The Carter Center Reviews

Petty office politics, US government-level bureaucracy, substandard compensation and working conditions for junior staff, and fossilized senior leadership which is allergic to substantive change creates an atmosphere which is so toxic and morale-sapping that even the interns catch on to it. Programs often collaborate with and support each other only when there is a direct and immediate benefit; otherwise, programs will often only do the bare minimum for each other, if they do anything at all. Personality clashes between Directors often results in comically petty turf wars. Lack of "listening" by leadership and mid-management to junior staff's concerns and needs contributes to the most common manifestation of change being high junior staff turnover. Considerable lip service is paid to innovation, but when individual staff members actually take initiative to foster innovation and cross-programmatic cooperation, their efforts are rarely recognized or seriously valued. Very limited in-house training opportunities, and a bafflingly self-sabotaging resistance by management to PMP and other relevant trainings to help staff actually do their job better. This puts the onus on staff at all levels to find training opportunities, secure their supervisors' approval, and often fight with management to get them approved. Most staff members are friendly, but working groups are often "cliquish" and often make it hard if not impossible for new staff to be seriously involved, unlike far more inclusive and open working groups at peer organizations. Due to low turnover at the management level (due in large part to a lack of performance standards and accountability), there is a distinct "ceiling" for junior staff trying to move up to mid-management positions. There is a pervasive culture of not accepting responsibility for individual or collective mistakes, or pushing for accountability, often leading to a culture of ignoring problems and shunning corrective actions. Senior staff are far less accountable for their performance and actions than the lower-level staff they manage, and some face negligible consequences for damaging actions which would even get interns fired. Lower-level staff shoulder a disproportionate burden of the workload and responsibilities, especially in understaffed programs. Very common to see junior staff having to take on the responsibilities of vacant positions above and below them. In contrast, Directors are compensated at multiple times the rate of their junior staff, and some only do a fraction of the substantive work. An institutional preference for area expertise and ability to attract donors versus management experience-and lack of serious emphasis and training opportunities for management skills-results in some senior staff lacking basic management and leadership skills. There is significant variance in competency at the Director's level, with many who are peerless experts and effective project and team managers, while a few others shouldn't be managing a Taco Bell. The lack of a genuine performance evaluation system results in hard work and extra effort not being recognized, thus incentivizing a pervasive atmosphere of "functional mediocrity" by staff at all levels. Consultants are frequently hired to offer common-sense recommendations, only for them to be promptly ignored. The unpaid internship program, despite the institution's significant endowment, reflects a failure of the organization living up to the progressive ideals it preaches. On a functional level, this increasingly regressive practice also results in a pool of mostly privileged interns, while talented candidates are often lured away to peer organizations with paid internship programs.