"Just Awards" or just deserts?

Last year, Blue Avocado and Nonprofit Online News kicked off the "Just Awards" in order to provide urgently needed recognition to two forms of folly: "Abominable Press Coverage of the Nonprofit Sector" and "Narcissism in Philanthropy."

They have just opened nominations for 2011's awards, raising (in my mind, at least) the question of how many years of public ridicule it will take to make any difference in the degree to which narcissism drives our sector, or in how journalists cover it. Perhaps the organizers and the judges of the Just Awards should ponder the Straight Dope's motto: "Fighting ignorance since 1973. (It's taking longer than we thought.)"

In fact, I think that Blue Avocado and Nonprofit Online News have an uphill battle ahead of them, especially in the department of personality disorders such as narcissism. Of course, I heartily applaud them for undertaking it with humor. In fact, I'd like to encourage this blog's readers to get on board, and propose a few awards of their own.

Here are a few that I'd like to see:

The Effort to Outcome Award, for the organization that does the best job of confusing motion with progress.

The Mushroom Award, for the nonprofit executive who attains the greatest success in keeping his employees in the dark and feeding them $#!+.

The Sad Sack Award, for the nonprofit professional who is deemed to be the most needy, ineffectual, self-absorbed person in the workplace.

I'd also like to see some awards for Lifetime Achievement in Denial, in categories such as technology adoption, acknowledement of failure, and addressing class as an issue in hiring practices.

And now, dear readers, I turn to you with an invitation: what sector-wide awards would you like to propose? Please post your ideas as comments.

How to kill a water cooler conversation at your nonprofit organization

I am shocked by the email I'm getting these days from nonprofit professionals, thanking me for posting practical advice to this blog. Apparently, some people are reading it for purposes other than amusement or in a spirit other than schadenfreude!

Obviously, I need a little course correction here. In the form of impractical advice.

Therefore, today's lesson for nonprofit professionals will be on how to kill a water cooler conversation at the office. Let us commence.

The most important function of informal dialogue in the workplace is to establish dominance, thus squelching the sort of information exchange, collaboration, peer learning, good feeling, and other factors that can only lead to holding hands and singing "Kumbaya."

Your first assignment is to start with casual conversations in the elevator, the break room, and around the water cooler. Later on, you can graduate to killing conversations in mission-critical meetings, but we will begin with a simple exercise.

Your goal is to respond to conversational gambits with the implied message "I can top that."(1)

Here are some examples.

Co-worker: The stairs are wet, so please be careful. I slipped on them and bruised my knee.
You: Well, I once slipped on some stairs and broke my leg.

Co-worker: Jane told me about something interesting that happened to her mother when she was in Argentina.
You: Well, my mother went to Antarctica.

Co-worker: It's strange that I'm having trouble learning Haitian Creole, considering I got decent grades in high school French.
You: Well, my school didn't have grades - everything was pass/fail.

Do you see what I mean? If you regard every remark as an opportunity to bring the focus back to yourself and establish that you and yours are ever so much more so(2) than the current topic of conversation, then you will soon find that no one tells you anything.




1) As Fran Lebowitz so justly remarked, "The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting." If you use this as a guiding principle,you can triple or quadruple the impact of your response with the right tone of voice.

2) Choose your own adjective.