Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Storytelling that Propels Careers
Chapter 1: Telling Stories about Change
Page 12
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The bank in which I worked instituted a policy that centralized the lending process. An application was to be taken from the client and sent off to be approved or declined, processed, prepared, and returned to the branch to be signed by the client. While the process was streamlined, it also took away valuable face-to-face knowledge about the client and the loan. If the employee did not have any prior lending experience, he or she couldn’t answer simple loan questions from the client. While I appreciated the newly created time in my schedule, I felt that the clients were being slighted. I proposed to my boss a small adjustment that would permit brief face time with the client. My boss implemented my idea, and now we have the best of both worlds, face-to-face time with clients without taking significant time away from the streamlined process.
In my senior campaign-management job, I was the pinnacle person for a diverse group of project managers. I had many representatives from all the product bases constantly coming to me to develop databases of customers they could sell to. They wanted to know who they could market to. I would collaborate with them, asking questions like, what’s the budget, how many pieces do you want to direct mail? Or do you want to call these people? What media will you use? I worked to ensure each group got all the demographics it wanted. I’d pull the requirements into the data. And I’d be darned if the group didn’t change its mind and ask for a different demographic. Or something unpredictable like a hurricane would mean the group couldn’t mail to a certain region. So, I’d have to throw all the data back in to the pond and re-fish. And the changes wouldn’t happen with just one group; they would happen with all of them at one time. I dreaded my pager going off at 7 a.m. because a project manager had a thought while sleeping last night: “Ooh, I would love to see how many prospective customers wear toenail polish.” But whatever their requirement was, I said, “I'm on top of it.” I enjoyed the analytic aspects and the busyness and the constant go, go, go. Change drives me. It’s something I enjoy because it’s an extra challenge.
Some change isn’t instigated by the organization at all, but by the organizational member who
decides to change careers, an increasingly common phenomenon. In listing 21st-century human-resources
trends, nonprofit CEO John McMorrow predicted that career change would become the rule rather than the
exception, in part because of the “erosion of the implied good-faith contract between employer and employee.”
Career-changers, too, should be prepared to tell deft stories of why they made the change and how they’ve adapted,
as in the next example:
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