Worthy Mission and Great Colleagues But CEO is Preventing Org. from Flourishing
Pros
The mission of the organization is fantastic and the people who you get to work with day in and day out are some of the nicest, dedicated and most competent people you will have the pleasure of working with. There is genuine care amongst those working for the organization in what they do and why they do it and how to do it better each and every day.
Cons
The CEO, who is the founding CEO, is dragging down the organization. The org.'s modicums of success have been in spite of the CEO, not because of her. She lacks focus and does not understand how she churns and burns out employees, as there have been major departures at senior levels of the organization's leadership several times in the organization's history. There is barely any room for advancement or improvement with regard to compensation, since there has not been focus on strengthening the effectiveness of the operations of the organization and too much focus on program expansion without the internal infrastructure needed to support that expansion. Fundraising has been so focused on institutional and governmental funding (i.e. restricted funding) that individual giving (i.e. unrestricted funding) has been an afterthought, if any at all, which is the largest source of untapped potential for the org. There is also no engagement with staff on strategic direction in any meaningful way, as much of what the direction is is determined by what the CEO has been thinking most about recently. There is a significant lack of clarity as to how people's work contributes to our larger goals and objectives, mostly, people keep their heads down and just focus on meeting funded obligations every year so funders can keep giving us money. There is a lot of discussion of the staff as "family" which is used as a tactic to placate the staff and avoid honest conversations about the lack of proper compensation, workload reduction, lack of focus, and much more.
