CHAPTER FOURTEEN:  Evaluation of the Executive Director, Funder Relationships and of the CAA as an Agency

From EVALUATING THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, by Jim Hickman, United Way.

I.  Appraisal should be planned on a regular basis to review agreed-upon standards of performance, including the results the Executive Director agreed to produce.

II. Employee performance-based appraisal is a four-step process that places the major responsibility on the Executive Director.

      All steps are documented in writing. The Executive Director may find the same procedure useful in evaluating staff.

    Here is another sample of a GUIDE TO EVALUATION OF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.  Source:   Health and Community Services Council of Hawaii, Room 602, 200 North Vineyard Boulevard, Honolulu, Hawaii

1.  Relationship to Board and Committees

2.  Relationship to Members and Community Leaders

      Does he/she work effectively with:

3.  Relationship to Staff

4.  Professional and Personal Competencies

B. Board and Funding Agency Relationships

    The key concepts are: 

    RESULTS. Any funding source is "buying results" from you. They want their goals and purposes to be accomplished.

    ACCOUNTABILITY. They want to insure that you are accountable to them, and to the other significant publics, for what you do and how you do it.

    INTEGRITY. They want to be sure that you are honest in your dealings with them and in your handling of their assets. Every contract is a partnership where the actions of one reflect upon the reputation of the other. And nobody likes to feel like they are getting ripped off.

     These four factors can be "mixed" very differently.

A. Foundations.  Foundations tend to emphasize the YOUR SELECTION OF A PROBLEM AREA IN WHICH THEY ARE CURRENTLY INTERESTED and the present of CORRECT SOCIAL VALUES in the recipient of funds (i.e. -- you) as a form of results. They do not give you money to solve your problems. They give you money to implement the foundation's value structure. They tend to select and fund people who have similar ideological and value structures as theirs, and they rely on their personal judgments to provide that information. Once they have blessed you, some of them seem to lose interest. Some foundations will send you a check and thank-you-and-goodbye. Others want only a final report. Still others want an audit. Others may want periodic narrative reports, usually in the form of a letter to them. Only a few foundations will schedule on-site visits. These relationships tend to be fairly informal and unstructured. They are very fluid and can change quickly. 

B. Corporations. Corporations tend to emphasize the visible results in the community and their name in association with those results. Corporations want projects that have some connection with their corporate purpose. If the right product is created at the right time, they are usually not too concerned about how you did it. Since they may not have "standard procedures" for dealing with entities like yours, you have to invent the relationship for each project. Corporations rarely require audits as long as you produce the desired results.

C. Public Agencies. The public agencies tend to focus on accountability as the main issue. Bad publicity alleging misuse of funds is so damaging to the legislators that supported a program to the public agency that administers it and to the careers of the officials who administer them that they are always extremely focused on accountability. To protect the program, their agency and themselves they devise and require use of complex management systems. 

    These rules and management systems are designed primarily to serve the needs of the funding agency. The systems may or may not be useful to the agency staff and Board. There is often considerable confusion when one party does not understand the purpose of a system and tries to use it for something other than the purpose it was designed to accomplish.

    This is not necessarily correct, of course, and the trend in the past few years has been towards "performance-based" contracting wherein you are responsible primarily for RESULTS and are given more flexibility in terms of how you produce those results. There is often great difficulty is specifying exactly what results are to be produced and in measuring to determine if the agreed upon results were produced.

    In the CSBG, a national monitoring and assessment task force sponsored by HHS/Office of Community Services has developed a set of six national goals for the CSBG. For each goal, they identified examples of results measures under each of those goals. All CAAs should be using those materials and relating their activity to that framework. You can select your own goals and measures, but there should be some way to relate them to the national goals.

    Public agencies may emphasize communication as a tool in the accountability process. Some public agencies deal almost entirely with the Board or Board Chair. Others with a Committee of the Board and the Executive Director. Others relate primarily or entirely with the Executive Director or a program director. Some require both the Board and the Executive to sign applications or contracts. Other require the Board to sign. Some allow the Board's designee to sign (i.e. the Executive Director). Some send only one letter to the agency. Other send copies to the Board Chair, or to all Board members. These practices vary widely from agency to agency and often change.

    Virtually all public agencies require audits. Most specify the topics they want covered in the audits. Fortunately they are also willing to pay for the cost of doing the audits.

C. Self Assessment of a Community Action Agency

There are basically four types of standards for self-assessment.

The ideal standards also include the standards created by your peers through the national associations. The Community Action Code of Ethics creates standards for all of us. The Code can be found at: www.communityactionpartnership.com/professional/ccap/codeofethics.pdf

     The community action Partnership has adopted standards of what constitutes excellence in a community action agency. Whether you apply for the award or not, you should be using these standard to assess your CAA. These can be found on the Partnership web site at: 
http://www.communityactionpartnership.com/about/about_partnership/award_for_excellence.asp

Many interesting and useful new tools are coming out of the ROMA process. See both the NASCSP website and www.roma1.org

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End of Chapter 14 Quiz

Chapter 14 Quiz Answers

Which of these would be most useful for your agency to use over the course of the next year or so?  How will you bring this to the attention of the Board and the Executive Director?

Good luck! And remember, if you have questions about any of this, e-mail Jim Masters at the Center for Community Futures, jmasters@cencomfut.com or call him at 510-339-3801.