OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Structural Frame Worksheet

1. Describe how the structure of the organization influenced the situation.

The YMCA of Silicon Valley utilizes a top-down structure similar to that of many other
organizations - there is a CEO at the top, about a half-dozen Vice Presidents, and then one to two
Executive level staff at each location who report to the the Vice President of Operations. The
Vice Presidents, with the approval of the CEO and human resources, decided to restructure the
directors that oversaw membership at each location, essentially splitting the customer service and
sales team into two, as a way to combat a consistent annual loss in membership revenue. ​I was
expected to hit my sales goal every month, no questions asked, which I was unable to do on a
consistent basis because of how poorly this restructuring was implemented. There was little to
no communication with the lower-level management (myself and my equivalents at other sites)
about how we were going to be supported in these new roles, which made inherently difficult to
hit our sales goals.
This situation immediately caused tension between myself and my supervisor, as I had
always viewed my job through the lens of customer service and he now had to measure my
performance exclusively by how well our sales were doing and nothing more. I was much more
focused on member retention with a slow overall gain of membership over time to keep out
revenue consistent, while the sudden new goal for the organization was to now just gain as
many new memberships as possible on a monthly basis. My supervisor's hands were tied
because he was instructed to solely focus on sales as my entire job, where I saw my job as so
much more than just a director of sales. There was no discussion as to what approaches I
would be taking to make the sales, I just needed to hit a certain number and none of my input
was taken into consideration. This restructure did nothing more than give the senior managers
an easy target for when our revenues were down and did nothing to communicate strategies or
facilitate cooperation between themselves and lower-management. Ultimately, this structure did
not work and about a year after I left, the previous structure was put back into place because
their attempt at restructuring this part of the organization failed.

2. Recommend how you would use structure for an alternative course of action regarding
your case.

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 Goals drive the intention and behaviors of any organization and the YMCA of Silicon
Valley is no different. While the goals may have been relatively straightforward, the path to get
there was not, and lack of strategy to help guide the organization to these goals thwarted the
success of this restructure. A functional strategy would have made the goals of senior leadership
more clear and would have helped give insight to the lower-level managers as to how to go about
meeting these hefty goals that were being set for us. As mentioned by Bolman in ​Reframing
Organizations,​ “a good strategy needs to be specific enough to provide direction but elastic
enough to adapt to changing circumstances” (2017, p. 51). By implementing some sort of
outlined strategic plan, senior leadership would have set the lower-level management team in a
better starting position and would have given our supervisors more of an understanding of how
they needed to measure our performance and how to coach us through any issues.
Before making this change, I would have preferred to see senior leadership facilitate
conversations with the lower-level managers about how to approach this problem. While senior
leadership had a birds-eye view of the problem and potential solutions, the front line managers
are the ones seeing what has actively worked and what has not and the lack of consult with the
lower-level managers was discouraging from the very beginning. What senior leadership would
have quickly found out was that our marketing was ineffective and many of us did not have the
experience or resources to properly market our programs and membership offerings to our
communities. A more effective approach would have been to keep the structure of the
membership teams the same (as the restructure did little to consolidate work and cost the
organization more money) and create a much closer relationship between the membership teams
and the marketing department. The lower-level managers would have been tasked with creating
appropriate marketing for each of their given communities and a communication plan would
have been developed to continue ideal levels of consistent marketing. This would have been a
great way to get different parts of the organization to collaborate and solve a much larger issue
that would have benefited the organization as a whole instead of alienating the lower-level
managers.

3. Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned about
this frame.

With what I have now learned in mind, there are a couple of ways I would have perhaps
approached this situation differently. First and foremost, I would have sat down with my direct

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supervisor and insisted that we layout how we wanted to measure our success and how my
progress and effectiveness as a director were going to be evaluated. One of the most significant
issues we had was that the only barometer we had to measure anything was just flat out sales and
nothing else. While this was certainly one of the more important things to focus on, it was not
the only measure we could have used, which would have helped my working relationship with
my supervisor and my confidence level in relation to my job. It is demoralizing to have to feel as
if you are constantly failing at your job and does not reflect well on senior leadership when their
unreasonable expectations are being thrust upon you with no guidance as to how I was supposed
to really achieve those goals.
Once I had accomplished identifying these measures and a course of action with my
supervisor, I would have then asked to meet with my counterparts at other locations to see what
their plans were and how they were going to measure their goals. Then I would have asked us all
to discuss this at our next all-hands meeting to see how we could discuss our strategies further
with senior leadership, as a properly implemented strategy needed to be put into place. Ideally,
they would have been on board with what we had to offer and a plan of action and specific
strategies would have been outlined and shared with the entire organization. Knowing how
senior leadership tended to function, I do not think I would have gotten very far with doing this if
this scenario were to play out but it would have at least been worth the effort to try. Strategies
do not have to be perfect but they need to be clear and the most important thing is that flexibility
is ingrained within the plan so that changes can be made when something does not initially work
the way it was intended to. The way the YMCA of Silicon Valley is structured would have made
it difficult to get this to move from the bottom-up but as a nonprofit organization dedicated to
community engagement, strategy has to be an important part of what they do.

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 References
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership
(6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass