Middlemen at Work

Look: sometimes you put a term (“middle man”) into a search engine, and what comes back is a sweaty middle-aged dude who looks like he left his office job in a big hurry, now covered in blood and holding a severed appendage. In those situations, I take the hint and just include it in my story about something utterly unrelated.

Hola amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I’ve gotten pretty busy (a good thing), plus a few ideas I had for posts either felt less like fully developed concepts than multiple children stacked up inside a trench coat,1 or would have been in violation of my general guideline (not quite a rule) that Disillusionist should focus on workforce and related issues, rather than my all-too-emo venting about politics.2

Instead I’m going to write about intermediaries, which if done wrong could look not just like biting various hands that have fed or are feeding me,3 but actually going after them with a chainsaw. So I’m going to try to do it right… and keep it high level. Any specific examples will be fictional.

Let’s start by trying to define our terms and establish a little history. As I remember it, workforce intermediaries got their glow-up in the 2000s, when people like Rich Kazis at Jobs for the Future and Bob Giloth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation4 set out their role and potential value. Analysts argued that a wide range of organizations could function as intermediaries: nonprofits, chambers of commerce, workforce boards, and so on. The main idea that Bob and other thinkers had was for workforce intermediaries to connect supply- and demand-side stakeholders—training providers and businesses—in ways that would facilitate job placement and career advancement for workers from low-income households and communities.

I’m not sure that any of the New York-based workforce intermediaries exactly fit that description—in part because the sheer scope and complexity of the place, and the way that the interests of individual stakeholders are in tension with those of the system. Most focus more on supply-side than demand-side issues, and in some ways function more like industry associations for the provider community (albeit with employer partners as well) than intermediaries as Giloth and Kazis described them.

If this sounds judgmental (and I really hope it doesn’t), I don’t intend it that way. Every intermediary has a value proposition. For the purpose of this post, I’m much more interested in the inputs that help to determine their effectiveness, both actual and perceived.

I think there are three. And they are all really, really tough—much more so than I expect anyone who hasn’t worked for an intermediary (much less more than one) is likely to appreciate.

1. Mission Clarity. What’s so difficult about that? you might ask. Surely any new organization starts by declaring why it exists and what it aims to do. And yes, that’s generally true at the outset. The challenge begins to emerge the first time different stakeholders—staff, Board members, external partners, philanthropic funders, government, the general public—disagree on what the words of the mission mean, how to pursue it, or both.

   There’s a lot of room for disagreement under the broad heading of any goal. If your objective is, say, to ensure that every high school student in New York City has a paid work experience before they graduate, people can and will disagree about the definition of “paid,” “work,” and “experience.” Then you’ll get into argument about tactics: are we supply- or demand-side focused? Which stakeholders should be doing the paying—does it count if the dollars aren’t from businesses? Shouldn’t the public school system be handling all this anyway? If so, why aren’t we pushing them harder to take this on?

   This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but it requires more or less constant attention. If you have an active, engaged, and thoughtful Board with open lines of communication to the staff—think of it as a working connection between the brain, the heart, and the hands (and note I’m not saying who’s who)—that doesn’t make disagreements disappear, but it does render them much easier to resolve. Communication with external stakeholders is a big deal as well. The goal must be to minimize how often anyone asks the common snarky question that plagues intermediaries: “What do they do, exactly?”

2. Field Buy-in. This is related to the mission issue, in that all the intermediaries’ counterparties must understand both what the entity is there to do and how it does it. But it goes further, in the sense that partners also must believe that the intermediary is effective in pursuing its mission. There should be a shared understanding of what’s been accomplished, as well as how this materially benefits the counterparties.

   Sometimes this is straightforward, if not easy. A funder will attach deliverables to a grant (or contract). A membership driven organization will articulate benefits that they either actually deliver, or don’t. Where it gets murkier is in less quantifiable impact. Are you influencing what’s on the agenda, or isn’t? Do other actors in the space take your group into account, either in terms of jumping on board in support of your efforts, or moving in because your failure or inactivity has left a void? Ideally an intermediary wants to be held in esteem, regarded as a powerful and capable actor. Short of that, being feared also has its benefits.

3. Resources. Finally, you have to keep the lights on. The economics of intermediary work are inherently unstable, as organization leaders must constantly consider the next grant cycle, emerging “market” opportunities, larger trends and so on. But if you eat everything in front of your face—if you chase every potential check—eventually you’ll poison yourself. This ties directly back to mission clarity, and mission creep… and what you don’t understand until you’re faced with it is how seductive and easy it is to justify a little stretch.

   In the worst case, you can actually lose by winning. Going back to our imaginary universal-paid-work-experience intermediary, what if there’s a grant solicitation from a national education funder to connect classroom teachers with externships that will help them incorporate “real world competencies” into their pedagogy? It’s arguably in scope, and the grant is for six figures—it would increase their budget by, say, a third. But the funder is a stickler for performative accountability, and suddenly the small staff is spending hours every month on compliance activities, with an opportunity cost of engaging with schools and businesses to set up work-based learning experiences, or conducting research that might move policymakers, or even raising other funds that might be less encumbered. Over time, mission clarity deteriorates, and buy-in declines.

I don’t have a grand concluding point here. (Remember, I haven’t done this in awhile.) But given all the time I’ve spent with and on intermediaries, and how necessary and valuable I find them to be—particularly in a complicated and “noisy” setting like New York—it seemed worthwhile to set out some thoughts.