Case Summary #2
Students will provide a one- page summary of each case activity within the assigned chapter for the week’s readings in the Lewis, Packard, and Lewis (2012) text. The students will include a summary of the challenges faced by the individuals in each particular case as well as an analysis of the strengths and limitations of the approach and state whether they believe the situation was resolved effectively. In addition, students will discuss if they would have proceeded differently. Each case summary is worth 5 points.
Be sure to follow APA Publication Manual (7th edition) guidelines when writing your case summary. You will need a title page and references page.
(Case Activity 3.1 on pages 75-76, and Case Activity 4.1 on pages 97-98.)
Case Activity 4.1
Pg 97 & 98
THE COMMUNITY CAREER CENTER
he Community Career Center (CCC) was initiated several years ago by a group of professionals who had become impatient with the impersonality and red tape that overwhelmed their work in public agencies. All four of the center’s founders had previously worked for departments of human resources or vocational rehabilitation, and their experiences had led them to think that there must be better ways to deal with clients’ career development needs.
A few basic concepts had been part of the center’s orientation since it had first begun operation under Department of Labor and fee-based funding. First, the founders felt that one counselor should work with the total scope of a client’s career needs, linking
him or her with training programs, with educational institutions, with other needed services, and, finally, with jobs. They also believed in using training formats to deal with the kinds of needs many clients shared. From its unassuming start, the center had provided training programs dealing with midlife career change, retirement planning, job-hunting skills, self-assessment, and a variety of other topics. These programs were offered to members of the general public, such as women reentering the job market, and to local institutions and businesses.
At first, the founders of the center provided most of the services themselves. If they felt that a particular training format had exciting possibilities or if they were invited to design something special for a local group, they would provide workshops and group sessions. In the meantime, each of the four also carried a caseload of clients to whom they were dedicated. They saw themselves as counselors, advo- cates, and placement specialists for their own clients, and their success exceeded even their own idealistic expectations.
Last year, the center’s management began to get out of hand. Its size had mushroomed, and so had its funding. Local businesses had proven so supportive, especially in contracting training programs, that the initial Department of Labor contract provided only a small percentage of the agency’s total funding. Each training program was self-supporting, and the num- ber of individual clients kept growing. To keep pace, the center had had to hire additional staff members to provide services, so there were now a number of trainers and counselors who had not been in on theoriginal planning. Little by little, the original four founders had become frustrated. Instead of spending all their time with clients and trainees, they were becoming involved in keeping books, planning repet- itive services, and supervising staff members. This supervision especially bothered them. New staff members somehow did not understand the concept of being dedicated to their clients. These counselors did their work, but they were not bubbling over with creativity. They were not seeking new challenges, coming up with new ideas, or making that extra effort that made the difference. The original founders, who did have that urge for creativity, were unable to use it. They had become managers, and they did not like it.
Their solution was to bring in a business manager, a recent MBA who knew how to organize and con- trol a growing firm. The center’s founders breathed a collective sigh of relief when management concerns were taken out of their hands. They gave their new manager a free hand and were pleased with the way he took control of the budgets and financial reports. The new organizational structure that he created also seemed to make sense. He divided the center into departments, including the training department, where programs were designed and implemented; tinto departments, including the training department, where programs were designed and implemented; the marketing department, which had responsibility for selling the training programs to industrial and other organizations; the counseling department, which provided direct services to clients; the job develop- ment department, which canvassed the community for placement possibilities for clients; and the busi- ness department, which took care of administrative concerns, including personnel.
This approach seemed to work for a while. The newer staff members, in particular, seemed pleased with the increased clarity of their job descriptions. They were no longer badgered with instructions to “be creative.” They knew what their responsibilities were and could carry them out. The center’s founders—still the board of directors of the agency—were pleased
to have management responsibilities taken out of their hands. Now they could be creative again.
Yet that sense of renewed creativity had not taken hold. Somehow the agency’s new organization did not allow for it. Now in its fifth year of existence, the Community Career Center was in jeopardy, not
because it had failed but because it had succeeded. Two of the four board members wanted to resign and spin off a new smaller, more responsive agency. Monica Shannon and Paul Ramirez did not really want to make this move, but they could see no way to carry out what they believed to be their mission through an organization as unwieldy as the CCC had become.
At the most volatile meeting ever held at the center, the board of directors cleared the air. Shannon, one of the two original members who had decided to leave, spoke first.
“Look,” she exclaimed, “our original idea was to have an agency that would be responsive to our clients’ career needs. We would stick with an individual, be an ombudsman, help meet all this one client’s needs. Now we have a department for counseling and another department for finding jobs. What happened to the idea that got us started in the first place?”
“And what about the training component?” Ramirez chimed in. “The idea was to meet commu- nity needs by designing special sessions, not to keep repeating the same program all the time to make it easier for the marketing department. Everything we do lately is to please the marketers, to make it easier for them to sell. But what have they got to sell? We’ve got the tail wagging the dog.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Mark Morgenstein responded. “We’ve got a big organization here. We can’t expect everything to be the same as it was. Growth and change was supposed to be one of our big aims, too.”
“And you were the ones who got the most excited about bringing in a manager to take the business responsibilities out of your hands,” Colleen Morgan pointed out. “You can’t have everything.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Shannon said. “We may be a large organization now, but we accomplished more in a day when the four of us began than that whole gang of bureaucrats we’ve got here now accomplishes in a month. That’s what we’ve got here now: a bureaucracy. Why did we ever bother leaving the Department of Human Resources? We’ve got a duplication right here.”
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