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CRE Success Stories
Photo credit: Cyndi Shattuck Photography

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"CRE's goal is to enable client organizations to build what we consider the "three-legged stool" for high-performing organizations: solid, visionary leadership, strong and efficient organizational systems, and effective programming that links strategy, planning and outcomes."

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CRE Deputy Director

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- Gwen Carter, Life Force: Women Fighting AIDS, Inc.

Our Services: Case Studies: Sunnyside Community Services

Sunnyside Community Services

Services Provided:  Team Building, Synchronizing Management Styles, Establishing Better Lines of Communication

Our Successes:

  • Brought in for team building consultation for ED and the senior management team at Sunnyside Community Services (SCS).
  • Helped establish a list of recommendations that have caused SCS’s managers to listen, empathize and communicate better as a group.
  • Managers now are thinking in terms of “broader issues” and not getting bogged down in the minutia.
 
Sunnyside Community Services – Team Building

It’s possible that back in 1974 when the Sunnyside Community Services (SCS) was started as a tiny senior center in the basement of a church to give older locals “a place to go” that the handful of founders agreed on all of the organizational decisions.

But it’s only natural that as SCS diversified into youth and other community programs and grew into the largest community-based social service agency in Western Queens, reaching over 15,000 residents from the ages of 5 to 95 (an older), that all the senior managers weren’t always pulling in the same direction.

After watching a CRE consultant provide team building session with SCS’s Youth and Family Department, it struck the nonprofit’s executive director, Judy Zangwill, that she and their senior management could do for some team building themselves.

“I had actually attended a seminar that the CRE consultants did with the Youth and Family Department and I saw that it worked and I thought, “hey, we could use that too,’ ” Zangwill said.

CRE’s consultants met with Zangwill and her senior management team and conducted exercises in which each manager was asked how they would deal with a specific topic or issue. In this way the consultants attempted to reveal and establish all the key players’ individual styles and then showed how those various styles might complement each other in given situations.

“I frankly think some of it was just recognizing this is the way I operate and this is the way you operate and how can we do this most effectively together,” Zangwill says.

A key to the team building consultation was establishing better lines of communications. To that end, CRE helped SCS create a short list of communication skills to abide by to make each management meeting go smoother.

“For instance,” Zangwill began, “less interrupting. Only interrupt if the person is really going off track. Making sure there’s enough space to make sure everyone can express themselves. Being able to step outside of one’s self and try to understand everyone else’s position. It really improved our listening skills.”

One point that the consultants were able to get across to SCS’s management team was not to get bogged down in the minutia and really try thinking strategically about the broader issues, Zangwill said.

In this case, it wasn’t a quick process. Zangwill said they met with CRE consultants on a monthly or bimonthly basis for more than a year. In addition, CRE is also providing its coaching and strategic planning services to SCS.

“There still are some issues but I I definitely think this has brought us closer,” Zangwill said. “It has helped us recognize some special issues that were impeding our process and now we’re trying to rectify those issues. But overall I think working with CRE has been fantastic, it’s been great. We’ve worked with several of their consultants and I’d say the quality of the CRE consultants has really been top notch.”

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