In the footer of this website, I reveal only a few details about who I am, including that I am a co-founder of a nonprofit organization that collapsed in the wake of an attempted board coup. To reveal a little more about me: I was on staff at the organization for its first five years and changed careers after that, but remained on the board. I knew that I could better serve the organization and its mission in that capacity, and that there were people with more talent than me as nonprofit administrators, ready to take my place on staff.
Current Status
I had read books and other materials on nonprofit governance, management, and operations long before co-founding an organization, and continue to read. In the time since the coup, I’ve been reading these materials with a different lens. But it’s been a bit more difficult to get through them. Random passages trigger my anger at knowing what a difference it would have made had I, my co-founder, or the other board members had read and accepted the advice and wisdom written in these books.
I recently picked up a new book to help me better understand what I had actually witnessed when things went awry. In her book Mobbed: What to Do When They are Really Out to Get You, cultural anthropologist Dr. Janice Harper reveals the dynamics of mobbing in the workplace. If management wants an employee out of the company — especially an employee who is difficult to remove — they will take steps to discredit that employee in the eyes of their colleagues before the employee is fired. I will plan to write more about how the lessons from this book can apply to a board coup situation in a future post.
In the meantime — on my doctor’s advice — I began counseling sessions a couple of months ago. My doctor advised me to start counseling so that I can find myself “at peace” with what happened. When I began my first session, my therapist asked me about my goals for seeking help. I conveyed what my doctor said to me, and continued: “But I don’t really want to be at peace with what happened. My issue is that as I take this journey of learning as much as I can from what happened and doing something productive with all of that, I can easily get triggered. I read something in a book and feel too angry to keep going. I need to get past that.”
I couldn’t quite find the right word to figure out what I wanted to say. If I’m not really looking to be at peace, but I also don’t want to be so angry that it’s difficult to continue, then what am I really looking for? My therapist suggested that I may be looking to become desensitized to that anger, so that I can focus on my larger goals. And she was right. She found the right word.
Curiosity Over Anger
The Insider remains one of my favorite movies. It’s a dramatization of the story of Jeffrey Wigand, a big tobacco executive who blew the whistle on the industry; and Lowell Bergman, a 60 Minutes producer whose efforts helped keep Wigand safe as he brought damning truths about the tobacco industry to the public.
One of the key events in the story involved an improper FBI seizure of Wigand’s personal computer during an investigation of a death threat against him. When Bergman heard about the seizure, he got an agent in-charge at the bureau (Agent Robertson) on the phone to make some waves about the seizure. As Robertson tries to evade Bergman’s questions about the raid, Bergman responds:
“You better take a good look [at what happened], because I’m getting two things: pissed off, and curious!” It’s such an excellent line — one that stuck with me since the first time I watched the movie, back in the early 2000s. Sometimes, when I feel upset about another person’s actions, I remind myself of this moment. It’s better to be curious and to ask questions that I have some chance of finding the answers to than to show anger.
I feel very strongly that what I witnessed and experienced in the course of the attempted board coup was an injustice. Why should I ever be at peace with that? Why should I be at peace as well with my now more fully understanding and appreciating that the basic, default nonprofit model unwittingly sets up many nonprofit founders for failure?
This curiosity moment from “The Insider” has long inspired me to focus on finding and asking the right questions to ask when I’m upset. It’s not to say that I have been perfect at putting that idea into practice over the past couple of decades — nobody’s perfect — but for me, that’s what this journey is about. What are the right questions to ask, and how do I find the answers?
Peeling Back the Layers
Many of the books I have read over the years about nonprofit governance and the various aspects of administration have a lot to say about what constitutes “best practices.” That’s not to mention the many contradictory ideas I have heard from consultants, attorneys, accountants, and even the most seasoned administrators. It should come as no surprise that there’s no shortage of opinions about “best practices” of nonprofit governance.
To really get at the heart of why board coups happen in the nonprofit world and how to prevent or fight them, my questions must go beyond those that may challenge the most common or most debated best practices. And my questions must also go beyond understanding the topics I have covered so far in some of my past blog posts.
Most board members don’t know how to be good board members. And all too often, some of the most crucial aspects of board service also turn out to be the most uncomfortable, especially for inexperienced board members — fundraising may come to mind as an obvious example.
Several months before the incident that sparked the board coup that I experienced, our board chair offered to lead an orientation for new board members, in lieu of the Executive Director leading it. One slide of the presentation offered a set of bullet points listing out “dos and don’ts” that conveyed a sense of what good governance looks like, and what it doesn’t look like. The board chair skipped over that slide, calling it “not important.”
Why would a board chair — especially one who is a seasoned nonprofit administrator — claim that a lesson in basic board governance delivered to a group of new and inexperienced board members is “not important?” The moment happened very quickly, and the lack of alarm I felt at the time now feels incredibly naïve. That moment was one of several big red flags that I should have recognized at the time that something was not right.
So now, a few years later, as I peel back the layers a little further, I discover this book that describes mobbing — what it looks like and how to deal with it if it happens to you. The book’s first chapter puts mobbing in the context of mobbing in other species. This is not a phenomenon that only happens among human beings. Mobbing can happen in any group that has one member regarded as an “alpha” among its own. That means that we’re talking about a very dark behavior that exists as a core instinct in social groups.
By this point in the book, the author has also offered a few fair warnings about what’s to come as I continue my reading. First, it warns that many of those who have been mobbed in the past tend to be at greater risk of becoming the target of a mob again later in life. Second, the book also warns that in the course of preventing this type of situation, those who find themselves becoming a target may also have some hard truths to face about themselves.
Dr. Harper’s anthropological perspective on mobbing is a dark layer to uncover that is clearly relevant to a board coup situation. I’m still angry about what happened, of course, but also still curious to reach a better understanding of what really happened, and what part I can play in recognizing the potential for a board coup in the future and stopping it before it happens.