Brandon Hults

Kenneth Willmott 

OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I

Arizona State University

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 A petition was created on social media by a group of former staff called “Better Camp
Chi” during the summer of 2020 that was targeting issues of inclusion that they believed
were not being addressed. The director and full-time staff members took immediate
action to open a dialog with the group to address their concerns. My role in this situation
was not direct, but as a current employee observing how it was handled by the full-time
year-round leadership team. Along with this point of observation into the situation is my
personal reaction also as member within the alumni community. The petition circulated
to members in the alumni community prompting hundreds of comments that attacked the
premise of the petition as taking advantage of the current environment of social unrest,
and while some of their ideas were in good faith, they went about it in a destructive
manner choosing to go public before any dialog with the camp was attempted. Camp Chi
formally responded to the petition in a post to the alumni Facebook group explaining how
they have either already taken action to address many of the issues brought up, or are
actively working towards many of the goals they set. In the response they provided
specific examples of how they have addressed many of the issues brought up and the
grants that they received to make it possible. They wanted to emphasize that they have
not been as publicly outspoken about changes that taking place in camp as they could
have been. They also included their email and phone number stating that they are always
open for anyone in the community to share ideas, concerns, and feedback.

To understand how structure has influenced their response to the situation it is important
for me to explain the roles within the Camp Chi leadership team. At the top of the Camp
Chi leadership team hierarchy is Jon, the Camp Director. The second in command is
Joelle, Associate Director, followed by Kyle, Assistant Director. There is also a Business
Manager, Operations Manager, Office Manager, and a Program Coordinator. This group
of seven staff make up the full time and year-round leadership team. In this situation, Jon
was the first to receive the email followed by the rest of the team. Being the Director, he
responded right away to open a dialog with the Better Camp Chi group. There is a reason
he is in charge; with over 40 years of camping experience he can handle situations in a
very rational and collected manor. He called the leadership team into an emergency
meeting to discuss the next steps they needed to take in response to the public petition
that was now circulating online. In this meeting they brought on two members of the JCC
of Chicago’s executive leadership team to assist, the Chief Human Resources Officer and
the Chief Operating Officer. The COO was able to offer his experience as the previous
camp Director, who has been at the camp during the time that the previous staff who
were responsible for creating this petition are referring to. After reading through the
details and demands of the petition as a group they would then need to coordinate a
response. Two issues that are central to structural design are how to allocate work
(differentiation) and how to coordinate diverse efforts after parceling out responsibilities

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 (integration) (Bolman, 2017). Having such a small team was beneficial so that they could
work closely on the situation as a whole group, but also offered the flexibility to split up
after meetings to work on specific tasks based on their individual skills. Jon as the
Director would continue to reach out to the petitioning group along with Joelle. Joelle has
a master’s in social work and would be able to talk with the group to better understand
the motivation behind the petition. She would also be helping the leadership team talk
through their knee jerk emotional responses to give way to a more rational and
empathetic thought process. The program coordinator was able to work on how they
would respond to some of the issues the group took with programming, such as single
gender programming and gendered villages. It was clear who would be working on
specific tasks even before they were assigned. This was because of how closely the team
works together, the detailed understanding of their individual roles and responsibilities
along with their personal areas of strength. The textbook stated that effective teams take
time to explore who is best suited for a particular task as well as how individual roles
come together (Bolman, 2017). The leadership team had put in the hours working closely
together that allowed them the solid foundation to collaborate effectively in a time of
crisis for the organization.

The Better Camp Chi petition called on Camp Chi leadership to recognize how their
current policies and summer camp structure left certain groups feeling like it was not a
safe or inclusive space for them. An effective team “establishes a social contract among
members that relates to their purpose and guides and obligates how they will work
together” (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, p. 116). Camp stresses the importance of their
main values of Kavod (respect) and Chesed (kindness), to their campers and staff through
training and programing along with modeling that behavior. These values are universally
shared at camp as part of our own social contract. We pride ourselves in being inclusive
and open community that is accepting of all that share in those values. The petitioners did
not believe that camp was doing its job to create the right structure that is truly inclusive.
While camp did not agree with every point that the group made, they wanted to stress
how much they are not upset at the group even when it is human to feel attacked.
Members of high-performing teams hold themselves collectively accountable and this is
exactly what the leadership team stressed to me and the other staff working at camp
during this situation. The structural frame emphasizes that effective teams find ways to
hold the collective accountable: “Teams enjoying a common purpose and approach
inevitably hold themselves responsible, both as individuals and as a team, for the team's
performance” (Bolman, 2017). The camp leadership team was upset that they had failed
to make these individuals and others in the camp community aware of the progress that
they had made towards a more inclusive community in the previous years. They
recognized that they are not perfect, merely human, and this was an opportunity to
reassess how they operate. They wanted to work with this group and not against them, as

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 they both share a love for camp and a desire to create a more inclusive home away from
home for their community.

