Key Ideas in this Post:
- Impact investing is the latest hot topic in the do-good community around the world. At its core, the idea of actually “investing” in social-purpose organizations and achieve both “social and environmental” and “financial” returns for money, as an alternative and complement to philanthropy, gets people excited. Whether you think it’s just repackaging of old ideas or a legitimate paradigm shift, this “field” has undeniably gotten significant attention in the last five years.
- In Part 1 and Part 2 of this 5-part series, I proposed a 6-step mental checklist that may help you navigate your career in this field, and I started with elaborating on the first two items dealing with understanding why people seem to care about impact investing, identifying current opportunities, becoming more aware of your actual role on the job, and remain cautious because career development is probably currently not a priority for the majority of impact investing firms but those with most money, scale, and years of experience (which is very few).
- In this Part 3, I will discuss the third component in the checklist, which involve understanding who you are dealing with as the so-called “impact investor”. I will claim that the personalities of people running impact investment firms nowadays spans a certain spectrum and may or may not be a good fit with you depending on your own preferences and needs. Understanding this will help you probe in your interview and during your research phase to better gauge if a particular firm is the right place for you. Trust me, this is definitely not much talked about when all the media nowadays report and debate on impact investing on its theoretical and abstract features, while paying on average rather little attention to its human level. Let me ask: while impact investing managers can talk passionately about the people their investments help all day and all night, how many can articulate where they see their employees move within their organization in five years? Lastly, do not be surprised if you see a strong theme around money and attitudes towards it. I write about them at length in this post because it is somewhat of an impact investing “dirty little secret” and not discussed because we are supposed to talk about doing good here, right? Well, what I would simply like to do here is to draw the connection between personalities and the way they lead people to interview and negotiate with you sometimes in rather strange, seemingly counter intuitive ways.
