This anonymized case study is meant to get beyond the common platitudes about good nonprofit governance practices by examining in detail an all-too-typical example of things going terribly wrong. It is based on something I experienced earlier in my career. In this article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, I outline practical strategies to avoid crises like this one and how to turn around troubled governing bodies.
“Alex, can I talk to you privately?”
Naturally, I agreed.
Tom Jones, a kindly benefactor and inspiration of mine for much of my career, led me over to a small table on the outskirts of a cocktail reception that was a prelude to what I expected to be a festive meal. The dinner was the formal opening of the first board of directors’ retreat ever held by Anonymous Nonprofit (ANP), which at the time was a nearly ten-year-old organization.
As we settled into our chairs, I wondered what Tom wanted to talk to me about. Perhaps congratulate me for being the first to suggest that ANP have a board retreat? Or maybe admonish me gently for ruffling a few feathers on the board of directors with my occasional blunt observations and suggestions?
He had scheduled, and then cancelled, two meetings with me and our board co-chairs since arriving in Washington two days earlier. It was not his usual style, but he was nearing 80 years old, so I didn’t make much of that.
Tom got right to the point. “Alex, we are trying to create a certain culture at ANP. And you don’t fit in. So I would like you to resign from the board.” I took that to mean that I would leave walk out the hotel, skipping the welcome dinner and board retreat that I had set in motion.
“Tom, I will not do that,” I replied firmly after I had processed what he had said. “I was elected for a one-year term to serve this organization, and I intend to serve out my term as best I can to help the organization grow.”
Tom sat back in his chair. “So, you are not going to resign from the board?” He seemed stunned by my decision.
I shook my head. “If I choose not to stand for another term, or if my candidacy is voted down, that is one thing. But I will not be forced out now.”
He then said flatly, “This meeting is over.” He stood up and returned to the reception. As it turned out, I would never have another conversation with Tom.
All I could think at that moment was, it wasn’t supposed to end like this.
* * *
When I began giving author talks about Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, my semi-autobiographical book about nonprofit leadership, I tried to infuse some provocative and amusing riffs that would keep audiences engaged.
As a preface to my top lessons on building a high-functioning nonprofit governing board, I said that to my surprise, I had concluded that around 80% of boards of directors around the country were dysfunctional in one way or another. I asked people to raise their hands if they thought my estimate was off base, and occasionally a few did so. I told them that I would seek them out after my formal presentation and ask them why they disagreed, rather than get into the debate right then.
Invariably when I tracked the dissenters down and asked them, they would say that they disagreed because they thought 80% was an underestimate of the degree of dysfunction. I later integrated those surprising responses into my talks.
Given the proliferation of charities in the United States, there are currently more than 1.5 million nonprofit governing bodies. No one really knows how many are high-functioning versus dysfunctional, though a 2014 study by the Urban Institute paints a fairly dismal picture. Based on the nods I get every time I cite my own unscientific estimate, there is considerable room for improvement.
I sometimes wonder why serving on a nonprofit board – which is almost always done on a voluntary, uncompensated basis – brings out the worst in so many people. My experiences with ANP some years ago have put this question into sharp relief, in the most painful way I could imagine.
* * *
One day, during a time of several life transitions nearly two years before the confrontation described above took place, my phone unexpectedly vibrated and I saw it was Tom Jones calling me. I answered and greeted him warmly. He told me that Oliver Moss, the Executive Director of ANP, was on the line too.
Some years before getting that call, I had had some dealings with Oliver resulting from Tom asking me for a favor. He believed that Oliver was the perfect person to lead the organization. But he acknowledged a flaw: his discomfort with fund-raising. So, as a favor to Tom and as my small service to the movement his organization was part of, I met Oliver in a public library in San Diego and gave him a two-hour tutorial on major donor fund-raising.
He listened intently and we parted with a hug. I told him I would contact him in a few weeks to see if he had any questions arising from having applied any of the techniques I had taught him. I found it strange that he never responded to any of my attempts to reconnect and discuss fund-raising. When I mentioned this to Tom at one point, he just shrugged it off.
Little did I know at the time, while Oliver is often open to new information, as a leader he resents anyone “telling him what to do” (in the words of a former organizational insider). I realize now that my attempts to follow up probably felt like me “checking up” on whether he was doing any of the things I had gone over with him.
As my friends Susan Davis and David Bornstein noted in their exceptional book Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, many social change leaders have a high need for autonomy. Oliver certainly fit that description. Perhaps social entrepreneurs believe that in exchange for taking a lower salary than they could earn in the private sector, they are entitled to this freedom to operate as they see fit.
But on this sunny day while I was on an extended vacation in Florida, that minor slight of not returning my calls was the furthest thing from our minds. Tom and Oliver explained, rather excitedly, that they were getting more interest from large, well-established foundations and questions were being asked about the makeup of their board of directors. Up to that point, it had consisted of Tom and a small number of his friends and family – something that raised eyebrows among more sophisticated philanthropists.
So, considering the impressive board of directors I had built at Grameen Foundation and the one that I had chaired at Fonkoze USA – two achievements Tom had witnessed up close – they wanted me to join the ANP board.
