A Consultant's Checklist for Spotting Toxic Organizations

Maybe it was what I learned from co-teaching a doctoral course on organizational performance this summer. Or, it could be the alignment of certain celestial bodies but I've been thinking about toxic organizations and the damage they cause. The survival skill set for consultants should include the ability to quickly spot toxic organizations.


Most organizations don't know what they don't know, but let's not confuse that with toxicity. The litmus test is whether the organization understands how important it is to learn. A toxic organization is more likely to cling to old, familiar behaviors and to actively resist efforts to turn foundational ignorance around. A learning organization--on the other hand--understands the value of being wrong and celebrates the journey necessary to getting better.  Toxic organizations already believe they are better and consequently are more likely to engage in consultant abuse.

Several weeks ago, I fired a toxic organization after a steadily devolving relationship spanning five years. This organization (whose name, for no other reason than professional courtesy, won't be divulged here) had been given a sweetheart role far beyond its own experience to link the expertise of consultants to a range of education providers.  All was reasonable in the first years of this work as the organization and its first wave of consultants coalesced around the mantra of "building a bicycle while riding it."  Sadly, though, as the work became more complex and trust between the organization and its partner organizations deteriorated, the organization began sliding down the slippery slope of trying to control its own consultants.


Most organizational consultants naively believe in the existence of surefire cures for bad organizations. I'm no exception. As the story goes, bring them to understand their own shortcomings and possibilities to do better--painful as that process may be--and they'll get better by leaps and bounds, right?  Well, no. Organizations don't get better unless they sincerely want to.  In that light, there are abundant clues that should guide a consultant's decision about if and where to spend professional energy.   Here's Rick Voorhees' Checklist for Spotting Toxic Organizations:


1.  Foremost, does the organization understand the expertise that consultants bring and that--because the organization lacks the expertise that it is hiring--the consultants it hires are a critical internal customer?  Are consultants seen as partners or as units of expenditure to be controlled?


2.  What is the organization's track record in dealing with consultants and other partners? Have other consultants told the organization to take a hike?  Why?  Finding out why others won't work with the organization can save valuable time.


3. What is the trust quotient within the organization? How fearing of its own role is it?  The above organization became increasingly bureaucratic and controlling, requiring consultants to sign agreements that would have limited their consulting with other partners and to seek approval for all travel two months ahead of time. Organizations that truly understand that a networked world depends on expertise also understand that they can't regulate that expertise.


4.  Does the organization treat its consultants like employees?  There's a distinct role for consultants (and the expertise they bring) versus what the organization can require of its own employees. I was told by a junior staff member that the organization could require any behavior from its consultants since they were, in fact, employees. This has obvious and dangerous legal implications including workmen's compensation, health insurance, Of course, this very junior person now denies ever saying this.


5.  Does the organization have have a systematic way of evaluating its own performance?  It seems disingenuous that a national organization the promotes data-driven decision making would avoid having concrete ways of gathering data about its own performance in the field. Another sign of dry rot.


6.  How does the organization communicate internally? Externally? This organization attempted to double their dues for constituent institutions one short week after a national meeting in which the leadership of these institutions were present.  Not a good communication strategy.


7. Does the organization hire its own staff and family members as consultants?  In other words, does the organization promote nepotism?


8. Are ego needs out of balance? Does the management's ego needs outweigh the importance of attending to the work?  In the present example, the organization felt very threatened when given opposite opinions to what their controlling nature told them should be happening.


9. Finally, does the organization actually consult its own consultants?  Or, are they ignored except when very convenient.  Consultants are a critical internal resource and organizations who are too hidebound to learn from them probably ought not to have them.


None of these flaws alone is fatal if the organization can identify them and turn them around. Collectively, however, they are a shipwreck.  Toxic organizations are usually unable to identify any flaws without expert intervention.  And, when #9 is in play, the chances of a toxic organization getting better are zilch. Better to walk away than to be like Sisyphus, constantly pushing a ball up a hill. Sometimes, it's just the wrong hill.

Fifteen Weeks and No Solution

Semester-long classrooms everywhere are missing their students. Is the academic term too long? Are institutions missing big opportunities by being slaves to the traditional calendar? Are we numb to other possibilities to promote learning? To each question my response is “yes!” As my esteemed colleague Kay McClenney says, “…in higher education, for every problem we have a 15-week solution.”


I won’t go deep into the bureaucracy of how states fund their public institutions. Suffice to say the narrow focus is to standardizing the time required to offer a 3 credit-hour class to ensure that no institution short circuits the budget process. When the time that students occupy a classroom seat is made equal across the public sector, we can be sure that learning is equal, right? Well, no.


To catch up with the rest of the organized world, the US push is to help more students to complete degrees. We ought to use this opportunity to develop new pathways for them to demonstrate what they already know so that they don’t need to sit through classes that have been designed in ways that presume they don’t know much. Somehow, many traditional academics have convinced themselves that leapfrogging classes or sequences of classes can’t be done without great harm. We don’t know if this argument is based on harm to students or harm to the curriculum but most often it’s voiced as the former when it’s actually the latter. Accelerating learning can be done, however, and done with rigor, based on competency-based approaches. Too often, we’ve let the undergraduate curriculum become a fortress, and not the tool it should be by providing multiple entry and exit points designed to maximize student learning.


