5. Rally for a Cause

—Jennifer Allyn (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP)

When Jennifer Allyn talks about her career, she gets right to the big questions—such as how to live a good life, how to solve social problems, and how to help make this a better world. Here's the thing about people like Jennifer: They have a huge amount of drive and can achieve amazing things. The drawback: Sometimes people with causes end up working in low-paying jobs at struggling nonprofit agencies. Jennifer's story shows how rallying for a cause can land you in a great job—especially if you rally for your own cause as well as the cause of the greater good. And even if your job isn't directly related to a social cause, if you focus on the way your job helps people, you might find the kind of inspiration and energy that people such as Jennifer bring to their careers.

Jennifer was hooked on making a difference in her teens and college years. Sometimes she teased her father, a successful CEO, for devoting his life to companies that did mundane things such as make Melba toast. By the time she'd graduated from college, though, Jennifer had changed her tune: "I really saw why what he did was meaningful and how he used his talents." She realized that corporations like the one her father worked for produce important goods and services and provide jobs for people to support their families, send their children to college, and build a society. Business, she saw, wasn't inherently bad. Her father's success impressed her in other ways: "He influenced me to find what I was good at, something that could contribute to the greater good."

After several years of finding ways to make a mark on the world, Jennifer is a managing director responsible for gender retention and advancement at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Her work studying social problems and coming up with ways to fix them has already helped change things for the better. Plus, she has a prestigious job and makes a great living. Best of all, Jennifer has a good feeling inside when her young daughter tells people that her mother's job is to help working mothers—and she's providing a secure financial future for herself and her family.

Even if you don't make a career out of bettering the world, you can think of your job—and the good it helps to achieve—as a sort of cause that you're working for. So whether or not you earn money by working for a cause, Jennifer's story shows us all how important it is to rally for a cause.

Starting from Scratch

Fresh out of college with a degree in philosophy, Jennifer needed a job for a year before graduate school. Because she'd been a peer counselor in the dorms at Brown University, dealing with gender issues such as safe sex education and date rape prevention, she figured it might be interesting to do some work related to those causes. She talked to the Dean of Student Affairs and proposed creating a video about safe sex for Brown's undergraduate students.

Jennifer's documentary-style 20-minute video, Pro's and Condoms, turned out to be a success. "It was very real and a little funny," Jennifer says. And to this day she still receives royalties from the film distribution company that handles it. But for all the success, it ruled out film as a career for her.

"The actual making of the film wasn't that much fun," Jennifer recalls. Some of the people she worked with were very high maintenance, editing was boring, and the whole process didn't appeal to her. Still, it helped her see that she enjoyed working on projects that helped people live better, safer lives. She just didn't want to be making films about it.

Next, Jennifer went to graduate school. Still looking to work for a cause, she decided on a masters degree in public policy, which is essentially an "MBA for the public sector." She attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and spent her days studying subjects such as statistics and economics, but instead of talking about the bottom line and increasing profits, the class discussions were about increasing the public good. Jennifer reveled in the discussions and couldn't wait to practice them in the real world. She had just gotten married and planned to move to Washington, D.C. While her husband finished graduate school, Jennifer planned to find a job where she could use what she'd learned about public policy. Little did she know there were things beyond her control that would affect the job market.

Underestimating Obstacles

Jennifer's first obstacle is something we've all heard of: the so-called Republican Revolution in 1994, when the Democratic Party lost its majority in the House and Senate. "People were looking to hire Republicans or people with Republican contacts," recalls Jennifer. "Plus, there were many out-of-work Democrats with more experience than I had." Here she was with a beautiful new degree from Harvard…and she couldn't get a job. She did get interviews and meetings with people, and she got close to getting jobs. But she couldn't make the final cut.

Finally, Jennifer settled for a fundraising job at a gun-control organization earning $30,000, which she considered "almost nothing" given the cost of living in Washington, D.C. As a consolation, she bargained for 6 weeks vacation time—and she got it. With that vacation time, she and her husband planned on going to work as camp counselors over the summer. That way, at least, she could have a little fun and earn some money during the summer.

A lot of people would have felt beaten down at this point, working in a dingy little office in an underpaid job they didn't want. But not Jennifer. She rallied her career and her cause. "I never intended to stay very long," she says. "Gun control really wasn't my issue, but I knew I would learn a lot."

Every job has something it can teach us, no matter how bad it seems. Sometimes, one of the things you learn is what not to do. In Jennifer's case, she saw how her gun-control organization was, as she puts it, "totally irrelevant to the national discussion." The group was too far left to have an impact on the national discussion and needed to create middle ground. "I didn't like being at the margins," Jennifer says.

And Jennifer learned another important lesson about rallying for a cause: how to debate and inspire others to follow her. "We were always getting requests to go on right-wing cable television shows for debates," she recalls. "I was lucky to get so much TV experience at 27 years old debating the opposing side." People would call in and say things like, "Little lady, you don't know anything about the second amendment," but Jennifer rallied and stuck with it. "It was a great way to learn how to think on your feet and argue your point in a hostile atmosphere," she says. That skill would get her career moving.

Building Momentum—Optimistically

After one year, Jennifer's upbeat attitude about her less-than-ideal job paid off. The enthusiasm she brought to her gun-control debates on cable TV led her to a new job as a press secretary at SOS (Save Our Strength), an anti-hunger organization. It was a well-respected group that was making a lot of waves in the nonprofit world.

