Table of Contents
Introduction: Management
Hillside Family of Agencies
Middle Management
Decision-Making, Planning, Communication
Managing Workers
Ethics
Leadership Style
Structural Design
SWOT Assessment
360-Degree Feedback/Evaluations
Conclusions
Works Cited
Appendix A: Questions Asked During this Interview
Chris Brown
Assistant Program Manager
Hillside Children’s Center
9-30-13
Management is the
planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human resources to achieve
goals efficiently and effectively. Efficiency is the development of goals and
testing them to see how effective they are. Effectiveness is the degree to
which goals are met with due to correct action and skills. There are 4 goals to
great management: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Planning is
selecting goals and creating a plan to achieve it. Organizing involves
establishing a task and then selecting strong management relationships that
allow people to work together to achieve objectives. Leading involves managers
to motivate, coordinate, energize, and help the workers understand the roles,
create harmony, and perform at a high level. Controlling involves accurately
measuring and monitoring how well goals have been met. Goals have to
predetermined, have a specific plan and allocate funds (Jones and George,
2011).
Ms. Brown
is the Assistant Program Manager at Hillside Children’s Center and has been
with the agency 17 years with 7 years in a management position. She became
interested in this career in high school when she took the ACE course,
Introduction to Psychology through Corning Community College. When she attended
college at Elmira College for four years she majored in Psychology and Criminal
Justice with a minor in Human Services. Brown started at the agency as a Youth
and Family Development Specialist and progressed to a position of Primary
Family Specialist and then progressed to a management position in case
management. She is currently obtaining a Master’s Degree in Human Services from
the University of Pittsburgh (Brown, 2013).
Hillside Family of Agencies:
“Hillside Family of
Agencies is one of the largest non-profit agencies in New York State located
for 175 years in Rochester, New York. Hillside is available to its clients 24
hours a day, seven days a week. Using a budget of more than $120 million
per year, Hillside provides more than 120 services to children and families at
more than 40 locations across Western and Central New York and in Prince
George's County, Maryland and is accredited by the Council on Accreditation.
Hillside retains more than 2,200 staff members who provide a variety of
services to more than 12,000 families on an annual basis. Hillside provides
individualized health, education, and human services in partnership with
children, youth, adults, and their families through an integrated system of
care. The organization offers multiple programs such as: adoption, early childhood development, customized services, education and day treatment services, developmental disabilities services for youth, home and community-based services, non-secure detention, outpatient treatment, residential, foster care and youth development service. Hillside adoption services specialize
in infant, international, and special-needs adoptions. Early childhood development offers neighborhood and home-based services that
support and enhance the development of children from birth to five years of
age. Customized services
develop services on an individual basis that meets the needs and strengths
of children, families, and communities. Education and day treatment serve youth, ages 3-21, who are experiencing
school-related and/or family challenges. Developmental disabilities provide support for community-based or
at-home care.
Community-based services send staff to visit families in the home for
support in resolving challenges.
Non-secure detention services evaluate youth waiting for due process in
family court by addressing medical and psychological issues. Outpatient
treatment provides crisis intervention, individual/family/group psychotherapy,
diagnostic evaluation, and assessment. Residential treatment offers care for children and
adolescents with severe emotional challenges 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The
foster care makes connections between trained and experienced foster parents
and children in need. The youth development provides school and
home-based that cares for at-risk youth to stay in school and achieve academic
success” (Hillside.com).
Brown has an
immediate supervisor who oversees the Hillside’s local satellite office and
those manager answers to the CEO and the Hillside Board of Directors located in
the Rochester, N.Y. office. Brown is third in the line of command under a
CEO and the top manager. Brown’s position is middle management. This agency
handles approximately 150 children by 15 workers averaging 10 children per case
load per worker per week. Some workers may carry more or less depending
upon the intensity of each case (Brown, 2013).