With advice I had gotten to not rush into any major new commitment weighing on me, I did not immediately say yes. But not wanting to disappoint Tom, I did mention that I could hardly imagine saying no to him, given how generous he and his wife had been to me since we had met in the late 1990s.
When we had a follow-up conversation a week later, I agreed to join. With a flourish I said, “Tom, I recently told someone that if you asked me to go to Washington, D.C., put on high heels and walk to New York, I’d only ask, ‘Please point me in the right direction.’” I considered him a prince of a man and I wanted him to know that I was more than happy to put myself at his service while also finding a niche for myself in the movement that he was now part of. The fact that taking on a role like this now was not on the timeline I had imagined for myself wasn’t a major concern. Life sometimes requires a change in plans to seize an unexpected opportunity to serve or to be there for someone who has been there for you.
I braced myself for the challenge of helping to turn an informal, rubber-stamp board into a high-functioning governing body. I thought that I would be equal to the task.
* * *
As Tom left me sitting alone at the reception, I realized that I needed to come up with a plan quickly. I got myself a glass of white wine and found the retreat facilitator. He took my story in, but had little to say. I approached the board co-chair, John O’Connor, and after a perfunctory handshake he grimaced, turned his back to me, and walked away as rudely as I think a person could in such a situation.
I shook my head and found Alan Jackson, my friend of 25 years who was the other co-chair. It flashed through my mind that I had been asked to give a tribute to him at a big dinner in his honor just a few months earlier. Certainly, he would have something constructive to say.
I explained what happened and asked how he would try to help address the situation so we could all focus on what was good for ANP and not this unfolding drama between Tom and me. I appealed to him to serve as a mediator.
His words, spoken slowly and coldly, still haunt me today. “I think too many bridges have been burned for that to work.” He avoided eye contact with me as he said them.
I was astonished. I had no idea that anyone had a serious problem with anything I had done, despite the inevitable tensions that would come up from time to time as I advocated for and against certain policies and processes. My eyes bugged out. I was speechless.
Within minutes we were being called to dinner. I stepped away from the group to collect myself, and then entered the room – one of the last people to do so.
Around three dozen board members and senior staff were taking part, and we were seated around two rectangular tables. Still reeling, I saw only a few open chairs left. One was next to Sally Mercer, a fellow board member whom I had occasionally clashed with but whom I had grown to respect as someone serious about good governance, who valued open debate, and who courageously expressed unpopular views when she thought it necessary.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, I said, “Do you know what just happened to me?” Reading my face, she said she wanted to hear me out. So I told her what Tom had said and how John and Alan had reacted. Expressing the perfect combination of empathy and righteous indignation, two of her best qualities, she calmed me down a bit. Clearly at least one person on the board was not in the know about this, and was in fact strongly opposed to the move to expel me.
After the opening course, each participant was invited to introduce themselves. I briefly considered, and then dismissed, the idea of describing my conversation with Tom, and my incredulity about it, when I was asked to speak. I took the high road, figuring that people like Sally would work to find some grown-up way to mediate whatever was happening so that we could move on. There was no need disrupt and cast a pall over the entire gathering.
After dinner, I approached a few people on the board and senior staff one on one. Soon I realized that most people were not aware of what Tom had planned, with the exceptions of Oliver, Alan, and John. But no one shared Sally’s conviction that this was wrong and needed to be handled in a more professional and sensitive way. Mostly, they looked at their shoes and tried to change the subject.
As I headed home that night, I realized I had to figure out how I was going to conduct myself the following day, since I never considered dropping out of the retreat that I had originally proposed.
* * *
Unfortunately, my wife Emily was away on business, so I had to think through an approach on my own. A key decision was whether I would choose an opportunity to bring this conflict out into the open and presumably force the entire group to grapple with it.
As I debated options, I replayed in my mind some of my recent interactions with board members and Oliver for clues and insights.
In a prior meeting, I had remarked that organizational goals for each year were never adopted, and progress on key performance indicators of the group’s work (such as they were) tended to be fairly disorganized. (Not that this stopped the group from engaging in over-the-top self-congratulation about nearly every piece of information it received.) I proposed that we develop a dashboard, and also agree on annual goals that would help us debate priorities and later, benchmark performance in a more rigorous and systematic way.
No one seemed opposed except for Taylor Roberts, who said he didn’t think these steps were necessary. I was coming to understand that Taylor, who was a skilled and long-serving volunteer, had a single role on the board: to immediately dismiss any idea that he felt might constrain Oliver.
A few weeks later I followed up with an email to Oliver, offering to help him design an organizational dashboard. His response: “Having spent most of my life in the private sector I have used dashboard in numerous situations. Thank you for the offer.” It was classic Oliver: polite on the surface, passive aggressive just below the surface, unwilling to acknowledge that the board had a role in determining what information it received and how decisions were made, and hostile to anything that suggested that he was not already doing things the right way. (However, Oliver was not opposed to giving board members like me assignments as long as he was in control. In fact, he asked me to take on special projects on a number of occasions and I always agreed and delivered, mistakenly thinking I was building up political capital with him and modeling good board member behavior.)
