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American Red Cross

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American Red Cross
Fundamental management problem/possible solutions
The fundamental management problem is the lack of organizational culture and communication between the different American Red Cross chapters. The lack of organizational communication has led to several chapters providing overlapping services to adjacent chapters. The Chapter Enrichment Program (CEP) was then developed and implemented to correct the many reoccurring problems within the chapters. Though the CEP brought together professional teams of the American Red Cross together to discuss problems, underlying issues would still be present and not pointed out in the chapter reports. For example program officers such as Ann Munroe would noticed issues in her chapter that would not be included into the final report. Ann Munroe decided not to comment on the obvious issues in the chapter because she thought it was inappropriate because her main focus was on health and safety services of the chapter, not the chapter as a whole. The culture of the company is to do what you are strictly hired to do, which leads to many problems not being brought to attention or not being covered thoroughly. Munroe clearly noticed dilemmas within the chapter, but failed to include them into the report, which is where said dilemmas should be includes. These dilemmas were clearly problematic if it was easily noticed by a program officer not readily involved in that section of the operation. These problems consisted of whether a chapter had too many staff members for an operation for a chapter of its size, and why were closely located chapters of similar sizes not collaborating with each other leading to redundant services being offered locally. Even though these problems were discussed in team meetings, it still did not make it into the final report. Paula Monaco, a team member, also noticed the blatant problems but did not want to bring it up to her chapter manager as she knew the talk of downsizing and having chapters merge would upset the chapter managers. Monaco did not want to raise the problem prematurely, but others also noticed the problems such as Hugh Thomas, yet in the final team conference no one brought up those issues, even when the floor was open to discussion about it. Team members responded that it really was not their place to go over the chapters issues, yet it is apparently is. This brings up the implementation of the Advisor Handbook, or cookbook. With the cookbook the team members can conduct their CEP studies effectively. While having this team members still had one essential problem, thinking creatively. Members should not be afraid to voice their opinions and communicated to those in positions of power. Chapters should facilitate open forums where members could voice their opinions freely without fear of punishment. There could be anonymous postings of problems where the members could review every so often. There should also be an open line of communication between levels of management to ensure all problems are voiced quickly and effectively before it becomes a larger one.

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