Before making a move, get clear on this one thing
Put up your hand if you think a supportive, inspirational manager is a unicorn. Keep your hand up if you’ve had managers who seemed great when you were hired but stopped being supportive the first time you challenged them. What about managers who treat you like a buddy, confiding in you and venting about conflicts with their own manager, but never listened to you? Have you had a manager who asked you to do projects that they never used or managers who hired you for your skills and knowledge, but then micromanaged everything you produced?
If you’re trying to get away from your unsupportive, soul-crushing manager relationship, read this article before making a move because if you don’t get clear about one thing, it’ll just keep happening. I’m here to reassure you that finding a supportive, inspirational manager less about searching out a unicorn; it’s determining a match in values.
Trust follows values
I know that “values” is one of those terms that has lost its meaning because of overuse and disingenuous practice. (Like the organizations that trumpet equity, but didn’t list salaries on job postings until they were legally required to.) While avoiding virtue signalling, values remain the gateway to finding managers that are a supportive and inspirational match. That’s because values are what’s most important to us. When values are aligned, trust is built, followed by the kind of productive work that leads to the impact that change lives—ours and the people our organizations serve.
Before finding my current manager, I was wrestling with feeling unseen, unheard, and unappreciated. You might say unvalued. There are no villains or victims here, instead, what was missing was value alignment. Many of my previous managers and I didn’t share what was most important to us. We shared some values like wanting to help people. We wanted to be successful. We believed in the importance of the not-for-profit sector. Maybe we even had multiple overlapping values in our top twenty or thirty values, but looking back now, probably not our top two.
In Strong Ground, Brene Brown, encourages us to distill our values to one essential value (the one ring to rule them all?!—she doesn’t bring Lord of the Rings into it, that’s all me). I can’t seem to get down to one (yet), but my top two are curiosity and kindness. These two values are more important to me than anything else. They inspire and support me. You can probably see where this is going—I needed a manager who is also driven by curiosity and kindness to consistently experience the support and inspiration I was seeking.
Enter Laura
Laura and I discovered our value synergy in our first conversation. In fact, she signaled it in her initial outreach for candidates. In a post on LinkedIn, she invited people to get in touch with her about a new role. The post was engaging and showed curiosity. During our chat, she asked lots of questions while also showing vulnerability. I felt her kindness. We bonded over being fundraising geeks and loving data. After our second call, I was beginning to believe that she could be my unicorn; even though we’re a generation apart and even though on paper we’re quite different. Our core values are the same. Dear reader, I took the job and I’ve never felt more supported and inspired.
If this is what you want and don’t have – here are three steps to getting closer to it:
- Even if you’ve already done values work, take 15 minutes and brainstorm what’s most important to you. An easy way is to work is with the sentence stem, “What’s most important to me is…” and write it over and over again. Set a timer and sit with it until the timer goes. It’s amazing what emerges when you sit with the question a little longer.
- Read your list and pause with each sentence, paying attention to what happens in your body. We embody our values. They ground us while also lighting us up. When I think “curiosity” my mouth automatically curves into a smile. When I think “kindness” I feel my heart. While reading your list, see which sentences lead you to feel the most. Returning to this exercise a couple of times over the course of a week can yield even more information.
- Cull the list to your top one or two. What’s most important to you? If it’s unclear, think about what frustrates you when you don’t have it. I get frustrated when people don’t ask me questions or when they don’t take other people’s feelings into account. Those are big indicators for me of valuing curiosity and kindness. What do your frustrations uncover for you?
Once you’re clear on what’s most important to you, make it a priority to discover whether you share these values when you’re interviewing. Before an interview, spend time thinking about how someone might demonstrate the value. An easy way to do this is think about what actions you take that align with what’s important to you. After an interview, reflect on what you heard, saw and felt. If you don’t see what you need, then this isn’t the manager for you. When you do – congratulations! You too have found your unicorn.
Nicole Arnold is a Major Gifts Officer at Lumenus Foundation. A self-described “fundraising geek” she has worked in fundraising for over thirty years across the sector, with a particular love for building major gift programs. Nicole believes in the power of combining kindness and data to drive positive change and derives daily inspiration from her two dogs.
