It must be me

What is it about me that I attract these working situations?

My last job, that I held for almost 7 years, came with a boss who was a disaster. He had zero interest in changing and making anything run better. The world was all about him and what was best for him. If I had a dollar for every time he tired to make me do a project that would put more money in his personal pocket...well, I'd have more than a handful of dollars now. There were issues in the program and I worked very hard to right them. We needed to brand the program and so I did. All our publications became unified, I had a logo designed, we got letterhead. We had a professional appearance. All for the good of the program. I wanted a boss who would meet with me weekly and be interested in what I had to bring and what I had to say. Instead I saw him once a semester and he was not interested in the least. Let's face it, he sucked.

Here I am, in my current consulting gig, working for a small non-profit foundation that wants to bring music in the form of a cappella to the school age populations who have had their music programs cut. I'm so all about that. Great idea, great cause. The program has been around for a few years, but it has floundered in a stop and start kind of way, working at some schools, not at others. It needs a review and a reflect phase before trying to build to understand what works and what doesn't. It needs a curriculum that teachers can use to teach urban youth about singing that will meet some of the standards set by the education world for teaching music. It needs an administrator who works more than 3 hours a week. It needs a guaranteed income source and budgeting talks that covers every possible expense that could be incurred. It needs a foundation that communicates and responds quickly.

Bottom line, it needs someone like me who can take in large amount of information, process it quickly and come up with a viable model to roll out and test. Every time I meet with the person in charge of this program's committee, it comes down to this: "we want 3 more schools and 3 more teachers by September". I don't think he sees the need to examine, reflect and learn from what has been past. He doesn't find a problem in sending college age students into an urban middle school to teach music with NO GUIDANCE. He fails to see value in looking at any one of the many music outreach programs in the Boston area to learn from their successes and failures before moving forward for this one.

They've contracted me for 60 hours of work. Do you know what I could do in 60 hours? More than hire 3 teachers and find 3 schools. But, that's what they want. I pushed back one more time this morning to see if they would go for me doing some work that might help this program in the long run, not just add more schools where teachers will fail and the program will falter after a year.

Sigh. What is it that I need to learn to keep from finding myself in these jobs?