Posse Foundation Reviews

I will frame my review within the context of an employee lifecycle, something Posse leadership, HR, and management can learn from. 1. Recruitment: Attracting and Selecting the best employees - The employee interview process is meant to reflect the same stages of interviews students go through to get the scholarship. The process is antiquated and not aligned with current job interview best practices. There is also a lack of transparency in salary range as you are going through the process, even if you are trying to get promoted internally. You don’t find out what the salary range is until you receive an offer, which is not how the current labor market functions. - Job descriptions are ambiguous and do not provide specific information on the roles and responsibilities. You can expect to do more outside of your job title, and when you bring it up to your manager as a concern, you’ll be told…”You signed up for this”. 2. Onboarding - You will be flown to New York for induction training. Depending on your start date and the next time Training and Evaluation has a training (which they often do because of the high employee turnover rate) you might not be officially “inducted” until a couple of weeks, if not, months into your employment. - On-site on-boarding looks different depending on the site. The main focus of training employees is on how to talk about the organization. This is when you start noticing that your work really is just to carry out “the manual” or do your work the “Posse way”. There are no hard or soft skills that are supported throughout the process. 3. Development and Career - For a program that claims to have a strengths- based approach to working with scholars, it does the complete opposite for its employees. Posse does a disservice to it’s staff by not leveraging their strengths and rather forces the employee to fit a mold. - Staff will have National Trainings twice a year, where all 11 sites, connect and participate in workshops. However, there is no breadth or depth in Professional Development that happens at trainings. You will constantly do personality tests in all the ways those tests exists (colors, shapes, titles, etc.) and that’s about it. You’ll participate in similar workshops that scholars go through while they’re in high school. There’s also resistance towards bringing in outside facilitators or outside consultants to train staff. No youth development training or training on how to support scholars who need mental health resources. There’s no career growth mindset behind these “trainings”. National Trainings serve as a platform to hear how managers demoralize and shame staff. 4. Performance - There is no performance framework. If you have a Director or Program Director who dislikes you, they will get away with biased treatment. There is no “checks or balance” system in place, which means that no one at Nationals will be checking fair employee treatment. - Feedback that is given is often unprofessional, unethical, and not constructive. - Posse needs to invest in employee and management development. 5. Reward - The compensation and benefits package is out of touch with the job market. Posse is recruiting out of major cities, where the cost of living is high, and the salary falls below the average salary ranges in these cities. The way in which you get a raise is completely arbitrary and up to the discretion of your managers (who are more than often not experienced or trained in HR or management). - Promotion opportunities are extremely rare. 6. Transition - HR does not know how to exit employees appropriately. If you are lucky enough to transition out of Posse with notice, great, because HR does not know the fundamentals of supporting an employee with Worker’s Compensation, Short-term disability, or workplace harassment issues. The Mission: - Externally, Posse’s brand is recognized and respected in higher education. Internally, Posse’s mission is confusing and misleading. Often times employees are attracted to Posse because of the goals, but program implementation isn’t aligned with what is sold. This leaves employees frustrated, nominators confused, and scholars feeling like they are fulfilling a quota. Culture: - Posse was an innovative, one of a kind, college-access and leadership development program. Posse’s leadership has been hanging on to “the program works” for almost 30 years. Even though there are some positive results (90% 6 year graduation rate), there has not been an acknowledgement to make changes or innovate in areas that need improvement. As an employee, you’ll hear, “change is hard to come by” or “it takes a long time for change to happen”. Lack of innovation has already made Posse stagnant. Overall, staff morale is low, the micromanagement culture is toxic, late nights and work weekends, heavy travel, no work life balance, Posse’s “special sauce” is stuck in the 80’s and 90’s (Koosh, activities, workshops, warm-ups), and there is a really bizarre obsession with the president and founder.