Incredible mission with iffy to completely disorganized departmental management
Pros
I had respected Partners In Health as an organization for years before working there. They do a lot of good in the countries they are based in, and they have a large staff of highly qualified global health equity experts. Overall Partners In Health values the opinions and life experience of staff who live in the countries they work in rather than making sweeping assumptions on how the US can help "less developed" countries to consciously try to avoid the white savior complex I have always admired the focus Partners In Health places on centering their work in areas where communities have the least support. By starting administering aid in areas that need it most, PIH tries to solve some of the most difficult problems first, even when it is more difficult to prove the value they provide than if the organization decided to work closer to areas with more resources at the start All this said - These are reasons I admire the mission of Partners In Health, however when I began working there I started to understand why people say you shouldn't meet your idols because they are never quite what they appear to be when they're behind closed doors
Cons
I found a lot of the behind the scenes of Partners in Health to be at best disorganized, with thoroughly lackluster onboarding and initial training. The training that new employees do receive is not typically organized through HR, but instead vary greatly depending on the department you join who create their own onboarding materials. I felt I was not given enough information to understand how the parts of the organization which were relevant to my role connected to each other, let alone the overall organization functioned. I worked remotely out of the Boston office (the main US headquarters), working closely with C-level executives as well as representatives of all the countries that Partners In Health has sites in. I was never given any cultural competency training prior to interacting with these high level medical professionals or well known governmental figures. I tried to tread carefully to maintain respect across cultures, but cultural sensitivity/competency training is the absolute least PIH could do to prepare the staff who will be interacting with those working on site in such varied parts of the world. Unfortunately, I also encountered inter-departmental conflicts (more similar to high school drama than to a professional workplace), that my colleagues openly referred to as an ongoing roadblock for collaboration between the teams. Allowing contentious relationships between teams is never going to be conducive to true collaboration, and the insistence on traditional "professionalism" in the org seemed to come to the detriment of real, human communication that could actually address interpersonal problems. Communication between departments within the US office was essential to keeping projects running smoothly, but there was rarely a shared understanding of what other departments were working on, which I would imagine leads to a lot of the same work being done by multiple people who don't know of other initiatives. There was a lot of talk in my time there about "streamlining work flows," "sharing resources," and "increasing communication" between different US departments and between the different country sites, but I never saw any true effort coming from the top to facilitate this There are many die-hard employees at PIH (PIHers) who have been in their roles for decades, which adds a lot of value to the org, but can also give an impression that there are different tiers of employees who receive different levels of respect or who are viewed as more or less valuable based on their tenure, which can leave new employees by the wayside to figure things out on their own rather than "bother" more experienced staff - Laying a foundational understanding that some people's time was definitionally worth more than others even when they are on the same team
