Horrible Top-Down Leadership. Shocking Turnover of Staff. 33% Turnover Last Year. - Director The Center Employee Review

The Center features more than one verbally abusive leader, whom the other c-level staff provide cover for. I have never worked at a place where so many people are trying to do some good in their community and the morale has been so low. As the old Greek proverb goes, "the fish rots from the head." The volunteers and most of the frontline staff at this place are great. But when 33% of the staff turns over in a year, that tells you that something is really REALLY wrong. The problems (and some of the institutionalized resentment that bubbles among the staff members) goes to back to a former CEO, who earned the loyalty of her all-female leadership team by paying for their MBAs with company funds. To my knowledge, no male, or transgender individual has ever been afforded this benefit. So this is an LGBT center where all of the leaders are women, half of the leadership are straight women, and until this year, with the arrival of a new CEO, all were white. The new CEO is a person of color--which is an improvement--but she isn't fluent in Spanish, despite her background, which does cancel out the benefit of having a Latina in the C-suite. There are NO out bisexuals, gay men, or transgender people in C-level positions. This has resulted in a distressingly bad and unbalanced leadership team, which does not serve or represent the diverse community that is LGBT San Diego. The C-team literally runs the place like a college sorority. There's the "in girls," who hold an executive meeting each week and decide what everyone's marching orders will be--and then virtually none of what was decided is shared in the "Directors Meeting" that happens right afterwards. In this meeting, all Directors report on their activities--and the C-Levels offer no report of their own. So you never know what they’re doing—if they’re doing anything. They all leave early for the day, so who knows. The Directors are scrutinized in the meeting (and occasionally humiliated), and smart people leave it at that, and don’t push back. Anyone who suggests a C-Level might do something better or differently is gone within 6 months due to being harassed and worn-down, or for some "trumped-up" offense that is ostensibly fireable. Even less information is shared with non-director staff in the monthly "Staff Meeting." Directors who share too much from the Directors Meeting with their frontline staff rapidly find themselves in trouble. (And when a C-team member is dressing someone down in an e-mail, the entire C-team is CC'd, to ensure a unified front. On some occasions subordinate staff get included on such e-mails, which is truly distasteful--though perhaps an effective "control method" for keeping staff worried enough not to speak out). Interestingly, there is a 5th C-Level staff member at The Center, who has years of nonprofit experience beyond that found among the organization's otherwise very young and inexperienced C-team. This highly-experienced individual is not invited to the weekly sorority meeting. This is part of a troubling pattern of institutionalized discrimination of older staff members. (Ultimately, they leave or are forced out). The leadership is truly ethically challenged. I saw an employee who needed to use Family Medical Need Act denied permission not to come to work--and then fired when he put family first. I’ve seen people who requested ADA accommodations be forced out of the organization. I’ve seen multiple people over age 50 pushed out of their positions when they tried to offer the c-level team the benefit of their experience.