Whereas most nonprofit leaders bend over backwards to allow volunteer board members to contribute ideas and then either make them happen or at least feel appreciated for trying, Oliver was stuck in his reflexive “don’t tell me what to do” response to such offers. Many other disaffected volunteers in nonprofits with controlling Executive Directors have shared similar stories with me over the years.
I forwarded Oliver’s dismissive email to the co-chairs and the consultant who was preparing to facilitate the retreat, assuming that they would see that such a petulant reaction reflected a growth area for Oliver that they would address in his next performance review. (I would later learn that there had never been a formal performance review for Oliver, and that it would be several years before one was conducted for the very first time.)
On another occasion, I had pushed the Governance Committee to make decisions, debate openly, and not defer to Oliver on every tiny point. Frustrated by the resistance I encountered from a few individuals, I emailed Alan that I thought I should step down as chair of the committee, and that someone who was more of an insider and with more history with the organization (and perhaps more patient as well) should take over.
In what I considered an encouraging and appropriate response, he copied his co-chair and said he thought my status as an outsider made me the perfect person to lead the committee. I took that to mean that he realized that my role was to ruffle some feathers in helping the board step up to its responsibilities within a context of checks and balances, and that he and John would have my back. And even on that night, despite Alan’s coldness a few hours before, I still thought that he might step up and manage the conflict, especially since he had encouraged me to continue my approach.
The third incident involved John. On a few occasions, I had deferred to him on governance matters, such as by delaying the election of a new board member by a few weeks until he became comfortable. But on others, I had clearly irritated him by interpreting the purview of the governance committee more broadly than he did and not immediately backing down when our views clashed. He asked to talk to me on the phone a few weeks before the retreat, and I agreed.
When the time came to talk, I prepared myself for what I expected to be a tense but hopefully candid and productive exchange of views. But when we got on the phone, he said he had decided that he had no interest in talking to me but suggested I speak to the retreat facilitator, “since you at least seem to respect him.” I shrugged it off at the time, but failed to grasp the key insight. To Oliver and the insiders like John that he trusted, disagreeing with them was tantamount to disrespect. And disrespect was not tolerated in ANP’s culture.
* * *
The next day, I pigeonholed a few other retreat participants and got the impression that they wished that this conflict would go away, or perhaps that I would. Veneration of Tom and fear of Oliver seemed to block any critical thinking, or even expressions of empathy.
I intentionally sat next to Sally, and throughout the day we tried to advise and support each other. Many hand-written notes were passed (and later ripped up to cover our tracks).
During the opening session, the facilitator asked each person to stand up and talk about why they were passionate about ANP’s mission. Up until the moment I spoke I was unsure whether I would bring the conflict out into the open, but at that last minute I decided to take the high road and not do so. (To this day I wonder if that was a crucial mistake on my part.) I did, however, remind the group that Tom and Oliver had actively recruited me onto the board in order to strengthen it, based on what they had seen me do earlier in my career. I reiterated something I had said in my first board meeting: that their desire to upgrade the board by adding people like me was a courageous act. However, I was coming to fear that diversifying the board was primarily done to mollify nervous institutional donors rather than to upgrade how it functioned.
As others spoke, I noticed how many people used the opportunity to say that they were, above all else, 100% loyal to Tom and Oliver. I don’t think this was said to side with them against me; I think they would have said much the same things even if I wasn’t there or if the conflict had not yet erupted. As they did so, I had a thought that would occur to me many more times: if everyone is loyal first and foremost to the founder and the executive director, who is loyal to the organization? This distinction came to become an essential feature of my philosophy about nonprofit governance.
Think about it. There is nothing inherently wrong with admiring an organization’s founder and leader. But there have to be limits. If Tom and Oliver were to ever do anything, however unintentionally or with good motives, that endangered the organization, would anyone speak up to challenge them? If everyone’s first loyalty was to these people, the answer would almost certainly be no. Checks and balances and loyalty to mission above all else became two of my highest values and were practiced by Grameen Foundation when I was its president, occasionally to my chagrin. These ideas were completely foreign to ANP’s board and how it saw its role; in fact, as I was coming to see, they were antithetical to it.
During the course of the retreat, I conducted myself as I would have without this distracting crisis. I tried to listen carefully, praise management and fellow board members when their results, ideas, or behavior merited that, and criticize or argue against things that I opposed. Sally behaved the same way, but was more articulate, vulnerable, and wise than I could manage to be. At one point she rose above the stony faces and dismissive rebuttal points of others in the retreat and said that she sensed part of the underlying conflict was an organization steeped in west coast culture trying to assimilate some pushy east coasters. It was a strong observation, but no one picked up on it – presumably because it implied that something was wrong with the organization. The subject quickly changed.
To this day, I am astonished by how poised, candid, courageous, constructive, and open Sally was, while at the same time being unfailingly supportive of me and my predicament. Her conduct made the situation more bearable. I never considered her a friend or role model before that day, and I have never considered her anything else since then. It was painful enough to listen to all the self-congratulatory comments about the inclusive and loving culture while I was in the process of being expelled; doing so without her at my side would have been absolutely excruciating. The experience gave me some small window into what it must be like for a token racial or ethnic minority in an organization to be forced to listen to members of the dominant group applaud their sensitivity while demonstrating exactly the opposite over and over.
