Administrative Albatross

Another example of "my way is the best way" was an organization early on in my practice that asked me to do a development audit to show them new fundraising capacity. This was not by any means a new charity start-up, but it did have a bad case of "founder-itis." The founder/executive had been in place for more than thirty years. The genius of the organization was that it had developed an organization management model that successfully allowed it to continuously diversify its human service offerings to an increasing breadth of service recipients.

The problem was that this woman had stayed in place so long because she believed that her administrative style was working, that it was superior to any other management procedure, and that no one could learn it from her to her satisfaction.

Over time, this administrative or management style, which had in early years been so unusually helpful to the organization's life and growth, became something of an albatross. When changes in the style were needed to keep up with more modern management practices and the demand from funders and government for more accountability, she refused to change. By the time I got there 99% of the people interviewed for the development audit said it was long past the time when she should step down. But she wouldn't budge.

This is another example where you have both a "turf" issue and a "my way or the highway" issue working together. The lesson I learned from the encounter with this client was that you can have a Board that knows its work, wants to do its work, and is (relatively) independent of the founder/executive, but this is not always enough to provide the kind of supervision that has the political strength to fire the founder.

What was the sticking point? The roots the organization had in the local archdiocese – had that founder/executive been fired, the founder had the power to, effectively, replace enough of the Board members to keep her in office, and there would have been a community-wide upheaval that none of the Board leadership was prepared to endure.

More on this tomorrow.