Middle Management:
Middle management is
responsible for multiple responsibilities and must focus on effective
management of resources and supporting other workers. Brown as a manager is
responsible for organizing and facilitating all management meetings. She
calculates time cards that include routine work time, on-call time and mileage
accumulated due to driving to meetings and home visits. She directly supervises
staff that coordinates 1:1 foster skill building. She is responsible for performance
appraisals that include verbal and written warnings, as well as interviewing
new hires and dismissing inadequate workers. She has a case load of her own to
carry that has direct supervision of the foster children, the home they are
placed within and the foster parents. If any of the staff are ill, on
vacation or absent she is responsible to provide coverage for those
families. She takes telephone referrals of potential foster children and
does intake interviews about each child and is on call over weekends on a
rotation basis (Brown, 2013).
Brown is also responsible for staff performance supervision, interviews,
contacting other agencies related to services needed, making referrals, doing
county and state audits. Brown continuously evaluates which workers are the
most appropriate match for which child and who can provide the best level of
care while meeting that child’s specific needs. Documentation of all care and
evaluation of the outcome of that care ensures that documentation is kept up to
date and thorough for each county level (Brown, 2013).
Brown aides the
organization to identify children that require advanced levels of care to
determine if outsourcing or partnership with other agencies is needed.
This generates a higher cost of care provided. She determines what referrals
require an immediate response and how satisfied Hillside will be considering
the financial constraints. The decision is always placing the child in the best
level of care required, while also considering financial reimbursement levels
(Brown, 2013).
The middle management
responsibilities for Hillside are numerous but the main focuses are: selection
of the most appropriate worker to take the case of a new client and considering
the most appropriate services to meet the client’s needs for the best price.
The manager needs to experienced and able to make quality decisions and handle
stressful situations of downsizing while increasing quality of services.
Maintenance of quality would include: role modeling, on the job training and
close supervision of workers. Motivating workers can be difficult and an
important aspect of the job. Managers have to be good organizers and time
efficient to be able to coordinate all the facets of the job. The difficulty
that Brown deals with is that the organization expects her to be a top, middle
and worker position simultaneously. She is expected to carry out top management
decisions frequently, do her own middle management position and carry a client
case load as well. The rewards to this type of management style are
higher financial margins of profit for Hillside, but blurs workers’ line of
duty (Brown, 2013).
Workers
can become confused by thinking Brown is one of them because she carries a case
load like they do, but go to her with their middle management mentoring
questions as well. Workers become frustrated and impatient because they
do not realize that there is limited time for Brown to complete all the
expectations. Experienced managers are required to deal with downsizing while
facilitating a high work performance from the workers. The manager can become
overloaded, have limited time to deal with nuisance situations, and are
required to make fast and efficient decisions. The outcomes of a decision
can be difficult to predict because of the constant change of the clients’
needs and what is right today may not be right tomorrow (Jones and George,
2011).
Decision-Making, Planning, and Communicating:
There are several important concepts that a manager needs to do well that
include: decision- making, planning, and communicating. Decision-making
includes utilizing a programmed response, and following rules and guidelines
driven by the rational model. Programmed decision making has a routine, and
contains automatic regulations that follow expected rules and guidelines. The
rational model of decision-making has six steps. The first step is recognizing
a need for a decision, generating alternatives, assessing alternatives,
choosing among alternatives, implementing the chosen decision/alternative, and
learning from feedback. An exceptional manager should be able to
determine a need for a decision. Generating alternatives are possible courses
of action for a need, assessing alternatives examining the legal, practical,
ethical, and economic feasibility of the chosen course of action. Once all the
pros and cons are determined the course of action that is the most feasible
should be chosen. Implementation is accomplished and then an evaluation of the
outcome occurs to derive why the goal was or was not met, and to determine
guidelines for future decision-making (Jones and George, 2011).
Planning at Hillside
is done in a business-level management style incorporating a time horizon.