Occasionally the situation during the retreat bordered on comic. During one break, Tom took the facilitator aside and they began to talk. Both being hard of hearing, they spoke loudly enough for anyone in the room who was trying to hear what they had to say to do so. The facilitator asked what the status was of expelling me from the board. Tom said he had not succeeded in forcing me to resign the night before. Instead, they intended to vote me off at a directors meeting that was about 7 weeks away. Hearing that at least gave me comfort that the board, which would meet for a formal session at the end of the retreat, was not going to try vote me off that very day.
At one point, Oliver presented the board with newly articulated organizational values. I asked how they had been drafted. He said a small number of volunteers he had appointed to a task force had done so. I asked whether the board would have any chance to review, comment on, or amend the values – or if we were going to be asked to approve them during our next business meeting. Oliver looked at me quizzically. Clearly, he saw no role for the board except to applaud the newly articulated values.
In most organizations, something as consequential as organizational values would be initially drafted by the governing body. If the staff or a consultant drafted them, the board would certainly have time to comment on or amend them. In fact, doing so can be an important bonding experience. In Oliver’s mind, they were already adopted since people loyal to him had worked so hard on them and had produced something that he was satisfied with. He plaintively asked, “How would these volunteers feel if someone changed what they had worked so hard on?” I was aghast at this latest marginalization of the board and its role.
The retreat ended and a short formal business meeting commenced, during which nothing really got done except agreeing to a few future meeting dates. At the very end, with all the staff and half of the board gone and the meeting’s business complete, for the first time I shared with those who remained what Tom had said to me the night before. I tried to take the high road, saying (with more emotion than I wished to convey) that if people had suggestions for how I could be a more effective board member, I hoped they would share them with me so I could improve my performance.
Immediately after the meeting ended, Oliver rushed over to me. I wondered if he had some plan to put the Tom/Alex conflict genie back in the bottle. No such luck. He complained about a board member who had missed the retreat, and how she continued to advocate for considering a new board member whose candidacy Oliver firmly opposed.
With those few words, so much that is wrong with Oliver as a leader came through: his inability to empathize with people, his tendency to complain about others behind their backs, his need to have complete control over anything important in the organization he led, and his lack of recognition that it was ultimately the board, rather than him alone, that decided such things as whether new members would be considered and elected to serve. Unfortunately, many nonprofit leaders behave similarly and are enabled by governing bodies that fear losing their chief executive or just don’t want to be bothered by reigning in his or her controlling tendencies.
When Oliver was done criticizing the missing board member, he walked away. Later that night, I texted him, asking if he knew that Tom was going to ask me to leave, which I had suspected. He said he was aware. I thanked him at least for being honest about that.
The following day, I tried several times to reach Alan by phone. Finally we connected. I asked him what he, as board co-chair, intended to do to resolve the situation. His answer: absolutely nothing. “I’m going to Asia for a medical mission in six days, and I don’t have time to get involved in this.” Neither before or since have I ever seen a board chair fail more dramatically to step up and lead when the situation so clearly called for it.
I drafted an email to all of the board and most of the staff, which I thankfully never sent. The objective was to kick off a campaign to get a majority of the board to support my candidacy and win a contested election for another term. My plan had two flaws: first, there was no way I could win given the inbred culture of the board and the organization. Second, as a mentor convinced me of a few days later, why on earth would I want to fight to remain part of a group that so disdained me and my modest reform agenda?
I shared the draft with Sally, who had a very important suggestion to make (which influenced many things I said and wrote over the weeks ahead). Instead of hypothesizing why there was a movement afoot to expel me, she advised that it was much stronger to say something that was both more true and damning: I had no idea why they were doing so, since no one had ever indicated any discomfort with my behavior or positions. Her sage advice shaped how I thought and talked about this chain of events in the months that followed.
All that remained was to figure out an exit strategy where I put the good of the organization front and center even if others appeared to be motivated by naked tribalism and the security they felt by closing ranks.
* * *
Over the course of my career, I have developed a philosophy about nonprofit governance that spans the gamut between traditional best practices (which does not always mean widely used practices) and some out of the mainstream techniques. For the most part, they have been informed by my trial and error approach to building the Grameen Foundation’s board and its culture. Governing and advisory bodies I have been part of have also shaped my approach, including my time with ANP. Only recently, when I began teaching about nonprofit management at the university level, have I begun to absorb what is actually an extensive literature about the subject.
I have written extensively about how a group can avoid these traps, and I will not repeat all of that here. But a core pillar of my approach since I had an epiphany in the mid-2000s is that for groups to function at the highest level, add value, identify and green light opportunities, and above all to manage and mitigate risks, all members should be encouraged to speak their minds and vote their consciences, especially during formal meetings when decisions are debated and made.
To some, that north star may seem uncontroversial. But most people who have been involved in nonprofit boards know that there is a strong tendency, even in many relatively healthy governing bodies, to not speak up against decisions that appear to have majority support among the volunteer directors and/or management. A skeptic may probe for potential allies before a meeting or at the water cooler on a break and, if they find none, ask a few questions that indicate hesitancy. But if no one else signals agreement, they bury their doubts. And when the time comes to vote, they cast it in favor in order to maintain what is likely to be a long, unbroken streak of unanimous votes.
