Posted on January 14, 2019
For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you may remember that back in September I wrote that our critical mission at Penn-Mar is to ensure that everyone who comes here to work is successful at what they do. To ensure that, we need every one of our managers to help the people who work for them be successful. I referred to it as a “mindset” that we were committed to creating that would be backed up by solid training.
To that end, back in May, our Foundation Board green lighted our recommendations to embark on an internal branding project that involved cross functional teams across the organization engaged in surveys and focus groups to take the pulse of the organization. Our goal was to find out what was important to our team members, what was working, and what we could do better to support individuals with intellectual disabilities.
We used these fact-based insights to develop our 2019 Strategic Plan that laid out three clear strategic imperatives. These would be aspirational on January 1, but my personal goal is to make them operational well before the end of this year. To fully secure the foundation of our organization, here is what we committed to:
• Transforming our team members’ work experience so that each member is fully valued, supported, engaged and accountable to our shared mission and values.
• Supporting individuals as they optimize their lives in a person-centered culture.
• Building the reputation of PMHS as an innovative leader advocating for best practices supporting individuals with intellectual disabilities and sharing expertise with others.
I envision every action that we take this year as an opportunity to directly support these strategies. In the next six-months, we will be working to identify our new organizational structure, concentrating on the first strategic initiative — transforming our team members’ work experience — to create a culture of One Penn-Mar, where everyone here is held accountable in the same way and recognized in the same way.
To achieve all these milestones, we need to be laser focused on our strategy and its implementation in a way that is both seamless and innovative. Following a full evaluation as it relates to this goal, we are moving to an organizational structure with one Chief Operating Officer (COO) overseeing both our Pennsylvania and Maryland operations.
Jackie Stevens, who many of you know as our Chief Operating Officer for Pennsylvania, will be taking on the role of COO for Penn-Mar Human Services. This move will create efficiencies through the seamless sharing of best practices and resources across the entire organization and support a culture of One Penn-Mar across state lines.
Jackie will be working with me to identify where the organization’s strongest resources are as it relates to internal talent, ensuring that everything we do aligns around our strategic imperatives and helps us to attract a committed workforce to support the Penn-Mar mission.
2019 is an opportunity for all of us at Penn-Mar to secure the foundation of our organization. We have every intention of continuing to move forward on the innovation front but, first and foremost, we need to build our future on solid footing.
By this time next year, my hope is that I will be reporting to you that every employee at Penn-Mar genuinely feels that they are fully valued, supported, engaged and accountable to our shared mission and values and will be working every day to ensure that everything we do is aligned with our strategic imperatives.
I have to say I am more excited about the future than I have ever been. Before us is an extraordinary year and an amazing opportunity to invest in our team members and make Penn-Mar the best-in-class model that other human services organizations aspire to be.