Pros
- Many well-meaning and lovely individuals
- The organization makes a real difference in family's lives
- Good work-life balance
Cons
- Highly dysfunctional and leadership is resistant to acknowledging or addressing underlying and long-standing issues. Issues which have only been exacerbated by years and years of people simply acclimating and accepting it as the norm.
- There is a lack of trust in leadership and visa versa. Leadership keeps a tight lid on key information, and is more interested in "controlling the message" than building trust. Information sharing is regarded as a threat to keeping order. Because people lack the information needed to do their jobs well, it only feeds the gossip machine further. It's a vicious cycle.
- It’s a very top-down leadership style that merely gives lip service to collaboration and other core values.
- There is an unwritten culture of “conform and acquiesce”
- No pathways for idea sharing or cultivating ideas from the ground up. Again, very top-down.
- Executives are either markedly detached from the day-to-day or deep in the weeds on pet projects.
- Priorities are unclear and ever shifting, resulting in little set criteria for making business decisions.
- There are little to no shared processes despite lots of rhetoric. Finance and HR have some processes, as you'd expect, but good luck learning about them if you happened to have missed that one email. Nothing is documented or disseminated with the longer-term, or even new hires, in mind
- Little cross-departmental collaboration. People work in silos to shield their priorities from perceived interference and leadership is uninterested in breaking down barriers. In fact, leadership is often guilty of this themselves.
- Very few managers actually know how to manage a team and inspire people's best efforts, and there are some serious pockets of micromanagement.
- No defined pathways to promotion or even merit raises.
- There is no meaningful hierarchy. There is “leadership” and everyone else. The lack of any middle management is likely at the root of much of the org’s inability to operate and information share more effectively