Leader/Follower Relationships at The American Cancer Society

For my final reflection I will discuss the leader/follower dynamics and relationships at the American Cancer Society. My internship has been completely remote and everyone I am working with, except for two people who are high up in leadership in the organization, have been working from home as well. Because of this, I have only been able to experience leader/follower relationships and dynamics through a remote setting, but I still believe that I have gotten a good understanding of this even while being completely remote. Also, because I am remote I was able to attend many remote meetings with many teams and I was able to have one-on-one meetings with many people in the organization. These things gave me good insight into the leader-follower relationships and dynamics of the organization. 

The way that the work is structured in the organization is through different groups that each have smaller teams within them. The smallest teams are around 4-6 people and these small teams will be grouped together with three or four other teams that they will work with. There recently was a big restructuring in late winter and early spring of 2021 in the structure of these teams regarding their sizes and which teams worked with which. Even though I was not there for this, I can tell it had a big impact on the organization, as people still talked of it often throughout my internship. I know that this restructuring was the result of less funding and less success due to COVID-19 and because of this, some members of many teams were fired. There was even someone from my immediate team that was fired. A lot of the work that I did was for things that she did and was working on before she was fired. I could tell that this restructuring caused tension between the executive leadership and the rest of the organization. I have heard things along the lines of the leadership not really being in touch with the lower level employees of the organization and the field work and everyday activity. It seems to me that there is a lot of unity among the lower groups and the middle and even upper management and then a big separation from the executive leadership. 

When understanding how decisions are made in the organization it is important to understand the levels of leadership. Each small team of 4 or 6 has a leader who is either a part of middle or upper management and each larger group has about 2 members of the upper management. These upper management members coordinate and liaison with the executive leadership, but they work much more closely with their team than they do with the exec leadership team. The decision making in my opinion exists on two scales. When it comes to everyday decisions, they are mostly made by upper management people and sometimes middle managers as well. These decisions that are more sensitive or important are run through the executive team, but there is a lot of trust and leeway given to upper management. Then there are decisions that are made completely by the executive team. These decisions are the bigger scale decisions, but they do impact everyone. They are then relayed down from the exec team to the upper management to the rest of the employees. It is interesting to me that even pretty big decisions that are made by executive leaders will be relayed through upper management instead of straight from the mouths of the executive leaders. I believe this could lead to some of the disconnect from the executive team and the regular employees. But it is important for me to mention that many of these observations come from much more subtle things that people are saying and not outright disconnect or anything overtly negative. In general the organization structure works well and everyone seems relatively happy with their role. While decisions are mostly made by upper leaders, each employee seems to have their own specialty and when it comes to decisions in these areas they are often given leeway and the ability to make decisions.