Jim (CEO and founder) is as bad as the other reviews say (and maybe worse.) If you want a leader who lives by the organization's values and who inspires you, do not work here. Jim is incredibly egotistical, arrogant, self-centered, and has delusions of grandeur. As a CEO, it his his way or the highway, in every area of the organization's key decision-making. As a personality, he is often a hindrance to the work that we do. He is also largely responsible for the constant mission creep of the organization and the inability to stay on track.
However, it's not fair to only put the blame on Jim. The rest of the senior leadership team and a few others in senior management enable him 100% and often need to scramble and apologize for Jim's misdeeds when Jim won't apologize or demonstrate accountability himself.
Common Sense has recently (in the last few years) embarked on a DEI initiative, but so far the results have seemed mostly performative and an easy checkbox to check (i.e., "hire a diversity consultant") and there is still deep transformational work to be done in order to make Common Sense an equitable place to work. I believe that as long as Jim and the existing senior leadership team remain, the organization's DEI efforts will remain surface-level and lack real impact.
There is a general lack of transparency and accountability from senior leadership to the rest of the organization, and this has been repeatedly brought up in our staff engagement surveys as a problem area, but little has been done about it. Sheltering in place has only exacerbated this issue.
Layoffs are a regular occurrence and don't seem to make any strategic sense. Meanwhile, Jim is able to hire whoever he wants and create roles out of thin air for his friends. Nepotism is a common practice. The way the organization spends money is questionable at best and there are definitely some ethical questions in this area.
