For Hire: Amazing Non-Profit Program Manager
Do we even know what that is?
My quest is to figure out what makes for an amazing program management professional.
My murky career
Throughout most of my professional life as a program manager in healthcare, I followed the work that looked interesting. It led me to engaging endeavors and the privilege to spend tremendous amounts of time with clinical teams, learning about what ailed them. Through job experience, I got better at managing projects and programs. I also got comfortable with having an incredibly unclear career trajectory.
There were no set terms laid out for the expertise and experiences that I needed to gain to advance my career. My bosses were doctors, nurses, and even one lawyer, so I couldn’t mimic the preceding generation. Human Resources offered helpful trainings, but little direct guidance on what the next level required. Similar to my experience as a student, I placed my trust in my hard work ethic and ingenuity. From there, I navigated my career by feel and figured the rest would take care of itself.
That plan worked, until it didn’t. Projects and programs failed ambiguously, often leaving me heartbroken, frustrated, and confused. Promotions dried up. Further, I hit an odd plateau where I found it nearly impossible to translate my work into new job opportunities. At mid-career, something had become deeply amiss.
Having traveled through my early career to this other side, I now wonder what program management professionals – particularly those working for non-profits – need to do to be amazing at their jobs. To define “amazing”, it means both the ability to navigate through the deepest challenges in program building, as well as to find ready career advancement opportunities.
How do we become the equivalent of a professional athlete in our discipline?
Winging it didn’t cut it.
Now, I have a hypothesis.
Three arenas to study…
To become a superior non-profit program management professional, you should train in these three arenas: Industry Expertise, Project and Program Management, and Non-Profit Leadership.
Industry Expertise: As programs often seek to improve operations, you need to know your industry. Its history, its drivers, its revenue, and its warts. You need knowledge and experience with the people who work on the front lines. Then you especially need to understand the customer. Why are they there, how do they navigate the system, and what are their most significant pain points? Non-profits are their own unique snowflakes in operations and culture, particularly as many straddle the line between a viable business model and universal public good (shout out to education and healthcare!). To manage change within them, you need to understand them.
Project and Program Management: You can certainly learn to run projects and programs through work experience (and many do), but I advocate for further self-study or formal education to gain an immensely tight grip on the fundamentals of project and program management. There will be substantial challenges that come up, particularly with long-term program building. And like in the sciences, only by understanding the fundamental building blocks of projects and programs - such as the program management performance domains - can you endeavor to maneuver them to squeeze through the tightest challenges and gain new ground.
Non-Profit Leadership: There’s a whole body of education on non-profit management and leadership, but it’s most often promoted to those already in advanced leadership positions. In juxtaposition, get to this information early in your career. If you led a non-profit, what would you do on a daily basis? What does it mean to manage a board, engage volunteers, fundraise? In the immediate, you will pull back the veil of what your leaders are juggling, which will dramatically improve your stakeholder engagement skills. Over the long term, you will prepare yourself for a larger leadership role and be ready when that opportunity knocks.
There are many, many other skills to develop that are needed to succeed at administrative careers in general, such as public speaking, networking, data analysis, delegation, job search, job interviewing, personal branding, etc. While you will need these too, it’s the three above that I predict will make you an excellent program management professional—prepared to gain promotions and face down the worst challenges a program can throw at you.
Yet, I have so many more questions. Most importantly, is my hypothesis correct?
What’s Next?
As a good researcher, I’m working to identify the best trainings in these three arenas and assess how well they apply to the job of a non-profit program management professional. Does everyone need a graduate degree in public health to run projects in hospitals? How well do the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) standards translate over to the janky non-profit sector? Does current non-profit leadership training frame the role of the project and program management workforce in the same way as PMI’s standards? Where are the gaps? What don’t we know yet?
Right now, these arenas are my three guiding lights to discovering how to become an amazing program management professional. Through unraveling these mysteries, I hope that we can have more fulfilling careers, build better programs, and help more people.
“Say No to This”
This article is my attempt at a shorter article. I love writing my ideas out at length, and I’m admittedly brevity-challenged. It’s a real struggle to keep my article under 800 words.
To honor a short snippet of high impact in music, this article’s song pairing is thirty seconds from “Say No to This” in Hamilton. A song whose utility is more about the plot than the musicality, still, Jasmine Cephas-Jones punches through the entire score in her one brief moment. Listen specifically from minute 2:50 - 3:20. The Spotify excerpt posted below captures that same clip too.