PATH Reviews

There have been too many changes in leadership

• Very prejudiced against “non-technical” staff, junior staff, temps, interns • Limited career growth opportunities • Centralized services are underfunded, have no review mechanisms, and introduce unnecessary inefficiencies • Passive aggressive culture • Senior management actively discourages innovation and novel ideas from lower-level staff • No feedback mechanisms for management • Lots of donor funds invested in communications and leadership projects with little oversight and questionable impact I write this review with quite a lot of reservation. I have a lot of respect for PATH as a legacy global health institution with historical knowledge matched by few other organizations. But unfortunately, what remains of this legacy is bogged down but what I’ll simply call willful ignorance. Most work I’ve observed has been unsuccessful by most measures, and management appears willfully ignorant. Timelines are routinely delayed for fixable reasons, Sharepoint is considered a cutting edge project management tool, significant investments are funneled into a mediocre digital presence, document production is mired in endless reviews, and an over-zealous proofreading culture makes writing anything much more difficult than it needs to be (PATH takes pride in having their own internal editorial style—which is just as ridiculous as it sounds: most companies are content using international standards, like Chicago style or AMA)—the list of incompetencies goes on. On some level this is to be expected: nonprofits can’t invest in centralized processes like other international firms. The traditional donor model struggles to scale. However, the most perplexing part of PATH is how the organization appears to operationalize willful ignorance of inefficient systems. You could tell management “no” many times and provide clear feedback on ways to improve—and all of it appears to go nowhere. And this happens with external groups as well: I’ve seen donors provide clear directives like, “the sample size of your study is too small,” only to see similar studies with the same sample size designed months later. From the perspective of a junior staff, I think this ignorance comes from prejudice: many “senior” staff have advanced technical degrees and probably believe on some level their education gives them expert authority. In a true culture of "innovation," ideas would be privileged over experience. Everyone matters because everyone potentially has innovative ideas. But at PATH, the ideas that seem to matter are the ideas from tenured “technical” staff. If you don’t appear to have the right expertise, the expectation is to bob your head in meetings, signaling quiet optimism and passive agreement with a smile. I’ve seen PAs with global health degrees asked to do nothing but process documents and spend hours of labor on Sharepoint sites. I've seen qualified, smart internal candidates with Master’s degrees denied promotions in favor of inexperienced candidates with “technical” Bachelor’s degrees in Biology/Chemistry/Engineering. I’ve seen “technical" staff quickly promoted to “Senior” level titles for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, some of the most motivated employees, with novel and interesting perspectives, are asked to sit quietly, take meeting minutes, and keep calendars for the “technical" project officers they support. Like it’s said in Harry Potter: “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”