{"id":27,"date":"2004-06-04T20:44:17","date_gmt":"2004-06-04T20:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php\/2004\/06\/04\/a_small_dance\/"},"modified":"2004-06-04T20:44:17","modified_gmt":"2004-06-04T20:44:17","slug":"a_small_dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"A Small Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last few weeks I have been watching a small community run organisation<br \/>\ntry not to tear itself apart.<\/p>\n<p>It all started when one of the closeknit and well established group of four<br \/>\nstaff members went on maternity leave. &#8216;Trish&#8217;, the replacement person did not<br \/>\nimmediately fit in and started to make some errors of judgement. Complicating<br \/>\nthe situation, the existing director had taken over from Trish around ten years<br \/>\nago when she left to have a family. Only one of the assistants remained from<br \/>\nTrish&#8217;s previous tenure and no-one from the previous committee of management<br \/>\nremained.<\/p>\n<p>From the outside and hearing everything second hand it seemed like the new<br \/>\nperson had become incompetent in the situation. <\/p>\n<p>Also from my perspective hearing how everyone reacted, it seemed like the anxiety<br \/>\nin the organisation rose to extreme levels when Trish started.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The existing director had never had such an experienced person in the more<br \/>\njunior position<\/li>\n<li>The existing director had known Trish in a previous environment and appreciated<br \/>\nher professionalism<\/li>\n<li>The one person who had previously worked with Trish had reservations about<br \/>\nworking with her again. Mainly because of this, the appointment committee<br \/>\nmore would have appointed someone else if there had been a suitable candidate.<\/li>\n<li>The existing director is very close to the one person who worked with Trish<br \/>\nwhen Trish was the director<\/li>\n<li>The preferred candidate for the position declined to accept the appointment<br \/>\n(she could not negotiate special employment conditions.)<\/li>\n<li>The personality difference between Trish and &#8216;Nadia&#8217;, the person she replaced,<br \/>\nwas extreme. Nadia was highly organised and efficient but lacked people skills.<br \/>\nTrish treated the clients extremely well but lacked confidence and could sometimes<br \/>\nput her co-workers off by appearing to be aloof.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I am not there, but from what I hear, Trish is making a lot of mistakes. She<br \/>\nis not exercising appropriate duty of care, she seems to forget to do elementary<br \/>\nthings that everyone expects would be second nature to someone of her experience<br \/>\nand does not seem to be able to manage her time appropriately. Is Trish being<br \/>\nscapegoated? Does Trish want to be scapegoated.<\/p>\n<p>When Trish first started making errors, everyone else retreated and hoped that<br \/>\nshe would just get better with time. But she didn&#8217;t. I encouraged the director<br \/>\nto take Trish aside and say something like &quot;Look Trish we know you are<br \/>\nbetter than this. What IS happening for you.&quot; But she didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>The management committee considered terminating Trish&#8217;s probationary period<br \/>\nbut felt they had not worked openly enough with her and given her sufficient<br \/>\nopportunity to respond to their concerns.<\/p>\n<p>After a lot of heartache, Trish is still there and has responded significantly<br \/>\nto the concerns raised by the management committee.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is precious little generosity and a lot of mistrust around.<br \/>\nI keep thinking that generosity would go a long way to improving the situation.<br \/>\nBut the anxiety still seems to high.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder what comes next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last few weeks I have been watching a small community run organisation try not to tear itself apart. It all started when one of the closeknit and well established group of four staff members went on maternity leave. &#8216;Trish&#8217;, the replacement person did not immediately fit in and started to make some errors [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}