Fireworks and Follow Through: Week 8
How strong is your follow through? My work this week gave me a strong reminder that ensuring a project is successful includes having a good follow through on tasks.
Sometimes, follow through means making corrections given to you. I redrafted the Code of Ethics, now a Code of Ethics and Conduct, after receiving edits from an amazing corporate attorney working pro bono for IBJ helping us with compliance. The edits were to combine the mission and goals of IBJ, the conduct component that I had considered too vague to count as the Code on its own, alongside the more procedural components. The finished product is still an integrated Code of procedures that reference to outside policies, and, most importantly, now gives reporting guidelines, but also includes structural language.
Other times, follow through can mean completing follow up tasks you already anticipated. This week I also coordinated with IBJ’s Deputy Director, Shawnmarie, to ensure her first week of meetings scheduled abroad in Boston went smoothly. Instead of “location, location, location,” my motto was “confirmation, confirmation, confirmation.” Meanwhile, I also scheduled her following week meetings in DC, and coordinated travel plans.
Follow through can also mean being reliable for those you work alongside. When the staff member set to host two high school interns for this week at IBJ was unable to come into the office, myself and my co-worker who helped create the youth program jumped in. We led the interns through our updated version of the youth workshop, and lined up other projects for them to complete throughout the week while supervising them. I also created a pre-survey and post-survey for the high school interns to begin taking to facilitate grant applications in the future.
While the initial upheaval occurred in discovering we went from planning to host two high school students through a one-time two-hour workshop to hosting them for six hours each day, I discovered Shawnmarie ran into problems during travel. A main funder canceled their meeting last minute, so I called Shawnmarie to approve of schedule changes and found out that she had been in a car accident only minutes prior. Fortunately, she was safe, but needed her schedule completely overhauled between the cancellation and travel delay. I immediately contacted the individuals she was set to meet in an hour, and then began rescheduling, while on and off the phone with Shawnmarie finding the nearest Hertz car rental. At the end of my work day, I had rescheduled all meetings and accommodated the short time frame the main funder had available to meet. Shawnmarie didn’t have to cancel any of her meetings, and the high school interns rated IBJ highly on their exit survey.
More surprises were in store for me this week, though! I decided on Wednesday that I still needed to see more of Switzerland, and bought my train ticket to Zurich. When I arrived, I immediately headed to Lake Zurich. To my shock, and over the weekend my delight, I had randomly headed to Zurich during their triennial Zurich Fest, a three-day long event filled festival that overtakes the city with about two million visitors. I spent the weekend seeing famous cathedrals juxtaposed by pop-up caipirinha bars and food stands. The best part of my weekend was that each night of the festival ended in a thirty-minute firework display, so the night after I missed July Fourth celebrations, I still got to “oh” and “awe” with a crowd gawking over a bursting sky.
