All Hail Hall

By:Spencer Hall

About the Author

During the2014 EDSBS Charity Bowl, fans donated $33,375.85 in just six days!

In 2013, EDSBS fans donated$31,432.07 in the same timespan.

This month, New American Pathways salutes long-time friend Spencer Hall, Editorial Director of Sport Blog Nation (SBNation.com) and renowned editor of college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday (EDSBS.com).

What started as a spark of an idea to raise a few bucks for charity a few years ago has turned into a major annual donation drive and serious rivalry among college football fans all over the nation. Who will win the coveted “Most Generous College Football Team” title from Spencer this year? Stay tuned and find out!

Spencer shared some thoughts with us on how his work in refugee serving non-profits applies to his leadership role in an online media company. Here goes:

I used to work at a non-profit, and now work in online media. Both involved management. Both, it turns out, share a lot in common. That’s what I’m going to talk about here briefly.

1.  You can’t plan for everything, but have to plan for something. More often than not, most jobs come down to teaching something very simple in a very quick span of time. In non-profits, this usually happens as a result of budgeting, and in online media, it usually happens as a result of…well, budgeting. The point is: in neither situation do you have a lot of time to blow money and time and effort on specializing your employees. They need systems, and they need them to be simple, replicable systems you can teach in a very small span of time.*

*Not coincidentally, this is exactly what good coaches do, particularly in college where you have limited practice time. Make them simple so they will be moving and doing their jobs, and not hesitating and overthinking what they do.

2.  Say “yes” a lot more than you say “no”. This is especially the case when you work in a creative field, but on the whole when an employee has an idea, it’s because they a.) care and b.) have been closer to the subject than you, and know what they’re talking about. Make your people the experts in their field. Your job is to take their approach and make it an asset to the system. My employees in the non-profit world worked beautifully if they thought something was their idea; likewise, there’s no editor in the world that wants to get in the way of someone with a story idea they’ll lose sleep and weekends over. Just help them craft it, and then do what so many managers fail to do: get the [heck] out of the way of good things.

3.  Enthusiasm, intelligence, and temperament are all superior to pedigree. In an environment like the non-profit world or something relatively new like online media, there’s really not going to be much in the way of pedigree or obvious qualification. That’s fine, and even an advantage most of the time: you can train them as you like, make them better than when they came into the organization, and get completely new perspectives on things. The best people we had at my non-profit went to no brand-name schools, and majored in all kinds of things not related to the field. Our most successful writers on our site don’t have journalism degrees, and never intended to be a part of anything close to journalism. (My favorite writer on our site didn’t even go to college, much less journalism school.)

4.  Do what you say you are going to do for someone. You’re a bank, basically. If someone writes a check against your credit, you better keep that rating clean by backing what they do with your actions. This worked in both.

5.  I’ve never gone wrong by saying things quickly and in a blunt (but not rude) fashion. Feel free to ignore that, but it’s what works for me.

Follow the EDSBS Charity Bowl all week on our twitterand onEDSBS.com.

You can alsolearn moreabout the Charity Bowl and how it works.