As child welfare agencies look introspectively at organizational culture, change, and reform, it's important leaders examine the systemic aspects of organizational culture that promote high workloads, turnover, and unintentional abuse of the workforce.
Dee Wilson offers some thought provoking solutions to accompany his analysis of the organizational culture of child welfare systems across the county in his latest blog post for the Court Improvement Training Academy at the University of Washington - Seattle.
Caseworkers, supervisors and managers who have worked in a state’s child welfare system for several years are likely to have encountered local offices with idiosyncratic cultures that are resistant to change despite nearly 100% turnover of staff. Organizational cultures can be cloned; they do not necessarily depend on specific persons to be sustained in the midst of high turnover, even when they are clearly dysfunctional. Over the years, I have encountered offices that were highly conflictual and/or stubbornly incompetent in which these characteristics persisted through the complete turnover of supervisors and managers and most of the office’s caseworkers. Regional administrators and agency directors were often at a loss regarding what to do about these offices. On a positive note, some local offices have maintained a culture of fierce independence, exceptional community collaboration, and pride in professionalism, some remnants of which have survived destructive and bullying regional managers or top administrators. Strong cultures, positive or negative, which have persisted for years are hard to stamp out.
The sources of organizational culture may, at first glance, appear to be mysterious, but upon reflection, the factors that create and sustain organizational cultures are prosaic and hard to identify only because they are so commonplace. First and foremost, organizational cultures develop through social modeling, especially modeling of behaviors and attitudes of high status persons within units or offices. High status is not the same as “officially in charge.” I have worked in regions and on statewide management teams in which one or more of the top managers were sometimes openly disrespected or intensely disliked. However, when a top manager is both competent and widely admired inside and outside the agency, that person’s values and attitudes can have a huge impact on organizational culture in a short period of time...
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