What’s the problem with this kind of enforced consensus? People who are advocates for certain decisions are unlikely to have to defend them thoughtfully, even though doing so could end up improving the decision. (This is especially common when the person advancing them is donating or raised the funds that will be required.) There is a high and often unacknowledged cost to all of these polite discussions and lopsided votes. Things get greenlighted that should have been thought through more carefully, or even discarded. Mission creep takes over. Critical thinking and risk mitigation take a back seat, or are forgotten altogether.
On the other hand, nothing raises the vigilance of an organization more than having a minority of board members vote against something that is ultimately adopted. In healthy organizations, that vigilance is focused on making sure the majority was right while also being alert to the possibility that it was wrong. In unhealthy organizations, the vigilance is trained on the dissenters. They are made to feel increasingly uncomfortable and unwelcome. In almost all cases, they start to conform to the “go along to get along” way of doing business or they leave voluntarily.
Some people view an organization whose board approves a budget or new initiative by a vote of 10-2 as in trouble. In my view, it is more likely a signal of openness and rigor.
I realized early in my tenure as an ANP director that it did not encourage people to think critically and then to speak their minds and to vote their consciences. But I did not anticipate how vicious it could be in enforcing that aspect of its culture.
* * *
ANP evolved as an impressive capstone to Tom’s distinguished second career as a donor, volunteer, and activist. At a crucial moment in the history of Grameen Foundation, which I founded in 1997, Tom stepped up and committed $500,000 over five years. This built upon many smaller grants he had made to GF, which he supplemented with financial and moral support to some of our implementing partners in India and Haiti. He even started his own microfinance organization in Latin America with much help from one of my Bangladeshi colleagues at Grameen Foundation, teaching himself reasonably good Spanish in the process. He made that organization a small-scale but very real success, and perhaps most impressively of all, he gradually worked his way out of having to be actively involved in funding and managing it.
When he began searching for one final foray into civic uplift, he educated himself about one of the critical issues of our time and saw a gap in terms of addressing it. Combining elements from several nonprofit efforts he had been part of, he formed ANP. Before long, it hosted its first annual conference. I attended for a short time and voiced my support and admiration for what Tom was doing.
He poured some of his considerable financial resources into this fledgling organization. He retained the perfect person to advise his small team. But the organization began to take off only after Tom recruited Oliver to be the Executive Director. A period of exponential growth ensued.
Like many nonprofits, the organization can point to some impressive outputs though has very little to point to in terms of outcomes (i.e., measurable changes in the societal problem they set out to help solve). But I hesitate to criticize the organization too heavily for its scant results to date. The movement it is part of is where the marriage equality movement was in the 2000s – on its heels but quietly building the infrastructure to change societal attitudes and policies in the future. For this reason, I continue to recommend that people consider volunteering for ANP. Sally is even more generous in terms of suggesting people get involved with ANP.
While part of ANP’s ability to grow rapidly was due to external factors, Oliver’s organizational skills supported by Tom’s money and cheerleading were critical. Tom viewed his selection of Oliver to lead the organization as his masterstroke. He also considered anything that constrained or irritated Oliver as highly suspicious, and in need of correction. Or elimination.
Tom and Oliver became acquainted through Landmark Education, the controversial self-help organization originally known as EST that was founded by Werner Erhard in the 1970s. Oliver led seminars for graduates of the intense initiation course known as The Forum. Tom regularly attended those seminars and admired Oliver’s ability to teach Landmark dogma and motivate its adherents.
Even had I not known that they shared this experience that would play such a crucial role in shaping the organization’s culture, I probably would have figured it out. At the urging of my mother, I had taken the original EST Training (the forerunner of the Forum) in 1984 when I was a senior in high school. While I found some of its teachings useful (even though many were repackaged common sense), within a few years I got tired of the jargon, repetition, kooky ideas, and above all the incessant focus on recruiting newcomers to take the courses. But I stuck around long enough to develop a sixth sense for someone who had been influenced by Landmark, typically by their use of certain terms or mental models to explain and analyze reality.
I suspect that most of the leaders of ANP have participated in Landmark programs, and quite a few likely remain actively involved. Like many belief systems, it has some valuable lessons, especially if they are applied judiciously. But adherents of many religions and philosophies also have a tendency to encourage (if not impose) conformity, marginalize those who challenge dogma, and insist on blind loyalty to those in leadership positions. ANP certainly did not avoid these traps. As a consequence, many sound practices related to nonprofit governance, checks and balances, open debate about priorities, and critical thinking were all routinely discouraged.
As the person who had been recruited onto the board by the founder and his chosen leader to upgrade the governance in order to appeal to a broader range of funders, I figured my position was safe and that I could push the envelope in terms of nudging the organization to adopt a more mature approach. By the time I found out how wrong I was, I had spent hundreds of hours of my time, thousands of dollars in donations, and perhaps even worse, had endangered my reputation as a nonprofit leader.
