Pros
● You can at least take comfort that you will be working with smart people. Their hiring screening filters out a lot of duds. ● Personally, I worked with a lot of people that I absolutely adored. ● The building/office you work in will most likely be very nice. Of course, as the Office Manager, it will be up to you to somehow find time to keep it that way. Lindamood-Bell does believe in finding nice locations and while I really wish they didn't blow a ton of money at Pottery Barn and Ballard Designs (seriously, why do you insist on buying white couches when we work with children?!?), the upper-class families seem to be impressed by the choices. ● Wacky Wednesdays can be fun about 20% of the time when you get to "dress up" (usually "dress down" in my case) but most ideas are regurgitated and stale after a year. ● You will gain plenty of other skills to add to your resume that didn't seem to be a part of the original job description, whether you like it or not. ● I've seen their programs work. It's painful to know how much money you are charging families for a week's worth of instruction, but when you get the e-mail from a parent that their child decided to read them a story last night and they were in tears, it's pretty special.
Cons
● The "Is This A Cult?" thing? It'll probably cross your mind sometime during your two-week training. If not then, it's bound to happen eventually. Lindamood-Bell spent a ton of money for people in corporate to attend Disney management trainings. There is a lot of hokey Disney-esque faux-flattery that goes around (Note: Chick-Fil-A uses the exact same phrase, so it's not THAT special) and it always sounds super creepy and disingenuous. I hope you like Kool-Aid. ● The CEO often makes irrational spur-of-the-moment ideas and the other "Yes" people in corporate just go along with her idea, for fear of seeming difficult. "We're doing the schedule this way!" "No wait! Now we're doing it this way!" "Next week you'll be using fancy new computers for it!" "Wait, that didn't work so let's go back to the way you did it eight months ago!" "No wait, the way we did it in the 90's was better!" ● They once made EVERYONE take a 5% pay cut for an indefinite amount of time. The e-mail went out on a Friday... after the centers were closed... and the CEO didn't even send it herself. She had her assistant do it. I wasn't even mad that I took a 5% pay cut. I was mad that they did it to the hourly employees, who were already severely underpaid and usually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There was an uprising from the clinicians before I even knew about it. We had a very straightforward trusting relationship in our center, so the clinicians were understanding that we didn't know any more than them, but it was a huge blow to morale for the entire company. I'm glad people were mad, though. They had every right to be peeved! ● You will always be expected to be THE person that deals with things NOW! Yes, it will be common things like the phone ringing and having someone at the door, but it will also be computers that don't work, clinicians that don't show up, student's that don't aim very well in the bathroom, insects and rodents appearing and disappearing, chat messages that pop up out of the blue, mysterious cars in the parking lot, air conditioning that comes and goes as it pleases, and students that create their own illnesses and need to go home. Good luck having a daily agenda! ● Meetings, meetings, meetings. You will be bombarded with useless online pep rallies and occasional trainings throughout the week. Almost every meeting has a moment where someone is crying (I'm totally not kidding) about how much their job means to them. If you live in the Eastern United States, these meetings will almost always be at a horribly inconvenient time of the day. Hope you don't like eating lunch in peace. ● They will tell your Center Director that he/she should be out of the center 80% of the time. Then they will also tell you that you need to meet with them every morning. And you should schedule all meetings between the Center Director and families within two days of a testing, but again, they're rarely supposed to be in the center! This is one of many unrealistic expectations that is somehow the Office Manager's problem. ● You will be on call ALL THE TIME! You'll get text messages at all hours from clinicians not feeling well or messages about what needs to be done tomorrow. When you wake up to your alarm in the morning, you will tremble as you pick up your phone, hoping to not have yet another text message from someone calling out. It is almost impossible to unplug from the job. ● Creating a functional schedule requires hours and hours, if not days, to do properly. Many students have special needs and can only work with certain personalities. You can't make the schedule too early, though, because if just one student is added to your schedule, you'll have to start over from scratch. And let me tell you, they WILL add a student at 4pm on a Friday and you'll be there until 8pm trying to figure it out so your employees will know when to show up on Monday. ● Summer clinicians can be very flaky. I mean, I get it... it's a Summer job to them, and many of them treat it as such. When you're doing 1-on-1 instruction, though, it's an absolute nightmare if ANYONE doesn't show up on time. This will constantly be infuriating. You often get less than five minutes to figure out how you're going to fix things, and this usually involves begging another center to help you out via computer (which is a challenge since you don't really have time to be at a computer, nor a phone) and then coming up with all of the supplies to actually do it. ● Speaking of Summer clinicians, they are hard to find! Remember the part where I mentioned that the hiring screening filters out a lot of duds? Well, it also filters out 70-80% of the people that apply for the job. Then, when the remaining candidates hear about the potential for not even getting full-time hours and possibly looking for another job in three months, many of them run. ● If a Summer clinician is offered to stay beyond the Summer, it's up to you to figure out how to get this employee enough hours to survive while also not offending the clinicians that have been there for years. It's a delicate matter. Corporate would be just fine with you scheduling all clinicians for 4 to 17 hours per week, but if you follow that plan, you'll be left with zero employees in a few weeks. It is NOT EASY! ● Due to the high cost of Lindamood-Bell's programs, families tend to be overly critical of absolutely anything that doesn't live up to 100% of their expectations. The introduction of online instruction was a HUGE problem for families and most didn't feel that they should pay the same rate for their child sitting in front of a computer from time to time (i.e. the aforementioned emergencies of clinicians not showing up). Some families will even insist that they not be charged for showing up late. It seems preposterous but some higher-ups will overrule you and you'll end up looking like the mean jerk that's actually trying to enforce policy. ● There is a false impression as an Office Manager that you will be making educated decisions based on your planning grids as to whether your center has the ability to take on another student. Your opinion really won't matter, though. If it means putting that child in front of a computer for four hours a day so they can work with an assortment of part-time clinicians spread across the country (of which, that will be your nightmarish problem to figure out as well), they're going to do it. And now you'll have four hours a day when you'll be trying to fix computer problems and checking every hour to make sure the other center shows up. Basically, the entire center will already be stretched too thin and then you personally will be dealt with even more stress. Oh, the almighty dollar. ● Nepotism runs rampant. You can probably count the few distinctive personalities in the company on one hand. Everyone else seems to be cut from the same mold. You'll see the look... you'll hear the timbre... you'll witness the promotion.