The camp leadership team handled this situation using mainly lateral communication
with only initial oversight from executive leadership. Once they planned a course of
action and agreed upon how to respond, the executive leadership trusted that it would be
handled appropriately given the experience and expertise of the group in their respective
areas. After having long evening meetings for three days in a row, they posted a response
to the petition on the Camp’s Facebook alumni page. It detailed each of the ways that
they had either met the petitioning groups demands already or are in the process of
implementation for next summer, along with the grants they had received that have
allowed them the financial means to do so. I think they did an excellent job at responding
to this appropriately, but there were ways that it could have gone differently. Kyle, the
Assistant Director was the one to officially respond and was very candid in doing so.
They all worked on putting together this unified response, but I think it would have been
helpful to have split up the response into 2 posts that responded to more aspects of the
petition, including the parts that they did not think were necessary or realistic. While they
did split up responsibilities at times, they were often all together working on their
response in the evening. Each of the team members has a unique relationship with camp
and unique set of skills that could have been utilized better in a more focused response. It
would have most likely been more efficient use of their meeting time. I also believe that
their individual roles at the camp and how they would implement change from their own
positions would have been an appropriate and appreciated response that would have
complimented their unified statement.
Another alternative course of action I would recommend would have been to include the
small group of staff that were working at camp during the situation in at least a small part
of these meetings. This would have added another layer of understanding and insight
from staff that work more directly with the campers in the structure that the petition was
demanding to change. We went to camp with the individuals that started this petition and
could have added our perspective into the experiences that brought them to publicly
demand change from camp. The petition stated that “We acknowledge that some of our
demands are already in place as official Camp Chi rules but are not necessarily put into
practice in a way that measurably affects camp culture or the day to day. We believe that
further growth can be explored, and for that reason we are leaving those demands on the
petition.” This is where the lower level staff have added value worth bringing into the
conversation. We understand better from our perspective how policies and practices are
realistically put into action.

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 Understanding an organization’s structure can help to frame a situation and provide a
more comprehensive picture. I have found that it helps me understand why certain
decisions are made or why the organization functions one way and not the other. The
more complex a role structure (lots of people doing many different things), the harder it is
to sustain a focused, tightly coupled enterprise (Bolman, 2017). Working at a camp you
find yourself taking on many different roles. Sometimes these roles are clear and defined
in your job description, other times they are thrust upon you in the heat of the moment
and you adapt. We often joke that summer camp is controlled chaos. With over 1000
campers over the summer and nearly 300 staff, we do not always have the most “tightly
coupled enterprise.” With the seasonal nature of camp, there is an entire off season that
can be used to reflect on the previous summer and look forward to the next. This is when
we sit down and discuss changes we need to make to the structure of our program and our
roles. Given the choice I do not think I would change much after learning about this
frame. I must admit it has opened my eyes to understand the importance of using the
structural frame to better understand the internal workings of the organization. It has
allowed me to look back at changes that were made to the leadership team and know why
they were made and how it impacted the handling of this specific situation.

When the previous camp director was promoted within the organization, the entire
leadership team was shuffled around. Some were promoted to new and different positions
that they would be taking on for the first time. Others had responsibilities shifted towards
and away from them based on their skills and the needs of the organization. Everyone on
the team had their roles and responsibilities adjusted to be less ambiguous. If employees
are unclear about what they are supposed to do, they often tailor their roles to fit personal
preferences instead of shaping them to meet system-wide goals (Bolman, 2017). Roles
that were unclear or unevenly distributed created cracks in the organizations structure. I
am sure that there are issues every summer are overlooked or not addressed properly due
to a lack of individual responsibly over the issue, which is ultimately a structural issue
that if not addressed will compound each summer. Ultimately these structural
inefficiencies contributed to this situation and reassessing the structure within the
leadership team annually is vital in maintaining a healthy and forward-thinking
organization.

References:

Bolman, L., & Deal, T. (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership.
New York, NY, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Katzenbach, J. R., and D. K. Smith. 1993. The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-
Performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.