T he
El e c t r on i c
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Case Teaching Resources
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GREENHILL COMMUNITY CENTER (B)
Hoping to confront openly any problems she had and to communicate directly with staff, Leslie
called individual meetings with the Program Directors.
I talked to everyone who had been at the personnel subcommittee meeting
(Brian, Denise, and Anne), told them how I had felt, and admitted that I should
make my feelings clearer about what I thought was and was not appropriate. I
also told them that the trustees did not want staff to come to policy-making
board meetings anymore but that they preferred written documents instead.
Staff were very upset, and while I had been the one to feel upset initially, all of a
sudden it had backfired on me.
I also spoke with Denise individually after the subcommittee meeting, and for
the first time we had a dialogue. I had conducted her performance review
around that time and we discussed what a great job she had done with the
abuse case as well as my feeling that she needed to be a bit less dominating with
staff and allow people to develop on their own. We discussed specific
examples. However, I was not able to give her the 13% raise she requested
because of budget constraints.
Thinking that perhaps these discussions had created some resolution of the crisis, Leslie was
surprised when the following events occurred.
Three days after her review, Denise mailed a letter to the personnel
subcommittee without my knowledge. I received a copy in the mail. The letter
stated that she was very upset because she thought it was wrong for the board
to exclude staff from trustee meetings.
This case has been provided for members of the Electronic Hallway system with the express permission of the author,
Melissa Stone, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
This is a peer reviewed case, published in The Electronic Hallway online journal.
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Greenhill Community Center (B)
I immediately called Denise into my office and told her that in the future she
needed to go through me before going to the board.
I then called the personnel subcommittee to warn them about the letter and to
ask them to make it clear to staff that it was not appropriate to circumvent me.
During these phone calls, I heard from a trustee that a second letter had been
sent that was critical of me.
The author, Elaine, wrote that I had told her things that I had never said.
Instead, she had heard things through the grapevine that did not have anything to
do with her.
The board said they would first talk to the two letter writers and then to the
other Program Directors. The Chair also said to me that he wanted to "nip this
in the bud" before he started getting letters from all quarters.
I wanted to be included in the meeting because I wanted to know what
complaints staff had about me and to make sure the trustees sent the message
about staff circumventing me. The trustees agreed. However, on the night of
the meeting, they said they didn't want me there. I was furious because they
were encouraging the very behavior I was trying to stop.
The trustees met with Elaine, Brian, and Anne, and it became clear that 95% of
the problems were Elaine's emotional issues. She was having a really tough time
with the changes in executive directors. The trustees told Elaine and the other
two that the board had hired me to move the organization in a new direction and
that I was there to stay. But I still didn't feel that they backed me -- after they
came out of the meeting with the Program Directors, they asked me what I was
planning to do about the situation.
After the meeting, I spoke with Elaine and told her that she could either try to
work with me or continue to go around me, but that my door would always be
open.
I continue to hope that the planning process will lead to common goals that we
will then be able to pursue and in that way move the organization forward. I
have also noticed a change with Elaine in the last few weeks. She's trying to
work with me. Perhaps the storm is over. I guess I'll see.
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