Karen E. Castro

Not a place for Professionals Classes are diminishing in size and number, long-time employees are being fired or having hours reduced, there have been multiple leadership transitions, and the new CEO (Andrea Bazan, not Steven Fink) seems completely lost but too egotistical to know it. The board is absent, and this is a rudderless ship. If it didn?t have so much money in the bank (maybe from years of poorly paying employees), it would fold. New money is drying up as the philanthropic community sees this contraction of services. Another review here says new management is unethical, but that?s been a problem at Puente for years. Everyone who works here has seen it. Current management is an improvement only in so far as the CEO?s cousins and uncles and sisters and brothers and aunts aren?t employed here at over-inflated salaries ? yet. It is an unpleasant place to work. While colleagues are great, management is in closed-door meetings, when it is present at all. One day you are commended for your job, the next day you are vilified, though your performance has remained constant. There are no published standards, and even as you try to set your own goals, you are hindered by management, who would prefer to keep their goals a secret, presumably so you will never meet them and then can be castigated. There is something of a high school mentality going on here, with favorites, mean girls, bullies and too much drinking. Not merely is this tolerated, this is the organizational culture being fostered. Soon this will be a place?at best--of the mediocre leading the mediocre.