* * *
The seven weeks between the board retreat and its next full directors meeting were surreal. At one point, I emailed all members of the board committee I chaired and proposed a date for our next meeting. The co-chairs responded by coldly writing that all meetings of my committee were cancelled until further notice. I contacted a board member who was out of the country during the retreat whom I thought would be sympathetic. She was, and told someone that she thought I was being treated “disgracefully,” but was not willing to spend any time or political capital to help.
I reached out to other board members to sound them out, and not one tried to defend what Tom, Oliver, John and Alan – all, like me, white men, as it happens – were doing. (I sometimes wonder how this would have played out if even a single woman had been involved.) Of course, I am not sure how one would defend a move to force one of the most qualified and active members of a board to leave without providing any prior feedback or warning, or even a reason. But no one besides Sally was able to express any empathy or signal any recognition that I was being treated unfairly.
Somehow, admitting that even one thing that these two leaders to whom they have pledged loyalty – and who controlled their ability to continue serving in high profile roles – had done anything imperfectly seems to challenge the entire culture, despite the largely phony veneer of intimacy, caring, spontaneity, self-expression, and openness that they had adapted from Landmark.
Since I had decided not to seek another term, I figured I would press for some nod to good governance and a more open culture on my way out. I proposed these terms to Alan: I would be reelected in December, and then quietly resign in January. But before I did so, Oliver would send a message to all board and staff expressing his support for people to express dissent openly and debate options vigorously and with curiosity. He did not have to mention me in this message. I said that if he did not agree to this or some mutually acceptable counteroffer, I would write a letter to the organization’s main funders about what I saw as its governance weaknesses. I never intended to write the letter, but when Oliver refused my terms and even an offer to discuss alternatives, I went ahead and drafted the letter.
The organization’s top fund-raiser, whom I had once help convince to rejoin the organization after she had resigned because of a conflict with Oliver, implored me not to send it. I decided to take a three mile walk to cool off and be sure that I was doing it for the right reasons – to spur improvement in organizational culture – rather than out of spite. When I returned, I sent the messages, and shared one with ANP’s leadership as a courtesy so they could prepare any response they might come up with. I was underwhelmed by the foundations’ desire to interact with me and learn more, underscoring one of my mentor’s pithy sayings: “In philanthropy, the easiest person to deceive is yourself.” Too many foundation program officers, it seems, would rather remain blissfully unaware of their grantees’ dysfunction, lest it cast a pall over their own self-congratulation.
For a while, I wondered if I had done the right thing by sending the message. That question was largely resolved in my mind when I came to know that within a year, the organization had embraced some long-overdue governance upgrades, such as having the board evaluate Oliver on an annual basis. I suspect that a few of the foundations that received my letter insisted on these reforms, or that ANP tried to get out in front of such requests by instituting them on its own.
In the weeks that followed my resignation, I talked with Sally from time to time. Her initial plan was to resign six months after I did, but told me she moved her timetable up when she was passed over for the suddenly vacant Governance Committee Chairperson’s role (despite being the obvious choice) in favor of an Oliver loyalist. When Oliver decided to have ANP enter a new area on its own, rather than in partnership with another organization Sally was involved with (which would have made much more sense but would have forced Oliver to not be in full control), it was the last straw for her.
Sadly, despite promises from Oliver to do otherwise, ANP has continued to treat Sally and organizations she has been affiliated with poorly long after she departed as a board member and donor. But those stories are hers to tell if she ever chooses to do so. In the meantime, she has focused on civil disobedience and on building up the next generation of activists (including several of my University of Maryland students, who are intensely devoted to her).
* * *
When I planned to visit a friend in the city where ANP was based roughly a year after the ill-fated retreat took place, I pondered whether I should extend an olive branch to Oliver and try to have some kind of reconciliation. Trying not overthink things, I reached out and we agreed to meet for lunch.
Oliver greeted me with a handshake. The hugs that we had exchanged for years were out – they were reserved for ANP insiders and loyalists, it seemed. At some point after we ordered, I shifted us away from small talk. Perhaps this felt jarring, since Oliver usually tries to control conversations he takes part in, starting with the obligatory questions about ones family.
I told him I wanted to share, from my experience, what happened from the time I was recruited onto the ANP board to when I resigned.
I walked him through it in as measured a way as I could. I emphasized the moment when I offered to step down as chairman of the Governance Committee and was encouraged by the co-chairs to stay on and push my change agenda.
Oliver listened impassively. He did seem surprised that I was disappointed in Alan far more than anyone else. I told him that as far as I was concerned, Tom had earned the right to tell anyone anything, including that he wanted me off the board. But after exercising that right, it was the job of Alan to mediate some fair and decent resolution or to appoint someone else to do so, and that he had utterly failed to do that or even to try.
As I wrapped up, he betrayed no emotion at all and simply asked me a single question: “What part of the ANP culture do you think needs to change?”
I was astonished to hear him ask that.
I mentioned a few areas, such as willingness to tolerate dissent, criticism, and different workstyles.
At this point, he changed the subject, never to return to the issue of my involvement on the board. We parted a short time later with a second handshake.
