This month is my last month at B Lab. After three and a half years, I’ve decided to step down from my role as Operations & Community Experience Manager. Since my job at B Lab was my first real, grown-up job, I was thrown onto steep terrain more than once. So here is my attempt to summarize my most important experiences.
How it all began
”Shouldn’t I start at a large, well-known organization to secure my references and future employability?” ”Aren’t all non-profit organizations very chaotic and need to fundraise all the time?” These were the questions that went through my mind as a young university graduate in September 2018 when I received an offer to start as a trainee at the then unknown B Lab in Amsterdam. Twelve months before the offer, I first became aware of the B Corp movement during a lecture in my Master’s program and decided to look into the topic in depth. I decided to work for this non-profit organization that I believed in and where I knew my ideology would be appreciated and where I had to build things from the ground up myself.
The trip to Berlin
In the first month of my internship, I wrote down my goals, one of which was: “Build skills that will improve my employability for a future job in Berlin”. In January 2020, without any previous experience, I was asked to co-found our German B Lab organization in Berlin. As such, I helped write our bylaws, set up and recruit our supervisory board, which was elected by the German B Corporations themselves. I helped hire three team members, one of whom is our new Managing Director, Iris Lapinski. I helped train forty consultants, our B Leaders, who are now guiding many companies on their way to B Corp certification. I have given interviews for Focus Magazine, spoken to ARD, Der Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung. And I was able to work with our dear philanthropic partners who made our work in Germany possible in the first place. Nevertheless, the time when I moved abroad to Berlin and set up a new organization in a pandemic also involved many difficult moments: We had to tell companies that they would have to wait months to move forward due to high demand for B Corp certification; we had to manage a multi-month recruitment process before finding a new executive director; I was working in my third language (German) and trying to develop a vocabulary for our complex issues, which involved many moments of frustration and self-doubt; and I kept having challenging conversations to increase understanding of our movement and identify opportunities for improvement for our own organization.
Thanks to the colleagues
However, I will miss these challenges very much, even if I often simply managed them from my bedroom. I will miss the naturalness with which my colleagues believe in new ideas for the role of business in society. I will miss all the contacts that come from working at B Lab, all the people our work resonates with and who want to volunteer. I owe everything I have learned to my colleagues, so I would like to highlight a few of them in particular: Mathieu, my team member from the German team, who taught me to be pilot-driven and start small. Katja, my former co-founder, who taught me how to create structured work plans and that you can never communicate too much. Katie, our European Managing Director, who taught me the importance of nurturing relationships, always keeping the big picture in mind and always learning more about our evolving field of work. Claudia, our beloved intern, who taught me to be proactive and to go to work motivated and diligent every day. Karry and Gina, who feel like my big sisters in our movement and have taught me how much freelancers can strengthen a team. Iris, our new managing director, who taught me how to listen well, ask the right questions and calmly weigh up different options before making a decision. Marcel, Alexander, Thorsten, Stefan and Karl: impressive and extremely generous experts in their field who were always willing to step in and help an unsuspecting newbie 😉 And then of course everyone who works for B Corporations, all our B Leaders and the team in the European countries who make this work so enjoyable, fulfilling and rewarding. Thanks to you, I have come a long way, with fantastic support and so many learnings along the way. And in Dutch they say: “You have to stop when you reach the top”. Well, I chose well then, because I love the view from up here. P.S. Curious about my next challenge? Follow me on LinkedIn.
