XXXXX XXXXXX
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 …show more content…

2

What would have helped in this situation was for Leslie to have a meeting with her new staff as a group, explain her vision to them, and clearly define what her expectations were for both the organization and the program directors. And the biggest thing that could have helped her would have been to ask for input from the program directors, how things currently run, what works, what doesn’t, what are their visions for their program, etc. Would that mean she would have to take their ideas and make them happen? Of course not. But I think when you put yourself into a new situation, especially in an organization like a community center where their main goal is to make people feel like part of a community, I believe you must have that same objective, at least to some degree, with the employees working there. It must be noted that she did open the lines of communication by establishing weekly meetings with each one of her program directors, but the approach she took, by meeting with each of them individually, appears to have made each of the directors feel left out from the organization as a whole and feel like they were just a source of income instead of part of something greater.
While community centers must be able to make enough money to pay their bills and run their programs, we have to realize that it is oftentimes the employees who make the community centers what they are. When employees are not happy if oftentimes shows up in their work