The title is an observation offered by Dave Paule of Our Fundraising Search. We were working on a Nonprofit Snapshot episode when he said these words. Dave isa seasoned leader with hard-won perspective. This observation is not about temperament. It is not suggesting that good leaders should be combative, aggressive, or indifferent to the feelings of the people they lead. It is making a more precise and more important point: that the inability to engage with conflict, to tolerate its discomfort and navigate its complexity, is a disqualifying trait in anyone responsible for leading people or managing organizations.
It is one of the more baffling phenomena in nonprofit governance: a board composed of smart, capable, hardworking people, people who clearly care about the mission, just cannot bring itself to fire an executive director who is visibly, demonstrably failing.
Think for a minute about this nightmare board member: They have been at the table for years. They have opinions (so, so many opinions) about every little thing: strategy, fundraising, operations, and the performance of specific employees. They’re immersed in their phone during meetings and presentations. They repeatedly ask for explanations they have already received multiple times. They disparage the organization after they've left the boardroom. They know nothing about the org’s finances, yet they’re quick to evaluate the ED. They have a contact list that could fund the endowment three times over, yet they have no intention of sharing their contacts. And when the annual fundraiser comes up, they want to know why the organization has never been able to get an A-list celebrity to support the cause. Plus the tablecloths are the wrong color.
When a nonprofit leader sits down to design or revise a paid time off policy, one question tends to surface quickly: how generous is too generous? It is a reasonable thing to wonder, but it may also be the wrong question entirely. The more useful question is this: in a sector that routinely asks talented professionals to accept lower salaries in exchange for meaningful work, why would any nonprofit leader hesitate to offer genuinely excellent time off?
My intent here is not to offend. My intent is to preserve. But be forewarned (and please forgive me), I'm going to be plain-spoken and forthright. If you want coddling, you'll have to find it someplace else.
Volunteer-dependent organizations face a particular kind of vulnerability that rarely gets discussed openly: what happens when the person causing problems is also the person the organization cannot easily replace.