Many programs in North Carolina are both broke and broken. Feather O’Connor Houstoun offers clues to help decide if a program needs more than money, or instead of money, “that is, [if it’s] underperforming due to lack of focus on outcomes and results, indifferent leadership or low imagination quotient.”

O’Connor Houstoun offers six guides, but one should sound very familiar:

Clue number four: Questions about performance and “How do we know how we’re doing?” are met with bluster or thinly-veiled disdain. An overly sensitive response may be a legacy of prior fault-finding leadership, but it may also be a sign that the organization is defending unseen work practices that serve the workforce better than they serve the public. Inflexibility about work rules, schedules and overtime restrictions are often wrapped in rhetoric about the “lives and families at stake,” but may really be about a system that facilitates second jobs and lifestyles supported by guaranteed levels of overtime.