Thanks for doing this project and sharing all this!
One thought I had is that a lot of the advice here is about ways to check or restrain leadership, and this seems pretty valuable for helping in situations where leadership fails dramatically. But I wonder how reliant this is on the fact that we are selecting on cases where leadership failed. Sometimes the board will fail dramatically, or staff will fail dramatically, and in those cases advice which sort of boils down to ‘strengthen staff and board’ might be counterproductive.
This is a good point – I’ve (anecdotally) seen one organization “go off the rails” because of a staff member who was behaving unethically but the CEO didn’t feel like they had a mandate to just fire them without going through a bunch of formal process.
I guess it’s by definition hard to precisely describe when one should deviate from a standard process; perhaps “get feedback from a bunch of experts” is the best advice you could give a CEO in such a situation.
Thanks for doing this project and sharing all this!
One thought I had is that a lot of the advice here is about ways to check or restrain leadership, and this seems pretty valuable for helping in situations where leadership fails dramatically. But I wonder how reliant this is on the fact that we are selecting on cases where leadership failed. Sometimes the board will fail dramatically, or staff will fail dramatically, and in those cases advice which sort of boils down to ‘strengthen staff and board’ might be counterproductive.
This is a good point – I’ve (anecdotally) seen one organization “go off the rails” because of a staff member who was behaving unethically but the CEO didn’t feel like they had a mandate to just fire them without going through a bunch of formal process.
I guess it’s by definition hard to precisely describe when one should deviate from a standard process; perhaps “get feedback from a bunch of experts” is the best advice you could give a CEO in such a situation.