Business-level planning has long-term goals and outlines specific methods to
compete against rivals such as: Kinship, Pathways, and New Directions. The time
horizon is carefully calculated and defines the period of time that the plan is
to be accomplished. Hillside uses both standing plans, which are used for
routine and repetitive occurrences such as children intakes, and single use
plans that are done on an individual bases and are specific to each child’s
particular needs (Brown, 2013).
Communicating
involves managing by objectives and setting goals. The organization’s goals are
determined by the CEO, top manager and middle manager. Communication of all
goals occurs through face to face interaction, email, personal written
communications, conference calling, and impersonal written announcements (Jones
and George, 2011).
Managing Workers:
Brown
applies a combination style of technical and human skills management. Technical
skills involve job specific altering, leading, and controlling of workers’
behavior. This involves communicating and motivating individuals to complete
tasks. Her job includes multiple roles with pressures producing high levels of
stress. Some of these pressures come from: customers, competitors, economics, and
suppliers. The customers are the biological parents and the children being
served, the competitors are Kinship, Pathways, and New Directions, suppliers
include Child Protective Services (CPS), persons in need of supervision (pins),
probation, and the courts and economic pressure is the funds that come from the
three counties; Allegany, Cattaraugus, and Chautauqua that this Hillside
satellite office serves (Brown, 2013).
Every manager
needs to function and manage outside forces from multiple sources that add
challenge to the work environment. These forces would include: pressure
from customer, technology, competitors, economics, suppliers, and from
political/legal (Jones and George, 2011).
Ethics:
Anyone that works for an
organization like Hillside knows the mission statement expects everyone that
works for this organization to exercise ethical aspects in all areas of their
work. There are multiple gray areas that make determining the best ethical decision
difficult. Being ethical means making reasonable decisions that are found
by general society as acceptable behavior and an unethical decision gains at
the expense of hurting others (Brown, 2013).
A manager when making
a decision making an ethical decision takes into account the impact that it
will have upon the major stakeholders of that organization such as the
managers, workers, customers, suppliers, the local community, and
society. This organization has firm standards, laws, customs, practices,
norms, and values. A human services worker employed by Hillside has a code of
ethics as defined by the human services profession which details how to behave
and are influenced by their own personal code of ethics that was derived from
family, peers, and their own personal upbringing. Society adds pressure through
standards, laws, customs, practice, norms and values (Jones and George,
2011).
Leadership
Styles:
There are
multiple leadership styles that Brown utilizes within her leadership role. She
has legitimate power, coercive power, expert power, and reverent power.
Legitimate power hires, assigns, and monitors workers and praises performance.
She mentors, supervises, and distributes evaluation appraisals to workers and
she can exercise coercive power by making treats of punishment. The upper
management encourages the use of authoritarian management style utilizing
negative reinforcement by all levels to correct and monitor workers’ on the job
behavior. This creates a negative environment and causes the workers to feel
resentful and they may even seek revenge towards their upper management. There
is no constructive recourse for the workers because they are non-unioned, there
is limited ability to obtain a pay raise, minimum promotions available, and
there are no bonuses (Jones and George, 2011).
The Hillside
Organization attempts to balance the negative appraisal style of leadership by
utilizing the 360-degree performance appraisals and feedback. While using this
style, any worker’s performance is appraised by a variety of sources. These
sources could include: supervisors, peers, self, subordinates, customers, and
clients. Everyone that affiliates with Hillside is included utilizing an
anonymous evaluation within the appraisal process. Each manger in turn
meets personally with each worker and discusses the appraisal together.
The major downfall for this type of assessment is that each affiliate must feel
trust on every level of the organization. Brown states that she uses
encouragement and positive reinforcement, but the threat of ongoing assessment
is constantly present. Great leaders possess certain skills such as: listening
skills, encourage change, trustworthy integrity, remaining calm in stressful situations,
confidence in abilities, patience, competence, and inspire others (Tracy,
2013).