My plan – basically, to give him an opportunity to take my perspective, and then have him do the same for me, as part of some kind of reconciliation – never had a chance. For him to engage in that healing exercise, he would have had to admit some degree of error or take some degree of responsibility for my anguish and organizational dysfunction. Despite responsibility-taking being a core element of Landmark’s philosophy – and indeed, one of its better ideas – Oliver couldn’t bring himself to do that. It seems that if he were even to consider the possibility of not being inerrant, the house of cards that the organization’s culture is built upon would begin to fall apart.
I have not talked to Oliver since then, though I did get a few thoughtful texts from him as Tom’s battle with cancer entered its final stages. But I did hear from him indirectly.
Some months after our lunch, I got an email from ANP asking me to take part in a survey on organizational diversity. I looked it over. It mainly dealt with ethnic diversity. I wondered whether I had been chosen because I was a former board member and donor, or whether it was Oliver’s olive branch to me, or a mistake. Nevertheless, I filled out the survey, sent it in, and forgot about it.
A few weeks later, I was invited to a call to hear and discuss the results of the survey. I was alone that night and decided to take part. I introduced myself (as each participant was asked to do) and then listened for a while. I noticed that the points I had made on the survey were not reflected at all. About two-thirds of the way through the call, there was a lull and I decided to speak up.
“During my time as the ANP board governance committee chair,” I began, “I had been disappointed that, to my knowledge, no one besides me had ever made an argument for having a more ethnically and racially diverse board except for that it would please our foundation funders. However, I think that this examination should go beyond ethnic/racial diversity, and examine how friendly the organization is to diversity when it comes to thought, workstyle, ideology, and worldview. For example, I know that ANP has had difficulty retaining conservative volunteers. This may relate to a lack of openness to their perspectives, since they vary from those of the majority of volunteers. Since they do not feel an openness to their views, they apparently opt out in large numbers.
“In my case, as a board member and chair of the joint governance and nominating committee, on occasion I expressed some points of view and opinions that were outside of the mainstream of what the board as a whole believed. Rather than approach those views with curiosity and openness, on the eve of our 2017 board retreat I was asked by Tom Jones, without any warning, to resign from the board because I did not ‘fit into the ANP culture.’ I did not immediately comply but some weeks later, I was forced to resign when there was no support for any kind of dialogue about the underlying issues, whatever they were. Another board member with some divergent views resigned a short time later. Being kicked off the board makes me think that acceptance of diverse thinking and workstyles was not an organizational strength, and may still not be.”
At this point, the other participants on the call had a lot of questions for me. One asked me to confirm that I was the chair of the ANP governance and nominating committee (and not for some other organization). I confirmed that I was. Another asked me what race I was. I reminded this person that I had stated that I was a 52-year-old white male at the outset of the call. Yet another participant asked me what reason was given for me being forced to resign. I said that no reason was ever given, formally or informally, either before, during or after my expulsion – beyond the vague notion that I did not “fit into the culture” of the organization. So I really had no idea. Yet another asked me if I had any theories about why I had been forced to resign. I said that perhaps it was related to the fact that on occasion I would express mild disagreement with or criticism of some of Oliver’s decisions and methods, especially since one ANP insider had later told me that Oliver doesn’t like to be told what to do.
Some weeks later, I got a follow up email from the facilitator asking if I wanted to be engaged more in the process. I said that if an exploration of organizational diversity was to include diverse viewpoints and workstyles, I would be interested. If not, I had said my piece and would cease being involved. I never heard back.
Around that time, word was spreading that my semi-biographical book’s publication was imminent. As a courtesy, I wrote to four ANP leaders to assure them that I did not criticize the organization, or them, by name in it. In fact, I singled Tom out for appreciation in the Acknowledgements section. In sharing that, I did however convey that I was still bothered by how they had treated me.
Shortly after my book came out, I came to learn of at least one case where Oliver was bad-mouthing me. He apparently was upset that I had joined the diversity survey and call and had spoken my mind (despite the fact that the organization he led had invited me to do so). I shared my displeasure about that. A mutual friend saw this as an opportunity for reconciliation and I agreed. In short order, Alan reached out and we talked. He heard me out, which must not have been easy for him. But when I was done, all he could manage to say was something so anodyne as to be meaningless: “Well, I am not a perfect person.” But it at least felt like a start.
I arranged a follow-up meeting with Alan at a conference in Washington, hoping to build on the positive aspects of our phone call, and he agreed. But when we sat down to talk, he slouched so far back in his chair he was practically laying down. His posture did not seem to augur a productive meeting. Undeterred, I asked if there was anything he wanted to say at the outset, so that I didn’t dominate the conversation. He said he had nothing to say.
I then explained where I thought we were in the reconciliation process. He sighed and indicated a desire to “just let bygones be bygones.” I asked him about an organizational project that I had spent long hours on that had been finalized that gave credit to others but not to me or Sally (who had helped a lot). A reasonable gesture would have been to find some way to note our contributions after the fact. He refused to entertain the idea, and the cold look that he flashed on the eve of the retreat reappeared. A short time later, the meeting was over.
* * *
From time to time I have wondered what I did to contribute to this unfortunate situation. In other words, what was my role in creating this crisis in the first place? (This is a different question than whether I acted intemperately once it began, which I certainly did on occasion. In particular, I’d like about 4 emails back.)
