Musings from the First Week

In switching jobs, I knew there would be a few things that would strike me as odd, at first. Here are a handful of musings from the first week.

"Holy crap there are women in the women's restroom"
I mean... this pretty much sums it up. I went from a workplace where maybe 1/3 of the office was women (and the last client team was me and 10 guys) to a predominantly female environment.

"Part of the executive team"
That's new.

Doulas
So if you don't know what a Doula is, you should read about it here.  I think I was first introduced to the concept at CHI a few years ago where my conference roommate had done some work in India with encouraging (basically) doulas to use technology for childbirth training and awareness in rural villages. It was a very cool project (leveraging technology as well and women empowerment and addressing health issues, stigmas, and education).

It's interesting though, because in a lot of cases, the concept of Doulas is one that is often associated with upper middle class women being hippies (being able to afford to have someone there for you through Childbirth that isn't a medical professional and often associated with "non-traditional" home births, etc. In the case of the work that Ounce of Prevention does,  the Doula serves as the one person that is for sure there for you throughout the pregnancy and childbirth - for a lot of the women, the father is not in the picture and they don't have family to rely on, so the Doula is really the one dependable and knowledgeable person they have access to.

I get a desk to decorate
Coming from the consulting world where you are either at the client site or in a "hoteling" situation at the home office, it's pretty cool to have a desk that is mine that I can set up!

Emotional Intelligence
Several of our talks the first couple of days were preparing for interviews. It's definitely cool to be in a situation where we're talking about emotional intelligence as important - in purely technical worlds EI is something that may or may not be considered depending on the company, the culture, and the position. In the case of a non-profit where even IT should be focused on some amount of relationship building, EI is pretty important. It's cool to be on that side of the interviews, as I always felt EI was one of my strengths in the "tech world". The consulting way of the interview world was "How would you feel being stuck in an airport with them for 4 hours".

People Profiles
Lack of people profiles makes joining a company really weird (without being able to look up info on people that send you emails to get a face with the name or their role).

Client Gigs
So, as a consultant, you really only believe a project is going to come through when you're on the airplane there. After 2.5 days of work (and going back tomorrow!) you better believe I'm on the airplane there.

What will take a while to get used to, though, is breaking the consulting mindset of "us" and "them". There is no more "Here's how we can help you". It's "here's what I think is best for US". I can already tell it's going to take a while to break the mental model that I'm not just there for 3-12 months and that this is more than just a client gig. I can't tell yet if that will be really exciting or if it will be panic inducing, but I know the day that it occurs to me that this is my job for the forseeable future may be an interesting one.