Brown has expert power
because of her experience working in this job for several years. She exercises
this power by role modeling to other workers and gives them direction when
assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating a client’s care. To
improve all workers skill levels they are encouraged to attend approximately 30
hours per year of educational training (Brown, 2013).
Reverent power is showed
by the management when she communicates to the workers that she is interested,
has concern, and gets to know the employees personally. This technique
works well, but needs to be limited so that workers do not feel that one is
being favored over another. Brown demonstrates that she has low
employee-centered behavior, and high job-oriented behavior (Brown,
2013).
Structural Design:
Hillside is
made up of several structures: divisional, matrix, authority, mechanistic, and
network. The divisional structure produces goods and services for the foster
children. Hillside’s impact is widespread geographically over three counties
and market to a variety of customers. This structure works well because it
takes a team approach to focus on a single service (Gillikin, 2013). The
organization uses a matrix structure because it is flexible. There are multiple
children moving in and out of the organization’s services and speed is critical
to the organization. If the organization does not move fast enough a rival
competitor could take over the client’s case. The authority part of the
structure utilizes a strong chain of command that ensures that everyone
associated with Hillside progresses through the system by levels of management.
The mechanistic part of the structure is driven by the external environment
which is the foster children. It has a narrow span of control, it has a tall
and vertical structure with hierarchical layers, it is centralized with power
maintained at the top of the organization, high degree of formalization with
lots of standardizations, rules and procedures and decision-making is
decentralized (Williams, 2012).The network structure is if a child comes into
the agency and has a deep psychological problem and all the services are filled
then Hillside can contract with another agency to work with the client for a
specific price. Subcontracting is allowed but outsourcing must be limited due
to the drastic increase in cost (Brown, 2013).
SWOT Assessment:
Hillside has multiple
strengths. Their goals are to respect all people by accepting diverse
thoughts, ideas, and opinions to build a strong, culturally competent, and
inclusive community. Their goal is to empower everyone through
individuals, families, and team decision-making processes through strong
leadership. They strive to create partnerships with children, youth, parents,
and families as partners. The Hillside organization has multiple opportunities
to make children’s lives better and ultimately improve society. The services
that they offer are diverse, a variety of levels of intensity, easily
accessible, boundary less and outsources (Brown, 2013).
The weaknesses are the multiple levels of
management that are expected of the middle management personnel. This allocation
to employees to fill multiple roles simultaneously is not efficient and makes
the manager less effective. The manager becomes overwhelmed, impatient
with multiple questions and contacts from workers and does not have sufficient
time to organize, plan, implement or evaluate their expected duties (Brown,
2013).
There are multiple
threats to the success of the Hillside Organization which would include:
decreased regulations, rivalry between outside organizations, power of the
suppliers and customers, and substitution of a product. Hillside does
outsourcing of services so working well with these other agencies is crucial.
Not having rivalry between organizations keeps the professional relationship
healthy and makes Hillside more effective and efficient when they cooperatively
coordinate services with other agencies. The recognition that the
children within their care can exercise their autonomy and file complaints
related to the care they are receiving is possible. Generally children
being cared for by the agency do not have a lot of autonomy, but their input is
considered. The foster parents that are raising and supporting these
children have input related to the success of the services offered. The
courts and Child Protective Services (CPS) are other customers and suppliers
that require satisfaction of adequate services, in a timely manner, and at a
reasonable price. There is always the threat that if Hillside charges too
much for the services they offer or offer poor quality services, they could
lose potential clients and other agencies could take advantage of the situation
and absorb their customers and suppliers (Brown, 2013).
