Reflections: Skills Transfer

I have been thinking a bit about my piece on corporate volunteerism. In that article, I wrote about formal corporate volunteering for nonprofits, the type of work that organizations include in their annual reports to demonstrate their commitment to corporate social responsibility. For-profit and nonprofit partnerships are important. They facilitate the transfer of skills and funds that can be mutually beneficial (even if they are, at their core, transactional).

I’m not here today to rehash what I previously wrote. Instead, I want to reflect on the skills I have developed over my 15-year career, and how they have made me a stronger volunteer and a better employee.

The one constant in event planning and management is that something always goes wrong. Big or small, it is the event manager’s role to ensure the show goes on and the guests (participants, walkers, attendees, etc.) have a positive experience, despite challenges that arise. My first experiences planning and executing events were in college with the American Cancer Society (an extracurricular I continued into corporate-adulthood).

Although I have never professionally managed events, my volunteer experience gave me the confidence to take on event planning and leadership roles at work when the opportunity arose. This raised my internal profile, which I believe helped me secure promotions and more interesting roles (or at least responsibilities). In turn, managing work events provided me with the opportunity to learn new skills that fed back into my volunteering roles, like best practices for producing virtual and hybrid events.

Event management is definitely one of those career paths/skills that is a bit IYKYK. It can be an extremely complex and stressful job with approximately 100,000 moving parts. And the better you are at it, the easier everyone around you thinks your job is. Kind of funny that way, so shout out to the volunteer and professional event managers out there, I see you!

Shortly after I joined Impact Austin, I attended a new member event about joining volunteer committees. The last table I went to that evening was for the Advancement Committee. As I sat down, the Committee Leader, who had given up her evening to recruit new volunteers, said, “Welcome to the table for the committee nobody wants to join.”

In my experience, people hate asking for help. Asking for money is the ultimate form of asking for help. It takes a special breed of volunteer, of person, to make the ask. I do not always have the right network or contacts to set up the ask, but (when the opportunity presents itself), I will happily shoot my shot.

I obviously was not always this way, but exposure therapy of asking for free stuff (silent auction items, event sponsorship funding, volunteer commitments, etc.) on behalf of nonprofits contributed to my “10,000 hours” of mastery (and yeah, I know that theory has been somewhat debunked). These days, when it comes to talking with clients or requests for internal resources, I do not hesitate to make the ask. The only path to failure is not asking; worst-case scenario, they just say no.

Probably the most obvious (but often undervalued) skills I have developed through volunteering are empathy and active listening. More than any other experience in my life, volunteering and learning about the nonprofit sector has taught me that multiple truths exist and that life is lived in the grey. Through this work (far more than my corporate roles), I have developed distinct and overlapping lenses through which I view the world, challenges, and solutions. I have had to learn to stop and truly listen not only to the words people are saying, but the space between those words and what is unsaid. I have learned to ask better questions, question my own previously held beliefs and biases, and lean in to curiosity as a path to possible answers rather than a distraction from the task at hand.

My organization (and others like it) emphasizes the importance of customer centricity. Empathy and active listening are critical skills to develop a customer-centric approach to work, whatever that work might be. Deepening my empathy skills and sharpening my listening skills have made me a better colleague and more curious employee. Beyond work, empathy and listening have made me a better partner at home and (I hope) a better mother to my soon-to-be one-year-old daughter.

I could keep going, but this is starting to sound a bit like an extension of my resume, and as much as I like talking about myself, I don’t mean for this space to become a personal blog (assuming it already hasn’t).

What I hope this piece sparks in you, the reader, is a curiosity about your own skills, their origins, and how they manifest and are useful in different facets of your life. Where are they sharpened, honed, and deepened? Where do they take on new or different meaning and importance? Where do they matter most, or matter differently?

Let’s go ahead and turn this into a reflective journaling prompt…

Think about the skills that define you, the ones you rely on at work, in volunteering, or in daily life. Where did each of them begin? How have they evolved? Consider where these skills are sharpened, challenged, or reimagined. In what spaces do they matter most? And what might change if you brought them more intentionally into another part of your life?