Senior Leadership Meeting Focuses on Accountability
NYCHA held its Senior Leadership Meeting at BNY Mellon in Manhattan on May 26. Falling the same week as Next-Generation NYCHA’s one-year anniversary, there was plenty to talk about. Chair and CEO Shola Olatoye enumerated an impressive list of accomplishments, which General Manager Michael Kelly discussed with property management staff during visits to developments before and after the meeting.
“The reason we have been so successful in one short year is because we kept our commitments to our stakeholders…for the tasks we outlined as our first steps,” GM Kelly told the group.
Emphasizing the need to better measure how NYCHA is succeeding—and where we need to improve—Chair Olatoye introduced the meeting’s theme of greater accountability. “We need to be able to pinpoint and measure specifically and accurately what works and what doesn’t so we can replicate and build on our success,” she said.
The meeting included training by Community Resource Exchange on “How to Manage Accountability Using Metrics.”
In a morning presentation on “Managing to Outcomes and Internal Metrics,” Senior Advisor to the Chair and Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Karina Totah explained that “[knowing] where we’re going and why we’re going there is outcome-based work. That is how we make an impact.” In using metrics, Ms. Totah advised asking “what can you track to measure [your] impact and how you can count it.”
The meeting also included Next- Gen overviews by six managers, including Director of Management Services Lillian Harris (see p. 4) and “Managing to Outcomes” presentations by managers, including Heating Department Deputy Directors Javier Almondovar and Michael Iezza.
The full-day meeting began with an overview by Chief Communications Officer Jean Weinberg and Deputy Communications Officer Jackie Primeau on how to create success stories for our work; they encouraged stakeholders and others to contact the Department of Communications to publicize them.
Meeting highlights also included a discussion on “NYCHA Adaptation: Eight Decades of Change,” by Dr. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and author of “Public Housing that Worked,” the authoritative study of NYCHA’s history, and Matthais Altwicker, Associate Professor at NYIT.
