I don’t think that this is a good state of affairs. I think that the points I raise range from “this should be completely unacceptable” (4, 6) to “if this is the worst credible information that can be shared, the org is probably doing very well (3, 5)”. This is not a description of an org that I would support! But if a friend told me they were doing good work there and they felt the problems were blown out of proportion or context by a hostile critic and a vengeful ex-employee with an axe to grind, I would take them seriously and not say “you have to leave immediately. I can cover two months salary for you while you find another job, but I believe that strongly that you should not work here.”
As always, context is important: “the head of the org is a serial harasser with no effective checks” and “we fired someone when their subordinate came forward with a sexual harassment allegation that, after a one-week investigation, we validated and found credible: the victim is happily employed by us today” are very different states of affairs. If someone is sharing the worst credible information, then the difference between “we were slow to update on X” and “they knew X was false from the report by A, but didn’t change their marketing materials for another six months” can be hard to distinguish.
Running an org is complicated and hard, and I think many people underestimate how much negative spin a third party with access to full information can include. I am deliberately not modelling “Ben Pace, who I have known for almost a decade” and instead framing “hostile journalist looking for clicks”, which I think is the appropriate frame of reference.
I don’t think that this is a good state of affairs. I think that the points I raise range from “this should be completely unacceptable” (4, 6) to “if this is the worst credible information that can be shared, the org is probably doing very well (3, 5)”. This is not a description of an org that I would support! But if a friend told me they were doing good work there and they felt the problems were blown out of proportion or context by a hostile critic and a vengeful ex-employee with an axe to grind, I would take them seriously and not say “you have to leave immediately. I can cover two months salary for you while you find another job, but I believe that strongly that you should not work here.”
As always, context is important: “the head of the org is a serial harasser with no effective checks” and “we fired someone when their subordinate came forward with a sexual harassment allegation that, after a one-week investigation, we validated and found credible: the victim is happily employed by us today” are very different states of affairs. If someone is sharing the worst credible information, then the difference between “we were slow to update on X” and “they knew X was false from the report by A, but didn’t change their marketing materials for another six months” can be hard to distinguish.
Running an org is complicated and hard, and I think many people underestimate how much negative spin a third party with access to full information can include. I am deliberately not modelling “Ben Pace, who I have known for almost a decade” and instead framing “hostile journalist looking for clicks”, which I think is the appropriate frame of reference.