If the
county and/or NYS regulations were be decreased many more agencies that offer
similar services could be developed. Currently in the region that Brown
works there are other agencies that do similar services such as Pathways,
Kinship and New Directions. The
threats to the Hillside organization are: the rivalry between organizations,
and decreasing of regulations allowing more competitive agencies to
develop. The power of the suppliers such as CPS is a threat because they
could assign the children over to other agencies for care if they are dissatisfied
with Hillside. This is when a rival organization can increase their work load
and Hillside loses revenue. The final threat is substitution of current
services for lower quality. The charges for the care and quality depend on the
organization and Hillside is viewed as being more expensive but that does not
necessarily reflex that the rival organizations have better care or quality
even though it may have a better price. It is difficult to always have a better
cost with differentiation. As a manager Brown decisions must follow rules,
guidelines and the code of ethics to balance cost with quality differentiation
on a daily basis. Quality develops by continuing education, which is encouraged
and close supervision of workers (Brown, 2013).
360-Degree Feedback:
The 360-degree
feedback method is used by Hillside at every level of employment. This style of
evaluation includes: direct
feedback from an employee's subordinates, peers, and supervisor(s), as well as
a self-evaluation. Hillside also includes feedback from external sources, such
as customers and suppliers or other interested stakeholders. The results from
360-degree evaluations are used as work appraisals to give feedback to workers
to help plan and map their specific paths for improvement and further personal
development. Although pay increases can be limited within the Hillside
organization the 360-degree feedback evaluations are used in making
administrative decisions related to pay and promotions (Jones and George,
2013).
Conclusion:
Hillside is an extremely
well organized, efficient and effective agency. It has a good reputation
and providing excellent care to all of their customers and clients. The workers
have the opportunity to really make a difference in children’s lives. It
appears that the workers are satisfied with the organization, but some
frustrations are present. To have management levels work successfully
there needs to be clear lines of authority, responsibility and support.
The middle management position functioning in more than one role simultaneously
is exhausting and confusing for everyone. Human service jobs can routinely be
overwhelming and stressful considering the issues that they work with on a
daily basis. Clear cut lines of management are a must and workers are more
likely to be motivated to do their job which will result in higher performance.
The
360-degree evaluation process is a good method to use with this organization.
It empowers all people involved in the process, giving each the ability to
evaluate and voice their viewpoints to motivate constructive change. Good
interpersonal relationships, growth through self-development and being
productive can have a direct effect on the organization to make great services
even better.
Brown advises that
anyone that desires to be successful in any level of management needs to
remember that the responsibility ultimately falls on them and it is a stressful
job. They need to consider political ramifications with each action and learn
to balance budgets. Brown stated that even though her middle management
position can be challenging she feels: empowered, “in the know”, more actively
involved in facilitating change, contributes to policy making and has more
control over quality improvements (Brown, 2013).
Works Cited
Brown, C. (2013, October 15). Assistant Program
Manager, Hillside Children’s Center. Personal Interview.
Jones, Gareth R., and George, Jennifer M. Essentials
of Contemporary Management. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2011. Print.
Williams, Diana D. "Leadership -
Mechanistic and Organic Organizational Structures."Ezinearticles.
N.p., 23 July 2012. Web. 9 Dec. 2013. http://ezinearticles.com/?Leadership
Mechanistic-and-Organic-Organizational-Structures&id=7422850.
Appendix
A: Questions Asked During the Interview:
1. Why did they choose this career?
2. How long have they been in this career?
3. What was their progression?
4. What is their education?
5. What activities/functions do they perform?
6. What is their level of management?
7. What is their approach to management (roles,
functions, skills)?
8. What do they do to help the organization be
efficient and effective?
9. What opportunities and/or threats are evident in
their industry as a result of pressures and changes in customers, competitors,
and suppliers?
10. Does their organization have a code of ethics?
11. How do they make decisions?
12. What is the type of organizational structure
that his/her organization uses?
13. What are the main performance measures
that he/she uses to evaluate how well the organization is doing?
14. What techniques do they use to motivate
employees?
15. What is their leadership style? How did they
develop it?
16. How do they evaluate employees?
17. What is their preferred method of communication,
face-to-face, written, e-mail, etc.?
18. How do they measure quality, efficiency, and
responsiveness to customer needs?
19. What do they think it takes to succeed in
management?
20. What do they like/dislike about
management?