On one level, it’s hard to say for sure how I contributed to the conflict, since I never received any specific feedback about what I was doing wrong in the eyes of the influential board members who orchestrated my ouster. Yet I can and have humbled myself enough to make some educated guesses.
I am not the most patient person in the world. When confronting what I saw as deficiencies in the organization’s governance and board culture, there were times when I was highly diplomatic (at least by my standards). And then there were times when I most certainly was not.
For example, on one occasion I learned, through a conversation with one of the co-chairs, that Tom was nominally the treasurer of the board but was not doing any of the work normally expected of this critical role. (He had apparently been elected to that position as a sign of the respect that everyone had for him.)
I thought this was risky, since an essential board function related to our collective fiduciary role was essentially vacant. I pressed the co-chair about what he was doing to do to remedy this problem. He said he was unwilling to remove Tom, as he might take offence at that. I then spoke words that I would like to have back, “Well, if that is the case, you are not doing your job as co-chair.” The remainder of the conversation was brief and unproductive. My words probably stung. With the benefit of hindsight, I could have used a more diplomatic and sensitive approach.
The following day I thought of an elegant solution to the problem: elect an Assistant Treasurer and have this person function as the Treasurer while Tom would remain in the role technically. Pleased with my creativity, I emailed the co-chair my idea. He did not respond. I emailed again to ask him to confirm receipt of my message and idea. He did so, but took no action.
Perhaps if I had initially been less accusatory and more solution-oriented when discussing this issue (and others), I would have contributed more and been seen as better fitting into the organization’s culture. The underlying lesson may be captured in the wisdom of Maya Angelou’s insight that people don’t remember what you say but how you made them feel. It’s something I hope to incorporate more into my interactions with others in the final decades of my time here on earth.
* * *
Why write this article now? It is a question I have been grappling with for several months.
There isn’t a single reason. I believe it is part of my own healing process. But even more importantly, it’s an opportunity to give the wider philanthropic community an up-close view of one archetype of board dysfunction, with all the rawness, messy details and human elements included.
For the past several semesters, I have used this as a case study in my undergraduate and graduate courses on nonprofit leadership. I found that it was a terrific way to bring the promise and (even more) the dangers of nonprofit governance alive. Occasionally, I thought that it could be used as a learning tool for a broader nonprofit community.
I have been surprised by how few case studies of nonprofit board dysfunction have been published. (A notable exception is the Kennedy School case study, “Should It Survive? Charles Dunlap and the National Legal Foundation.”) I suppose that having been part of a weak board or governing body is not something people like to draw attention to. It signals that you either caused the dysfunction, ignored it, failed in trying to resolve it, and/or did a poor job of vetting the organization prior to joining. It’s clearly not a resume-builder. But keeping all of these skeletons hidden from public view may contribute to the cycle repeating itself in thousands of nonprofit organizations every year, with people joining an idealistic organization with high hopes of helping it to thrive, only to unexpectedly find themselves in a morass after a few meetings and seeking a dignified exit strategy that protects their reputations.
After my students play out the scenario after being told what happens on the eve of the ANP board retreat, I ask them what are the central issues that cause the conflict. Inevitably, most conclude that it is about control. ANP’s founders wanted the prestige and fund-raising benefits of a qualified board, but did not want the other part of that bargain: sharing essential information and decision-making responsibilities. I sensed that this was the issue from the beginning. Naively, I thought that the die had been cast and that the founders were in the process of – and fully committed to – giving up total control. Clearly, I was wrong. As I always note during the class when this case is studied, the organization’s founders certainly see the entire case differently (though I can’t actually say exactly what their take is since they have never shared that with me).
I have tried on three occasions over the last two and a half years to achieve some kind of reconciliation with ANP that would allow me, in good conscience, to resume active support of the organization as a donor and friend. My objective was always to have that take place between the organization and both Sally and myself. Two of those overtures are described in this article, and one more was attempted while drafting it. None of them resulted in any meaningful gesture or response from ANP beyond hearing me out on a few occasions. I suppose one could argue that my standards for what constitutes a reconciliation are too high.
One final reason prompted me to publish this now, beyond simply having let nearly three years pass so that I could get some distance and perspective. Tom passed away last year. I would not have wanted Tom to read this article, even an anonymized version. Now he doesn’t have to.
Might it also be a catalyst for some long-overdue organizational self-examination about its culture? While a kind of ANP glasnost is not an impossibility (and theoretically could have already taken place without my knowledge), those of us who have been marginalized or expelled are not holding our breaths. While some on the margins of ANP occasionally whisper the C-word – “cult” – in describing the organization, that never quite fit for me. Despite my discomfort with some aspects of Landmark Education, I always thought that it was unfairly given that label. I feel the same way about ANP. But, as I noted in my parting letter to ANP’s largest institutional donors, while I did not consider ANP a cult, I believed that it did suffer from a cult of personality – a condition that quite a few nonprofits with strong-willed founders suffer from, to varying degrees. And nothing I have heard since then has caused me to revise or update that opinion.
Check out some practical ideas for avoiding crises like this and having governing bodies reach their full potential in my recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. There are also many tips related to board management in my most recent book, When in Doubt, Ask for More: And 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for the Mission-Driver Leader (Rivertowns Books, 2020).
