OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Describe your organization.

The organization I have chosen for this case study is the YMCA of Silicon Valley. The

original San Jose YMCA was founded in the 1860s and has been a prevalent contributor to the

local communities ever since. As the organization currently stands, it has eleven sites spread

across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, serving over a quarter of a million people every

year (YMCA of Silicon Valley, 2020). This nonprofit provides a myriad of services including

summer camps, swim lessons, health and fitness programs, food security programs, youth

sports, and many more. The YMCA of Silicon Valley is structured like many other large

organizations - a CEO and a team of vice presidents housed at headquarters along with support

and administrative staff and an Executive Director with more lower-level management and

frontline staff present at each of the sites. The Executive Directors are responsible for the

overall operations of their individual sites and the CEO and vice presidents are responsible for

the operations of the organization as a whole.

2) Describe your role in the organization

I am a former staff member of one of the sites within the YMCA of Silicon Valley, as I left

a number of years ago. At the time of my departure, I was a Program Director overseeing

membership and programming at my site and had been there for about seven years. I had

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been in my then-current position for about the last two years that I was there. I was responsible

for overseeing about fifty staff members directly and had a budgetary responsibility of over five

million dollars annually. I reported to the two Executive level leadership positions who were

responsible for overseeing the operations of the entire site.

3) Describe the situation.

As a staff member at the YMCA, I had been in a number of different positions over the

course of my seven years there. In my last two years, I was a director in charge of sales and

customer service and had a large team of people reporting to me. The organization tended to

vary between how strictly it focused on money depending upon how well we were doing

financially, and as Bolman says in Reframing Organizations, “[vacilated] endlessly between

being too loose and too tight (2020). In previous years the organization had been experiencing

relatively decent growth but had more recently begun to experience a slow decline in the

amount of revenue we were generating. Because of this noticed decline and in an attempt to

thwart it, the vice presidents and the CEO decided that it would be better to restructure the

organization and give much more intentional focus to sales and the amount of money the

memberships generated. This change in strategy meant that my job was going to change, as

half of my job was being given to someone else and I was to then solely be responsible for

sales and nothing else.

I immediately began to have disagreements with my immediate supervisor, John, as the

two of us did not agree on what my job was about to become. John saw my job as more of a

person who in charge of issues that centered around finances and goals (structural issues) and

making connections with local businesses (political issues), while I viewed my job from more

from human resources and symbolic perspectives that revolved around how I interacted with

others and bettered relationships. In some of our conversations, he would express concerns as

to why as I was not meeting my outlined weekly/monthly goals, while I was more focused on the

relationships I was building with our customer base and addressing our issue of retention of

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members as opposed to solely gaining new ones. I was trying to address our financial issues

by saying, “I’m trying to continue to the committed money we already have and are continuing to

lose,” and he would come back with responses like “that is not your focus, our goal is to bring in

new money, not worry about the money we already have.” We had this type of conversation

over and over and I could not convince him that my time and energy were better spent trying to

keep the memberships we had versus focusing on bringing new ones in as much as possible.

There was a clear difference in our abilities to see this situation from multiple perspectives and it

ultimately pushed me to leave the organization due to our disagreements over the

responsibilities of my position.

References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership

(6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

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YMCA of Silicon Valley (2020). Retrieved from https://www.ymcasv.org/about/history/150-years-

service