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The other day at work, I was hanging out with my friend in another department. She referred to her office mate as a “bulldog.” Basically, she was implying that this girl says whatever she thinks, and will step on lots of different people to get what she wants. And does it with a really white smile.
I guess it got me thinking. First, it got me thinking to how cute bulldog puppies are (since I am 100% a dog person), but after that it got me thinking about how they can sometimes change to be…not so cute in personality.
Sometimes at work, we have to act different. We have to be people that we’re not -or at least play a part. We deal with people that are not always the nicest – and we almost ALWAYS deal with a bulldog once in our careers. In my attempts to figure out what will make me happy in my career (and in life), I always come back to the question of being a bulldog. Do I become that person that fights only for themselves just to get ahead?
Side note: It’s actually ironic that I’m addressing this as someone in a nonprofit – but there are bulldogs everywhere, even in my sector.
I have a little bit of this type of person in me. As a New Yorker, I sometimes come out with guns blazing before I’ve heard the full side of the story. I’m passionate. I fight for people. It’s the reason I do what I do. But I’ve had to learn.
Even more than passion and a sense of fighting for what’s right, the nonprofit sector has taught me that you have to also put compassion and compromise first. You have to see the big picture, at the same time that you’re sorting through the details. Also, you MUST connect with others. You must compromise.
In one of my first classes in undergrad, Community Empowerment, we did an exercise. We were split up into groups and forced to become our own independent communities. THEN, in an exercise in creative imagination, we had to figure out how to design social services so that they wouldn’t have inefficient overlap.
This meant that we had to all work together, community to community, nonprofit to nonprofit to help find solutions. It was ridiculously difficult. Bulldogs and pitbulls overtook the group dynamics to get credit from the professor. This was my first exercise in trying NOT to overtake anything. Compromise was the point.
Later on, I wound up being an intern at the same professor’s nonprofit. It was a foster care advocacy agency, and he was the Executive Director. Thoughts of that very exercise played through my mind as I entered the “real” nonprofit world.
We can’t always be timid, and we can’t always be bulldogs. Fighting for people, and for changing the world requires teeth that can be put away quickly (like how in that show True Blood on HBO, the vampires only show teeth when they’re hungry. Stretch?)
This organization has a lot of bulldogs. It is like we are running a doggy day-care. I keep remembering my professor and his community exercise, and it reminds me who we’re fighting for.
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Grad School Zone
UVA (Darden) MBA Admissions Deadlines for 2010-2011
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The University of Virginia's Darden School of Business recently published its application deadlines for the coming admissions season. Here they are, followed by our comments in italics:
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