When I joined my charity as its finance director nine years ago I had high hopes of making a difference. The charity provides opportunities to the most disadvantaged people, has a turnover of £1.5m, a team of more than a dozen staff and a founding chief executive. But it is because of this CEO that my high hopes have gradually eroded away.
Our chief executive is passionate, a great networker and a fabulous ambassador for us. However the world has and will continue to change in this economic climate – and she is blissfully unaware of this. At the beginning of the charity’s existence it was just the chief exec and a couple of staff – she could manage the team while keeping her vision. But in the early years government grant money for our work was aplenty and with income came growth. It became less easy for her to keep control, and it showed. The team and I would put forward business development ideas and at first these were supported. But when these initiatives were worked up and presented back she often rejected them outright because they were not exactly what she envisioned.
It only took a handful of these rejections for learned helplessness to spread across the charity. Staff became fearful, not least because their jobs were at threat as their ideas were constantly dismissed. Great staff quickly moved on, and others just waited in the gallows.
As the organisation grew, a senior leadership team formed, however we were not exempt from the CEO’s wrath. For a while we thought we were making decisions for the organisation, but these would be quickly overturned by our leader. Meetings became a chore and over a short period the team and I found ourselves being increasingly passive. I couldn’t act confidently, internally or externally, as I didn’t feel able to make a decision without referring back to the CEO. I felt disempowered, weak and unmotivated.
It was as the economy crashed that things really changed for us. We had to change how we presented our work, our business model and how we operated. Grants weren’t being extended; contracts weren’t there for the taking. We had to redefine our offer and shift into new, ready-made and ripe markets. Yet the chief exec clinged to the status quo.
Action needed taking, yet the decisions that really had to be made were avoided. Our finances were declining rapidly; month by month redundancies were looking more likely. I’d present the figures but my role as finance director was always ignored. She took extravagant decisions – a part-time job for a relative at a ridiculous salary for a role that didn’t exist, a contract for some work for one of her cronies recently made redundant and a costly all-expenses trip for a “professional development course” for herself.
I knew that if things carried on insolvency would come in three months. So, I made the very difficult decision to go to our board, knowing full well that I could lose my job.
However, all but one of our trustees were friends of the chief executive. While each of them did offer relevant skills and experience they didn’t understand the principles of good governance – holding the charity’s leader to account. They were, in many ways, just nodding dogs.
I met with the one independent trustee, who then shared my concerns with the wider board about the absence of good financial decision-making. While I wasn’t party to those discussions a small shift did happen and our imminent insolvency halted. However some staff were made redundant, and the remaining staff experienced a pay cut. To those staff I offer my sincere apologies. I will never forgive myself for not finding a way out of founder syndrome.
Confessions of a charity professional is the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network’s anonymous series where charity workers tell it how it is. If you would like to pitch us an idea, click here.
