of my new job is called RCAP, Inc., which is the Rural Community Assistance Partnership.

I had an intense first week on my new job. I had told my new boss on Tuesday the previous week when I accepted the offer of the position that I was willing to start the following Monday, which was June 1 – the first of the month, a good day to start something new, I thought. But it was a busy week for the office that included a board meeting (one full day) and a program managers meeting (another full day two days later). So I tried my best to do some reading on my own and orienting myself in order to stay out of the boss’s hair as much as I could on those days he was in the office, since he was busy doing things for those meetings.

I confess that I did have parts of some days last week in which I was full of despair, doubt and anxiety as well as feelings that I had gotten into something that was over my head, mostly with the subject matter of the organization but a bit over worrying that I didn’t have the right level of communications skills. On the other hand, by the end of the week, I felt it was a good beginning to a new job. I attended the full-day program managers meeting, and after talking at length to the other two full-time employees in the office, at least I was able to define what I need to know about the organization and how it operates, even if I won’t know it and understand it for many more weeks or months. I was able to frame for myself and figure out the scope of what I’ll need to learn, and to me, that is often half the battle.

I also must say that this was an easier transition to make than those of past new jobs. It was like the transition we made when we moved from Geneva to Nairobi. For that, I knew what to expect when making an overseas move – or at least I knew how disorienting it was going to be. I knew what I would have to do when making that move from Europe to Africa, unlike the move from Chicago to Geneva, which was a huge adjustment, or the transition to my job with the ELCA World Hunger Appeal in Chicago. With this job, I had much more of the prepared mindset that I had when we moved from Geneva to Nairobi. I started by knowing beforehand how I would attack the learning curve – what questions I should ask and of whom and how I should gather information to get myself comfortable with my duties and the organization.

The biggest adjustment to this position is the type of organization and the office it’s in. My coworkers are:

• Robert, my boss, RCAP’s executive director, who is a former Navy man, from Texas, and a political liberal (not a typical combination, I know). He’s very laid back and easy-going.
• Aaron, a high-strung, ADHD-type, intense, driven, take-charge director in his late 30s who manages a couple of the government grants that the organization gets. Before he came to RCAP, he worked on Capitol Hill for Tom Daschle when he was majority leader, and his roots are on a farm in South Dakota.
• Dave, who is from West Virginia, a fairly ordinary bear of a guy who is your best meat-loving drinking buddy. He manages some of the organization’s other government contracts.
• Joy, a mid-50s registered member of the Green Party. She is the training director and lives and works from Boulder, so she’s not in the office here in D.C. She has a doctorate in water systems or something and has worked for the Peace Corps. She’s also a vegetarian and is the sort of Birkenstock-wearing, recycling-type of liberal that are numerous in that city and state.
  

So it’s just us four guys in the office. There is normally a part-time accountant, but that position is currently vacant and will be filled soon (and no, Sarah’s not interested in it at all). It’s a big change from my previous two full-time positions in which I was one of a dozen or so staffers in Geneva (and working in a building with a couple of hundred people) and on a staff of about 29 in Chicago (and in a building where I regularly interacted with many others in a building where a few hundred people worked). In a way, this will be a nice change, since I am the (topmost) director of communications (except for the executive director, we’re all directors, but we don’t direct any staff) and don’t have another communicator over me (a refreshing change from Geneva, where I had a demanding, insecure and downright mean communicator over me as my boss). On the other hand, there’s absolutely no hiding during political squabbles in the office or relying on other communications experts to help me with my specific duties or getting the work in my area done.

I have an office of my own again with a door I can close, although it’s on the inside of the building, and so I have no windows. I despise the office building we’re in. The entrance area is decent and modern enough, but the rest of the building is so nondescript, ordinary, plain, boring and almost run down that it’s just awful. It has absolutely no personality or character. There is another organization on our floor, but I’ve never seen anybody else on our floor other than our staff and the mail and courier delivery people. The only thing that makes up for this is that the building is right around the corner from the White House (it’s at 16th & K NW). Every time I cross 16th St., I turn and look down at the White House and marvel at where I’m working and living, knowing that so many important things are happening so close to me.

The program managers meeting that was held last week was for our main contacts in the organization’s regional offices (a term that’s used loosely, since these regional offices are basically autonomous organizations that agree to work together and have our office in D.C. that doesn’t really have any authority over them). There are six regions, and my boss wants me to travel to each within my first year. These regional offices are “community action organizations,” which is a type of entity I’m still trying to understand.

My first and urgent priority is to get the organization’s website up and running again. It has basically a web page only that is just a place holder. Rather than just replacing and re-creating the old site, I will oversee the whole redesign of the site and overhaul the content, which will means I will have to go through it all carefully, and this will give me a chance to learn about the organization and force me to communicate about it well on a public space. I will also be the editor of the organization’s quarterly magazine. A major part of my responsibilities from now until September will be to oversee the logistics and organizing of the annual conference of technical assistance providers (people like water and sewer experts in the regions who work on the ground in rural areas helping communities) that will be held in Rosslyn.

This job is also a new beginning for me in many ways. This is really the very first job I have gotten without using or having any previous connections to the organization or people who worked for it. Recall that I beat out 300 people who sent their resumes in for the position and the nine others who were interviewed for it. After my bad work experience in Geneva and struggling for many months from Geneva and Nairobi to find work in Nairobi and D.C., getting this job is proof for me, in a way, that I have recovered from my bad Geneva experience and a long period in which I felt my career had fallen off the rails. I am also consciously trying to make a new start in this job. I still may be the baby, the youngest one, in the office, but I have decided that I am not going to play that role or allow myself to be treated like the “young, inexperienced one” who needs to be taken under someone’s wing and mentored and taught down to. I may come to the organization not knowing much about the type of work it does, but still I believe (and have been told by many of you who are familiar with my skills and the organizations I have worked for) that I bring a considerable amount of skills, experience and a good sense, having worked and traveled internationally, of how the world works (or an appreciation of its complexity). Again, I’m really pleased that I am the sole communicator in this position and am not working under another communicator whose ways I will be expected to follow and who will have veto power over me. This position has been vacant for three years, so I will have a lot of room to define how my duties are carried out and how communications in the organization is done. And because there has been this vacancy, the organization has fallen behind a bit with how it does its communications. It has not stayed current with doing things electronically, etc. My skills are slightly behind in this area as well, so I can grow and catch up with the current ways of communicating as the organization does too.

The first few weeks and months of a new job are always the hardest and most awkward. Part of my bad feelings last week were just frustration and impatience – not being able to get into the real work quickly because I’ve waited so long to have a regular job. But with this job I’m determined to get past all this as quickly as possible and settle in.