What, I was under the impression he was top shelf material. Great, now we are going to be set back another two years.

Anyone else notice there is nothing indicated why he was supposedly let go?
Of couse the peson involved is going to claim innocent of anything wrong....and maybe he is...but...me wonders....

Hired to be Fired!
Organizational Change: When did it become an issue for the public to decide?
What a great example of a business case for UNBC business students studying "Organizational Behavior".

No matter how a decision is reached inside an organization, they (we in the business world) must have the autonomy to make changes; no matter if the public or the individual involved believes it's warranted. As business leaders it is never easy to make decision that require the removal of individuals. Some may feel that reasons for someones dismissal are personal or not justified, however in most examples if not all, a change is required in order to begin a new culture-move the group in a new direction. We must protect that right! If management decides a group requires directional change(within any level of the group), one must have the freedom to govern. In senior management as in hockey we learn: eventually you will be fired-just don't take it personally!
McNamara did a great job, I wish him well in any endeavor he pursues. Welcome to business at the senior management...it's just business and a great example for students to study "Organizational Behavior". Don't take it personally.

Bang on!!

Some of the achievements listed may simply not be the types of achievements that are required under a new UNBC leadership. How do we, as the general public, know what transpired in discussions, behind closed doors, that dealt with where the U was going to be headed with athletics in the next 5 years? A simple difference of opinion of what that path should be would have determined that the current Director was not going to be as beneficial to the U as he previously was.

So, we have the Board of Governors who must decide whether they support the decision of the new President they just hired or the Athletic Director.

Typically a no brainer unless there are extenuating circumstances that the new President could not have been aware of.

This may have something to do with Budgets and Cost cutting. UNBC is in a financial crunch, and as I understand it enrolements are down this year. (Havent seen any figues yet, however if they were up, it would have been front page news).

In any event why would someone want to stay in a position, if the top brass wanted you gone???

Hartley is off his rocker if those are accomplishments that he feels MacNamara is responsible for. For an athletic director that has arguably one of the best facilities in the province, why has he not been able to recruit better players?

Why do you go on the UNBC Athletics website and find no info on the Timberwolves teams? And why oh why did Len hired Kelly Sharp as a booster club coordinator?

Truth is, Macnamara is yesterdays man and UNBC need a person of vision, not someone who was happy with mediocrity.

McNamara needs a good experienced lawyer ***in Vancouver*** to represent him. UNBC's lawyer is also representing the SFU university and I am aware that the same UNBC lawyer, due to over confidence, lost to SFU faculty association's lawyer in a SFU firing case in BC labour board. The info is available on the webpage of the board and can help McNamara.

Iwama has failed to end the mismanagment in UNBC and instead of resolving a legal case against UNBC, in a collegial way, and ending the discrimination, he has decided to cause a second legal case by targeting a UNBC staff.

Very catasrophic move by Iwama. It is a
lose-lose situation for Iwama now, whatever the board decides. I also don't know the future of Madak, the dean in charge of declining enrolments in UNBC and the one who has been the immidiate boss of McNamara and the dean who started this recent fiasco. I would have eliminated Madak's position instead.

My advice to Iwama would have been to be more humble towards his hard working employees and acknowledge the mistake and backtrack from his position and try very hard to regain the trust of students, staff and faculty members in UNBC. He can improve the performance of UNBC, "if and only if" he rewards the good performance of the staff and faculty (in accordance with performance criteria) and give much more weight to criteria instead of ignoring the criteria in UNBC by following the bad advice from his deans with poor performance themselves.

I can't beleive I'm about to agree with Howard but here goes;

There is no doubt Len worked hard and accomplished a lot for UNBC. He is indeed a tireless advocate for UNBC sports.

The simple fact is that if UNBC is to take the next step in sport he is NOT the guy. He's gone as far as hard work take you. Now they need someone to take them to the next level and he simply lacks that level of experience, those networks and those "intangibles" that succesful CIS Athletic Directors have and need.

Nothing personal...just business.

Take your package, move on.

UNBC has a chronic problem in faulty evaluation of performance of its employees and it has been documented publicly. This problem is the main issue in the dissatisfaction in UNBC and has contributed to the decline of enrolment
in UNBC. The first step in solving the problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem (by UNBC administration, UNBC board, by BC media, by BC politicians ...), then take the patient to a doctor to get well before the condition become worse.

The following lawyers have represented the most cases in BC Labour relations board:

-Peter A Gall,Q.C. [Blaikie]: 100+ cases
-Andrea Zwack [Blaikie]: 90+ cases
-Donald R Munroe, Q.C.[Blaikie]: 30+ cases
-Walter G Rilkoff [Lawson] 30+ cases

The top 3 are from Blaikie law firm. Blaikie firm has worked with UNBC in the past and may not be able to represent McNamara. But I suspect that McNamara's lawyer should deal with UNBC's lawyer who is Patrick Gilligan-Hackett.

McNamara should check with a lawyer like Rilkoff for an assessment of risk/success and time limits to file a complaint. Rilkoff has worked in the past in the labour relation board and is aware of the important issues there and he has dealt with Patrick Gilligan-Hackett, the UNBC lawyer.

Back to econ101's point: "Organizational Change: When did it become an issue for the public to decide?"

I think the question may be worded wrong.

For instance, governments are organizations. It became an issue for the public to decide about organizational change at the top level of representatives when the government and/or the people decided to have a democratic government.

Other than that, I the public actually does not decide directly. I think the public, in a democratic country might comment, discuss, protest, etc. but not decide.

The more an organization is in the eyes of the public and the more an organization uses public money, the more the organization must consider the view of the public about the organization, otherwise, in the case of strong negative reaction, the organization will eventually no longer function effectively since it will expend more time fighting fires than doing the work it ought to be doing. By the same token, with strong positive reaction the organization will be a much better place to work for and will be more effective than they might be without any reaction.

Thus, as long as the public does comment, they may have an indirect impact of how an organization might go about implementing change.