While traditional time-based measures are endemic across higher education their impact is most often felt in community college developmental education programs. Seventy percent or more of new community college students are referred to one or more remedial classes. Most of this group begins postsecondary careers needing three classes in developmental mathematics. It’s quite possible therefore—in the tyranny of a fifteen-week term—that they won’t see the inside of a “regular” college-level classroom until almost two years after they first touch an application blank. Small wonder the probability of these students graduating or transferring to a 4-year college is in the single digits.


Inertia exacts a price. As Kay and others point out, reorganizing developmental curriculum to more fully meet a range of learner needs is daunting work. While there are few guideposts, I’m convinced that much of the angst would evaporate if community colleges would understand and use competencies as units of learning. I’ve seen a handful of community colleges enjoy great success in decomposing the credit hour class into manageable competencies. One of the colleges I coach, Bossier Parish Community College, has had outstanding success in offering individualized pathways for students in developmental math based on mastering specific competencies. BPCC has increased student success rates by an amazing 30 percent in the lowest level of developmental math using competency-based approaches over the traditional fifteen-week approach.


There is a recent, resurgent interest in competencies as curricular building blocks. The Lumina Foundation on Education and its “Tuning USA” initiative is leading the way in facilitating competency-based models for select disciplines in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah. Several years back I edited a sourcebook with some very wise colleagues entitled, Measuring What Matters: Competency-Based Learning Models in Higher Education It was designed as a toolkit for faculty and administrators to understand the layout of the curriculum, to look for overlaps in competencies among courses, and to identify opportunities to accelerate learning. Jossey-Bass indicates that it’s sold well, but given where we’re at with our devotion to the traditional fifteen-week term since it was published, perhaps not well enough.


Originally posted May 2010

Institutional Performance in the Context of Crisis

Higher education is deep in a jam both fiscally and strategically. In my travels, higher education leaders seem to be waiting for something while also acknowledging that when the stimulus funds run out that something will turn ugly. Half of the states will have spent all of their stimulus money for education by the end of June 2010 and 40 states that will experience revenue shortfalls in the next year only compound the crisis. Something has to give in the next year and much more will give in 2012.
There are smart people in leadership positions in higher education that are trying to mitigate coming fiscal disasters, but most of their efforts lack the sweeping agenda that could pull higher education out of a tailspin. Sadly, most actions are directed at preserving the status quo. Most states have either postponed thinking about how public institutions must match these new fiscal and demographic realities or are hoping things turn around very quickly. Those states in the former camp are most likely to permit their public institutions to raise tuition to levels that clearly harm low-income students. Those who believe things will soon get better perpetuate ignorance of the long, slow slog that marks the erosion of public support for higher education, a descent that began two decades ago as states struggled to balance expenditures for prisons, highways, K through 12 education and Medicaid.
At this time of crisis should we strive to maintain the current structure of public higher education? Can we continue to assume that all institutions produce equally valuable outcomes for the state and its taxpayers, the effect of which is to cut or reward all institutions on an equal basis?
Woe to the state budget officer who may understand the value of higher education but is faced with the traditional approach of taking a meat axe after the very sector that could propel a state’s economy (and future tax collections). Higher education should lead states onto higher ground that includes expanded job growth, gains in intellectual capital, and some assurance of being able to compete in a global market place. If your head hurts thinking about this, you, too, might be attracted to making across the board cuts to all institutions while ignoring greater issues of worth and merit. But, in this age, I would argue that sameness only short-term strategy, at best.
To survive, higher education and those that make decisions about how higher education is funded need to view institutional performance differently. In addition to performance data, courage will be required. Disproportionate cuts to institutions are inevitable in my opinion and states can get ready for new realities by asking:
• Which institutions graduate the most students for the least cost?
• Which institutions prepare graduates to match which state workforce needs?
• What other metrics of worth beside the workforce agenda does the state want to reward?
• How much return to the state’s investment in higher education is truly found in athletic programs?
• In an age of expanded access to technology, is it necessary that all institutions offer all major degree fields? How many programs can be shared across institutional boundaries?
• Which institutions are tearing down boundaries to higher education and which are insisting that things shouldn’t change? Whose interests are being preserved with the latter argument?
• How can states best provide incentives for all institutions to increase their performance?
These are only opening questions. The funding of higher education reflects values and value-probing questions are always difficult and messy. But, the values that we’ve held since the 1990’s—values that have reduced state appropriations to higher education to less than 10% of institutional revenue in many cases—are the same values that now require us to make difficult choices. How do we want our systems to look and how do we want our institutions to perform? The easy way out is to let the current crisis blunt our best ideas about strategy. But is this what our grandchildren will admire about us?
Rick Voorhees is marking the end of the traditional fiscal year by returning to spectacular Glenwood Springs, Colorado, from an Achieiving the Dream coaching visit to the Ivy Tech Community College (system) in Indiana.