Nicholas Barry

When my boss and I sat down with Marco* to talk to him about his performance, he didn’t meet our eyes. His shoulders drooped, and he slumped in his chair. After eight months on the job, we told him, he still required intensive hand-holding on simple tasks, even tasks he had been shown before. Steve, one of the most outstanding interns we have ever had, spent much of his time walking Marco through tasks. We felt that it was time for Marco to move on to other opportunities. We talked it over with him, and at the end of the meeting he slunk quietly out of the room.

Even though I was frustrated at the amount of attention Marco required, it was tough for me to fire him. I could see how dispirited he was. While being fired from a paid job has a bigger impact on your finances, being fired from a volunteer position carries a special kind of humiliation: it’s embarrassing to be told that your help isn’t wanted, even for free. Knowing how it makes the intern feel is what makes it so unpleasant for me.

“You can’t fire an intern.” Daniel, a friend of mine, told me. “They’re working for free!” He wasn’t joking. This is an attitude I’ve heard more than once, but I didn’t expect to hear it from Daniel, who manages employees in his job. It usually comes from people who don’t have experience managing, and who seem to view internships as a form of charity. I believe differently. The strength of our internship program is that we treat interns like employees. We give them real responsibility, allow them to work on real projects, and expect real work from them. We never ask them to make coffee or put quarters in parking meters. That means we need to fire interns who aren’t doing well in our office. But that doesn’t make it easy.

Steve and I spent hours training Marco. As a manager, my primary duty is to empower the interns to do meaningful, useful work for our office, and it’s hard for me to reverse direction on an intern. Up to the moment I fired Marco, I was trying to help him. Once I fire him, I’m shunting him out of our office. I don’t agree with my friend Daniel, but I completely understand the emotions that drive that belief.

I reason with myself that I can only do so much for an intern – Marco needs to reach a certain threshold of performance, or our internship program isn’t sustainable. I’m willing to invest time and effort in an intern, but the investment has to pay off at some point. With Marco, it didn’t.

* All names changed.

My mom and I kayaked recently from the charming little town of Clarksburg, and she related a frustrating exchange with a small business there.

Usually we'll drop off a car at the take-out point, then launch some ways up the river. But there is only one good put-in point in the area. You have to kayak upriver first, so when you tire out you have an easy ride back to the put-in point. If you start downriver, by the time you're ready to turn around you may have a much harder trip upstream than you had anticipated.

My mom, Camilla, had noticed a private lagoon on a previous trip. "I told them they should consider letting people pay for day usage of the lagoon as a put-in point," she told me as we paddled up the river. "The lagoon is right across from the town store, and people could buy lunch there. People would be happy to pay for day use!" My mom is an entrepreneur, and is always thinking of things like this.

"Let me guess," I told her. "They brushed you off?"

Yes, they had brushed her off. They told her that there was already a put-in point down the road. "But it's not anywhere near the store," she protested to me. It didn't make any sense to either of us that the lagoon wouldn't even be interested in considering a new way to make money, and potentially gain new long-term customers.

Actually, it did make sense to us - lots of people and organizations aren't good at considering new ways of doing things. I can understand that people sometimes have good reasons for not making what may appear to be an "obvious" improvement. But most frequently when people reject suggestions it seems to be because they're not really willing to even consider changing the way they do things.

Do you have ideas for getting organizations to consider suggestions that might improve the way they do business, or accomplish their mission? I'm thinking not only of informal suggestions like the lagoon suggestion, but also of the suggestions made by consultants organizations hire. Having spoken to a few friends who consult, I know that getting organizations to follow through on recommendations can be difficult - and if they don't take the recommendations, they're likely to feel that the consultant was a waste of their money.

So how do you prod, coax, or persuade organizations to make changes when the changes are in their own interest?