CHILDREN'S BOARD OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY (FLORIDA)

THE CHILDREN’S BOARD OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY (FLORIDA)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 28, 2012

REFERENCE

Readers know I have a problem when someone is punished unfairly, when they have little recourse to do anything about it.  Daniel Ruth is the author of an article titled "The horror that is the Children's Board."  He is a throwback to the entertaining scribe, the late Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune, but not always with the same civility.  A reporter has called and emailed me, seemingly incessantly, to get my take on the current unraveling between CBHC's board chairman and the director.  I've chosen not to get into the fray even when mention was made in the newspaper that I was shorted some $3,000 in my contract.  I break that silence now because it would seem Mr. Ruth’s newspaper, The Tampa Bay Times, feels less vulnerable to the high jinx and alleged horrors of CBHC.  The agency has problems, but I’m not convinced that many are of its own making. 

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Twelve years ago, I was contracted to do a study of CBHC.  I met with the director of CBHC and asked her, “What do you want me to do?”  She said, “Find out why we can’t get our work done.”  It became the title of my report.

After the fact, the attorney for the CBHC claimed I didn’t fulfill a number of indices, none of which were shared with me when I commenced the study.  My penalty was not so much failing to honor my contract.  My penalty was that the study was shelved to haunt the operation twelve years later.

This is not unusual behavior.  I come out of the private sector and nearly all my work in the complex organization has been in the private sector.  That said the problems in the public sector are not unlike those in the private sector.

My discipline is organizational development or OD.  I come to it having been a day laborer in a chemical plant while going to college, an R&D chemist after college, then a chemical sales engineer, field manager, and finally an international corporate executive for a chemical company working in South America, Europe and South Africa.  I retired from that career in my thirties, took a two-year sabbatical, and then returned to university for six years, year around, to earn my MA and Ph.D. in social and industrial psychology.  After which, I consulted in OD for ten years, then returned to the high tech private sector to work first as a management and organizational development psychologist, then once again as a corporate executive as the director of human resources, planning & development for Honeywell Europe Ltd. during the early days of the EEC.  Retiring early, I have subsequently written ten books mainly on OD, along with more than 400 published articles in this and related disciplines.  This is the experience I brought to CBHC.

What prompts this response is a diatribe in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times.  My first reaction, knowing what I know about CBHC, was to be saddened by how much distortion and false speculation can cloud such a vital activity, an activity clearly in some trouble, but an activity that gains little from the thousands of words in print that have been weighed against its operation recently

The director and personnel that were at CBHC when I made my study were dedicated professionals proud of their communal function.  It would appear this is not enough.  It is so easy to write a column, or a series of columns how terrible things are, and pen such inflammatory expressions as CBHC has “contempt for integrity and ethics,” a “social service agency (that) segued to Lord of the Flies,” to stimulate the schadenfreude of readers.

Organizational development is physician to the organization in the same manner that the clinician is psychologist to the individual.  A board or a director may hire OD, but as unobtrusive observer, the focus of OD is not in pleasing the client.  It is in unearthing chronic problems and perturbations that prevent the organization from doing the work for which it is designed.  The purpose of an organization is what it does.

In the public sector, the board is authorized and responsible for setting policy.  If the policy is happenstance, or the board is not functionally sound and knowledgeable of the work at hand, the board, believing itself cognizant of “what is,” when it isn’t, will tend to mettle in operations, which is beyond its purview.  More importantly, it compromises the authority and efficacy of the director in that operational role.

For example, a board is not meant to mettle in daily operations by soliciting comments from operating personnel.  To do so, only increases the fog index.  When an operation is already sick, this is an unnecessary and counterproductive activity and is iatrogenic.  While the attention of recent comments on CBHC is on the director, it would seem the board is not functioning as authorized.

CBHC would appear leaderless.  My problem with this is that leaderless leadership, something I have written a great deal about, is endemic to our times.  A leader of any enterprise struggles with being perceived as too much a micromanager or too much hands off.  Then too, in a wider sense, CBHC would appear to suffer from being too decentralized from Hillsborough governance for proper oversight.   

Much is being made of the $450,000 of no-bid contracts without delving into particulars.  I suspect that these might have been software contracts or similar devices to improve delivery of services.  Were I in the director’s shoes, and there was someone who knew our work, our needs, and the idiosyncrasies of our operations, and could give me a fair price, I’d do the same.  Sometimes expediency demands a little wiggle room. 

One of the executive mantras that is fundamental to operating successfully is always keeping the boss (or the board) informed.  We don’t like surprises.  Sometimes a clash of personalities has little to do with the actual problem.  The chairman of the board of Ford fired his CEO because, “Sometime you don’t like certain people.”   

Not for the first time, I saw the quote of the director: “If we don’t understand what it is we’re doing, how the hell are we going to make a decision about cuts.”  On the surface, this is quite incriminating, but in closer examination it is the crux of the matter. 

CHBC budget is $30 million.  I believe it was larger twelve years ago with more people to serve today, more agencies to support, more new contingencies to address.  The director’s comment I take to be an honest one.  As Truman said, when you’re in the kitchen “the buck stops here.”

What I hear the director saying is that we are spreading a mere $30 million so thin how in the hell can we cut a penny?  The irony twelve years ago is that CBHC had trouble getting the money out into the field.  Once you start providing services, those benefiting don’t expect those services to be curtailed or diminished.  They budget for them.

So, why did I say, “CBHC can’t get its work done?”  People – because of the pressures I suspect to justify their existence – were more interested in data collection and statistics than in pressing the flesh by showing up in the field.  Too many never left their desks.  One person commented that he saw me more than anyone else from CBHC.

Another problem was complementary service providers were not working in proximity to each other so they could collaborate on joint projects.  There was too much of the John Wayne syndrome of going it alone. 

Then too, the director I believe felt it was more important to be politically engaged than to be hands on involved in the daily activity. 

My sense is the beast that everyone is seeing CBHC being is misplaced, that CBHC professionals and the director are unwitting victims of a campaign to discredit them, which, in my view, is misplaced.

My experience was that those receiving CBHC services twelve years ago held the agency in high regard.  Were there malcontents twelve years ago?  Of course, there were.  Ask malcontents how they feel and they will oblige, ask them what should be done to improve the situation, and they will have little or nothing to say.  They are complainers not contributors. 

When obsessed with quantifying intangibles, and when intangibles are the primary business, the quantification takes away from the mission.  That is the precise problem with CBHC.  It is trying to do the impossible. 

It was trying to do it twelve years ago, and it can’t be done.  What amazed me in the thousands of words written on CBHC is the lack of testimonies from the myriad of communities CBHC serves, communities that would be in great peril were the agency to disappear.  It was too self-absorbed twelve years ago.  I feel now, in retrospect, the internal focus was believed necessary to justify its existence at the expense of its mission.  Accountability is misplaced when performance is a political charade.  Journalists who buy the charade only compound the problem.

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