Manager Interview

Management Interview

Professor Dianne Tuzzolino

Lynnette Lockwood

December 15, 2013

 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, developmental disabilities, services for youth, home and community based services, detention services, outpatient treatment, residential, foster care, and youth development. 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.

Educational 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. 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, boundaryless 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.

Gillikin, Jason. "Advantages & Disadvantages of Divisional Organizational Structure." Small Business. N.p., 4 Aug. 2012. Web. 9 Dec. 2013. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-divisional-organizational-structure-611.html.

Jones, Gareth R., and George, Jennifer M. Essentials of Contemporary Management. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2011. Print.

Tracy, Brian. "Management Skills- What Makes a Good Leader, Leadership Qualities." Brian Tracy. N.p., 5 Apr. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. http://www.briantracy.com/business-success/management-skills-what-makes-a-good-leader/.

 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.

www.hillside.com