The Authentic Organization

Leaders set the tone for an organization, serve as its public face, and through their power, set in motion all sorts of dynamics. When a leader acts out their own fears and denial in the context of their role in an organization, it can poison everything.

One of my readers wrote with an example (edited for privacy):

I was hired as the only paid employee of a co-op artist gallery. I report to a board rather than one person. However, the president of the organization believes that I should report only to her and gets into screaming rages when I do something she doesn’t like. She wants to micromanage and complain about how she has to do everything herself.

We have a vibrant arts community, including and driven by the local art school. The president constantly and loudly proclaims to anyone in earshot that the ‘patriarchal good old boy system’ has a strangle hold on the arts scene, and follows these speeches with a recitation of all of the incidents of her exclusion, people not saying hello to her, being derisive towards student work from local arts college, and taking opportunities to publicly confront college artists and alumni at adjacent galleries.

While her behavior places an easy target for finger pointing, the attention that it draws pulls the eyes of the organization away from some of the other problems. Members of the gallery can blame her for the failure rather than take responsibility as a co-op for failing to address fundamental issues like budgeting and planning, meeting deadlines, and public relations.

When I have tried to bring up the issues not directly related to her behavior, I get responses like ‘oh you’re so right, we’re so glad to have you here’ (how is that addressing the problem? stroking my ego doesn’t pay my wages), or ‘ yes but I don’t have time to help’ (then why did you join the gallery?), or ‘but we’ve never done it that way before’ (my dr. Phil voice kicks in, thinking ‘yeah, and how’s that working for you?’) or ‘but we don’t want to be like such-and-such gallery’ (how is adopting successful business strategies being a copy-cat? We still maintain the kinds of work we accept and the image of our gallery) or ’something always happens to help us out” (what happens if our bail-out person gets hit by a car? or just plain decides we’re not worth it anymore? you can’t milk the same cow forever).

I’m so frustrated because I can see the potential for success. We have a great space, in a fantastic location, in an excellent community. There is no reason why we can’t be successful in this city. At this point, I am also concerned that my affiliation with this gallery will hurt me professionally, as their reputation is falling so low so fast. This is definitely a case where one person’s fears and a group of people’s denial is bringing an organization to its knees. I plan to resign at the end of this month as I feel that my efforts are wasted here.

It’s true that a single person can cripple an organization. It’s not even necessary for that person to occupy a position of titular power, as is the case in this story. I’ve seen a single board member paralyze an organization for more than a year and then proceed to drive the best people out, sending the organization on into a destructive spiral. All that is needed is that there be no mechanisms in place for the organization to respond to that person’s damaging influence.

What is to be done, after something has gone this far? The author is taking measures to protect herself, by resigning. Could she use the threat of her resignation as leverage? That might be the final test of whether the rest of the organization is functional enough to make a healthy choice, but not many people like that kind of brinksmanship. Are there any other single leverage points like that? Maybe two or three key members of the gallery?

What could have prevented things from getting this bad? The president’s behavior isn’t dysfunctional in a vacuum. The author describes a scenario where members and donors cooperate in patterns at work here. Would better structures for sharing of responsibility and authority have helped? Leadership and board rotation or limited terms? Hard wired governance processes?