The Bottom Line: You need to bring your political A-game if you want to survive here.
The Organization:
It's common to hear "this place is like a startup". It is in some ways. Unfortunately, the more positive aspects of startup culture are not represented here. In a startup people tend to rally behind the mission and all pull together to accomplish goals. Success is interdependent at a startup.
Just the opposite is true at the foundation. It's very much a zero-sum game and success is not conceived of as being mutual. Turf wars abound between teams and within teams; struggling for attention/blessing from the highest levels of foundation leadership, funding for their projects, team headcount, and media coverage. This creates a lot of enmity between people and teams, the greatest casualties are the great ideas that never come to fruition and missed opportunities. Being a team player is not on anyone's annual goals.
The organization is constantly reorganizing. This creates a lot of uncertainty for projects, issues and the people who work on them. Twelve to eighteen months between major reorganizations is about the norm, shorter for more minor reorgs. Leadership can't seem stick with one operating model long enough to thoroughly vet it before moving on to the next thing. "Top tier" management consulting companies have deeply embedded themselves at the foundation and attached themselves to influential leaders. These management consultants are very effective at triggering reorganizations which result in a big payday for them.
The Leadership:
The incentive is to "manage up" rather than manage across or down. Without a good boss/mentor/champion behind you, it's very difficult if not impossible to advance your career here. Very few people are lucky enough to find someone who wants to pull them up.
There is little to no emphasis on working together better. After an internal analysis revealed a level of dissatisfaction around the culture and how people worked together, a senior leader was asked what was being done to improve the situation. This leader indicated to the staff that those are not the metrics that leadership is focused on.
The Work:
The public perception may be that the foundation is a fulfilling place to work because of all the good it does. The reality is quite different. The foundation is essentially a checkbook and as an everyday employee you are many layers away from the work being performed on the ground by sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors. Additionally, the foundation's grantees and vendors charge what is known as "Gates rates". Almost every request for funding or contract is significantly inflated. It's often disheartening to see so much of the budget be eaten up by inflated expenses.
The foundation tends to work with the same set of "partners" who have become entrenched interests at the foundation. There's very little appetite or ability to solicit fresh new ideas from hungry, smaller partners. In the case of these large entrenched, and often highly entitled, partners, the relationships have become dysfunctional - more about the money than the good work.
Strategy refreshes for issues are frequent, intense and can take upwards of 5 months to complete. This prevents the real work from being done on the ground. Supporting these strategy refreshes is another huge stream of money for "top tier" management consulting firms working at the foundation.
The Coworkers:
Cautionary tale: I got thrown under the bus on my third day of employment after being invited out for a "welcome lunch" by one of my peers. On the fourth day our group's Business Officer chewed me out because my lunch-mate from the previous day had reported me and intentionally misrepresented what I said. You never know who you can really trust.
People from the northwest tend to be pretty frosty and passive aggressive, but the folks here take it to a whole new level. Feeling completely alone in a building of 800+ people was common.
Unfortunately, the lower you are on the totem pole, the tougher it is. The lowest level employees, the Program Assistants and Program Coordinators have it the worst. The treatment they received from higher ups was often thoughtless as if they were lesser humans and sometimes bordered on abusive. Many people who are Senior Program Officers and above demand to be waited on hand and foot. Example: many of them don't know how or refuse to print their own documents.
HR is completely ineffective. They will always take the side of the higher ranking employee. Staying out of the cross hairs of others is your best and probably only defense.
