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Greenhill Community Center Case Study
March 28, 2013
Introduction
According to The Oxford Handbook of Public Management (Ferlie, et. all, 2005) nongovernmental organizations can face complex management dilemmas when dealing with growth.
There are four key challenges that are faced: assessing performance, governance, sustainability and infrastructure support, and collaboration and cooperation. At Greenhill Community Center we see an organization that is looking to bring about change (and in particular growth). The board of trustees unanimously agrees on a promising young woman, Leslie, to help move them towards their goal. What they get is someone who does in fact grow the community center, but at the expense of the staff’s job satisfaction.
Overview
Leslie, a recent MBA graduate, found an executive director position at Greenhill Community
Center. She started the position with “great enthusiasm” but quickly found many of the employees to be upset by the change in management and resistant to any changes she tried to implement. The staff was upset because they no longer felt included in the operations of the organization and felt at a distance with the trustees, while Leslie felt the trustees preferred to work exclusively with her position in order to complete business more quickly.
At Leslie’s six-month review she showed the trustees a positive performance, noting that she had already raised $41,000 in grants and subsequently requested an 8% raise, which the trustees granted. About two months later staff began to question the merits of her raise and made complaints regarding the exclusion of staff from the trustee meetings (previously staff was included in those meetings, but Leslie had stopped staff from attending shortly after arriving at
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the new position). Some staff took their complaints to the board of trustees where they