Dear Holy Father,
I’m writing to seek your advice as you are in town. I need help with my kids. The Church is passionate about youth – some of your officers a bit too much – and has a millenary track-record in education. I hope you can point me in the right direction.
I’m not a father in the biological sense but feel as such for my staff. They are young, thriving, but inexperienced. I took them from the provinces where they grew up semi-naked playing in rags. They joined the team with enthusiasm and naiveté.
I feel I’m responsible for both their professional and personal development. Now the kids live in London, there are the crossroads of every vice and temptation. They are easy preys.
We are also going through hard times. The recession is looming ahead. I will ask my kids to work harder and longer just to save their jobs and our network. The general atmosphere will be depressing without even mentioning the weather.
Every day I try to be a role-model for their career, balancing stick and carrot. I have to teach them to be responsible and at the same time entrepreneurial. You have to learn the rules of the game and how to get around them. Be nice to people but hit first and hard if necessary. It’s a struggle when you have tons of work and scarce resources to reward their efforts.
“Why don’t you pay me more?”, “Why don’t you give me more holidays?”, “I want a higher per diem”, “I want to do that expensive training course”: these are daily requests that I can hardly meet.
Sometimes professional needs clash with personal development. I have to push them beyond what is normally expected by a manager. I can’t let them become complacent. They must be better than when they joined. They must aspire to become better than me. That’s the lesson of Ancient Greece.
Moreover, the kids display pretty different challenges, being quite diverse in skills and priorities. Ben can’t keep quiet for more than a week, has an inquisitive intelligence, is ambitious but doesn’t have a clue where he wants to end up, what to eat and whom to mate with.
Jenna is as solid as a rock and manages interlinked and multi-layered long-term processes with no concern but panics when she is under stress – especially if I want to talk about her future – and refuses to take style lessons from Vogue. She’s an untamed feminist!
In the last year Luisa joined from l’Aquila, saved from the earthquake. She’s a diligent Bocconiana who moved to London to faithfully follow her partner despite hating the place. Sexy like Sabrina Salerno but diplomatic as a seasoned Andreotti, she would be a perfect European policy expert but hasn’t found her entrepreneurial soul yet. She’s still too fond of boundaries.
I want to mention the large flocks of interns I saw seen come through the office one after the other one for the last five years. The latest one in the series is Elizabeth; quiet and effective. She doesn’t want to discuss her sexual life with me but I can count on her. She has managed the European Social Innovation Competition almost on her own.
I should add our external advisors and consultants. We have several but the closest to my heart are Hanneke and Vlada. The first one, an iron Dutch lady, has been with us for almost two years doing quite a lot of volunteering work i.e. not paid. You might call her an old school socialist but why not? She’s principled as today you don’t find anybody else and won’t let you down. When we organised the staff dinner she forced me and the other more senior guys – i.e. those in the higher wage rank – to pay a larger contribution for the bill to subsidise the more junior staff. Annoying but fair!
Vlada has joined recently from Transnistria, volunteering for us despite her professional committments to a multilater organisation. She is a hero in Moldova and really a Passionaria. I know I will go into trouble with her sooner or later. Isn’t that what you do when you drive a Ferrari?
Dear Holy Father, my professional family is even larger and more complex. There is Stephen our Secretary General. I wouldn’t define him a hard worker but more like an angel. He protects all of us from the perils. On the contrary our President, Thierry, is über-active and enthusiastic. Sometimes we must remind him in his role he has to rather oversee with distance and firmness.
I could list all the other board members, full members and partners who keep me busy each one in a different way, and support me when it’s needed. Combined they are the greatest asset of the network. I know You are busy and I don’t want to bother You further. Actually just writing to You helps me reflect. I feel relieved. Perhaps I won’t be able to find a solution but will do my best to take care of my kids as I’ve always done. They are the most important part of my job.
