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Our Services: Case Studies: Harlem RBI

Harlem RBI

Services Provided:  Rebuilt Employee Evaluation System, Clarified Roles and Responsibilities


Our Successes:

  • Created what Harlem RBI’s executive director called a “unified, uniform performance evaluation system,” replacing an informal, “patch work” system.
  • New HR evaluation tool clarified everyone’s roles and responsibilities and created accountability within the organization.
  • New employee evaluation system part of an overall strategic plan that CRE has helped Harlem RBI create that now includes the founding of a charter school.

“What gets measured, gets done.”

It’s a saying you expect to come from a no-nonsense CEO on Wall Street, not the ED of a nonprofit organization catering to the needs and fostering the dreams of the youth in East Harlem.

Yet as Harlem RBI has grown over the past two decades from an organization with one full-time employee and a $150,000 budget to 60 staffers and an $8 million budget, it’s a Human Resources truism that the organization’s executive director, Richard Berlin, says he has had to come to grips with.

“The organization was growing and it’s true, what gets measured gets done,” Berlin says. “We had to be sure we were measuring performance in a uniform way across the board.”

So Harlem RBI contacted Community Resource Exchange (CRE) in order to “essentially rebuild our entire performance evaluation system for the entire organization – up and down,” Berlin says.

What had existed prior to Jean Lobell, a CRE managing director, taking on its latest collaboration with Harlem RBI, Berlin says, was “sort of a patch work of tools,” an informal system to evaluate if each employee was performing up to expected goals, which also weren’t always clear. A far cry from the evaluation system now in place.

“What we have now at Harlem RBi is a unified, uniform performance evaluation system which aligns with Harlem RBI’s vision, mission and values,” Berlin says.

The system is used to evaluate everyone working at Harlem RBI,  he continued. There’s a year-end evaluation and they track goals on a quarterly basis which allows them to both be more supportive of individual workers who may need extra help while also keeping a closer eye on overall organizational goals, Berlin says.

“No matter who you are in the organization you know you’re being held accountable in the same way. It has clarified everybody’s role and responsibilities and created accountability,” he says. “People are now clear about what their accountable for and who they’re accountable to and that help gets things down.”

Harlem RBI has worked with CRE dating back at least until the first year that Berlin took over as ED in 1997, he says. At that point, CRE conducted an evaluation of Harlem RBI’s overall organization and goals moving forward. Berlin says the fact that an organization as respected as CRE eventually wrote a very positive evaluation about Harlem RBI back then “credentialed us with the outside world” and helped in obtaining funding and support that allowed the group to grow so steadily.

Then at the end of 2003, CRE helped Harlem RBI created a strategic plan the biggest piece of which was the founding of a charter school. Berlin says he has found through all his dealings with CRE is that its core strength is that CRE is a nonprofit itself and its consultants are steeped in the ways of the nonprofit world.

“CRE just brings a unique perspective that is hard for other (management consulting) firms to get. I think the result is a process that always feels inclusive and connected and focused on organizational mission,” Berlin says.

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