PuddleMonkey

So it’s been a week or so since I last blogged. That’s because I’m so damn busy at work that I can hardly think straight anymore. I have an entirely new set of responsibilities to consider–they thrill and scare me all at the same time. Actually, I should say that while I am incredibly excited by the challenges I now face, I’m also terrified that I won’t be able to keep up with all my responsibilities. Here’s the analogy that comes to mind: I’ve been given a lot of rope to play with; let’s all pray I don’t hang myself with it.

At last weeks’ priorities meeting, the CEO made it quite clear to me that I am now in charge of developing a strategy for gaining corporate business. For the last five years, I’ve watched my two former supervisors fail at this task, both for reasons that I think are pretty obvious. The first simply didn’t try to gain any corporate business. For some reason, she felt it was the responsibility of the firm’s financial counselors to bring corporate business on board. Sure, counselors need to follow up on leads and referrals, but they can’t do all the leg work. My most recent former boss took the opposite route and felt that the firm relied to heavily on counselors to gain corporate business, but she had no strategy in place to gain new corporate clients without their help. She also made little effort to stay in front of the corporations we were trying to romance, but I don’t blame her for that–she simply had far too much to do.

Of course, just because I understand why my former managers failed doesn’t necessarily or automatically mean that I’m going to succeed. I’ve never thought of myself as a salesperson or marketer. Rather, I think of myself as a very good communicator, whether that communication be in writing, print design or web design. Fortunately, one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from all my years of studying writing is that it’s always important to strategize. I never had the ability to sit down and magically write a paper, no matter what the topic or style of writing. I first had to brainstorm, develop a purpose for writing, outline and plan. And then I had to write, edit and rewrite, edit and rewrite again. Although I consider myself to be a good writer, it has never–never–come easy to me. Even these blog entries sometimes take me days to write.

But as I think about some of the projects I now have to tackle, I am very, very grateful for my training. I watched my former manager always fly by the seat of her pants. It contributed to her constantly high level of stress, and it affected the quality of her work. I will consider myself at least partially successful if I at least do everything I can not to commit the same mistakes. I suspect, too, that I’ll probably blog about my ideas and frustrations and successes and failures often.