Modernizing Work to Meet Demand for Services
New York Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) has existed for 50+ years to support pretrial justice reform. It has become a national model for how to decrease the number of people held in prison awaiting trial.
CJA has offices in all five boroughs of New York City and nearly 400 employees. In the last 10 years, demand for their services, data, and partnership support increased dramatically in response to local and state reforms. In 2017, Aubrey Fox joined CJA as CEO to help guide the organization into the future.
Building trust in a new CEO
“I was new at the agency and trying to strengthen relationships with the senior leadership team,” said Aubrey Fox, CEO. “We started with Collectively’s executive coaching to do a lot of work with relationship building and bringing people together.”
Though he held leadership roles in other organizations, Aubrey hadn’t had coaching like this. He was surprised to see a real change in his approach to leadership.
"In the past, I didn't think that people changed that much. But executive coaching has helped me become more aware of my own emotional makeup and how I show up for the work and my team. I'm more flexible and adaptable as a leader," said Aubrey. "I've changed a lot in how I view my challenges and see potential solutions."
Reorganizing departments to work more effectively together
While working with Collectively in an executive coaching capacity, other organizational challenges rose to the surface.
“CJA has been around for a long time. It’s very diverse in its work functions and the previous leadership had been there for a while. There was a serious need to update and modernize how we worked,” said Aubrey. “We needed a culture that was less box-ticking and more innovative and supportive of each other.”
Collectively’s unconventional approach to consulting was a perfect fit for CJA’s people-centered values.
“Other consultants would be like, ‘Here’s the plan, here are the logistics. Good luck.’ But Collectively really got under the hood to get a deeper understanding of how our organization works and how our people function,” said Aubrey.
Collectively began working with CJA’s leadership to develop their collective vision for the future and help them gel as a team.
From there, Collectively’s organizational development consulting supported CJA as they reorganized, got the right people in the right roles, and launched new departments for more effective service delivery.
Embedding adapatable ways of working
The final piece of the leadership strategy puzzle was to engage in manager training. There, managers at every level learned how to set expectations, resource their teams, and stay accountable for delivering results.
The combination of leadership development, organizational development, executive coaching, and manager training has been transformative for CJA.
“Collectively helped us move away from the ‘command and control’ style of leadership that’s typical in nonprofits. Now, there’s more give and take—sometimes we have to align the people to the goals, sometimes we have to realign the goals to what’s happening in the organization,” reflected Aubrey. “It works because we have more empowered leaders at all levels who believe their job is to help make the organization better and who take responsibility for their role in that.”
Aubrey admits this level of organizational development is not always fun, but it’s probably the thing that matters most for impact-driven teams.
“It can be really hard for people to make an investment outside of their agency,” said Aubrey."This work has helped us build the capacity across the organization to make and sustain real change," said Aubrey. "I can't imagine doing it without Collectively's ‘outsider’ perspective."
Industry
Nonprofit
Company size
Midsized
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