SOS, founded by Bill Shore, was based on the philosophy that for-profit business can be brought into helping the social good. It sounded a lot like what Jennifer had learned from her father—that business wasn't inherently bad and could accomplish good things for society. SOS was a very influential organization that was changing the way nonprofits worked. For example, SOS helped raise money to feed the poor with an event called "Taste of the Nation," where it persuaded restaurants to donate food and skilled chefs to cater events that people would pay $200 a ticket to attend. Plus, big corporations, such as American Express, would agree to sponsor the event and defray costs. "It was a brilliant way to get chefs involved in the hunger issue," Jennifer says. "It was the first time I saw that if you could get a corporation behind something, you could really push your agenda and help people."

After less than a year at SOS, Jennifer's time in D.C. ended. Her husband finished his Ph.D., and the couple moved to New Jersey for his new job and to be closer to her parents. With some great work experience under her belt, Jennifer felt ready to go after the issue she was truly interested in: the advancement of women.

Jennifer landed a job as senior associate for research and consulting at Catalyst, a nonprofit based in New York City that works to increase opportunities for women in business. Its clients are companies that want to retain more women employees and have more women in higher-level leadership. Apparently a big problem in corporate America is that valuable women employees leave right when they're entering their most productive years. A big part of Jennifer's job was researching the question, "Why aren't there more women in corporate leadership?" She interviewed women, surveyed company executives, ran focus groups, and made presentations. "I loved it," Jennifer says. "It used my talents."

One of the best parts was that Jennifer would meet regularly with executives—women and men—and listen to them explain how they achieved success in their fields. The women, especially, gave her insight into what holds women back from reaching the highest levels of leadership and earnings. Jennifer was doing her job, but she was also learning valuable techniques for her own career. "If you listen to all that insight, year after year, you can't help but learn how to manage your own career."

The job at Catalyst also offered Jennifer a flexible schedule, which was important because she and her husband wanted to have children. When her daughter was born, Jennifer returned to work on a 4-day schedule until her daughter was in kindergarten. Jennifer was a walking, talking example of the kinds of things that many women want in order to stay with their employer during their child-bearing years. She was working for a cause that benefited herself as well.

Then, in 2000, PricewaterhouseCoopers became Jennifer's client. The professional services firm had major challenges retaining women, and Jennifer could help. She conducted an assessment of the firm and its policies—trying to get to the root of why women weren't staying at the firm long enough to be promoted to the highest levels.

What she found was that it took a breakneck career pace in order to tough out the first 12 years at PwC, and these were the very years when many young women weren't able to sprint. That's because women who are starting their families often need to take a little time off from their careers. Instead of throwing up her hands at the situation, Jennifer was optimistic that PwC could retain and advance women if they made a few changes. The firm must have been impressed with her ideas because they offered her a job.

Taking the Next Leap

Leaving Catalyst was a hard decision. "It was a huge leap of faith," Jennifer recalls. She would leave a small office where she worked with 64 people who all knew her and move to a place with 30,000 people. What's more, she would be managing a team of 8 people who were in offices all across the country. Her staff would be "virtual reports" who she would keep in touch with through telephone conversations and occasional meetings. That meant longer hours and more travel, and Jennifer was worried about how to balance it all.

Still, Jennifer jumped at the new job. She started out with a chief-of-staff role in the Office of Diversity and threw herself into the task of keeping staff—especially women and minorities—from leaving the firm just when their careers were heating up. The rigid up-or-out model of public accounting didn't work anymore for women or for men.

In order to make changes, Jennifer saw that she would have to sell her solutions to the firm's leadership council, the group of partners that runs the company. She would walk into the room and be faced with two dozen people instead of just one CEO. At times like that, Jennifer says she draws on all the experience she had in the nonprofit world rallying people to her cause.

And she also calls on the research from Catalyst, which found that in order to get ahead in companies, women need to have more "broad" relationships. "Women seem more social, but they treasure intimacy," Jennifer says. "They will have a best friend at work, but business relationships need to be more shallow, broad, and reciprocal. You don't have to like someone to form an alliance at work." So Jennifer works at creating a lot of good will among her colleagues because at some point she knows she'll need it back.

For instance, Jennifer and her team developed a program for women at PwC called Full Circle. Participants are able to leave the firm for up to 5 years in order to parent full-time. They are assigned a coach so they can keep in touch and are brought back for annual training to keep up their technical skills. But first she had to find a way to fund the program. At the beginning, none of the groups she approached wanted to fund it. But Jennifer didn't get mad; she just got creative. To make the program happen, she needed a brochure, website, and money to keep up the training of the women in the program. So she compromised: her team, the Office of Diversity, would pay for the costs of a website and brochure, while the business where the woman worked would pay for ongoing training. After its first year, the program is a success and getting a lot of attention in the media. In fact, PwC has been recognized as a leader in the field of diversity and just won the 2007 Catalyst Award for all its efforts to advance women.

When we feel like the work we do helps make the world a better place, we can dig down deep and find the inspiration we need to move ahead—even during the hard times. As Jennifer puts it: "If you have a great idea and you can mobilize people, you can make great strides."