On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 9:39 PM, Oliver Keyes <ironholds(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:58 PM, James Heilman
<jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Regarding to Oliver's comment: "My
concern is that when staff reached out
the Board replied with a letter indicating they had full and unanimous
confidence in our
leadership."
This statement is not really true. We had a formal vote regarding the ED
in
November and it was not unanimous. The vote
unfortunately has not yet
been
made public.
Very well, let me quote directly from the email sent to staff by
Patricio Lorente in his role as Chair of the Board:
"We are working with Lila to put together a plan to address these
issues. We are confident that she has the capability and the
commitment needed for this challenging time, and we know that, at the
present time, she is listening carefully to the Board, to you, and to
the community. **To that end, the Board remains unanimously committed in
our support of Lila in her role** and in her efforts to adapt her
leadership and to address these issues."
Asterisks mine. If your commitment and straw poll wasn't unanimous
your chair lied to staff, and that's not a great opening to our
rebuilding.
If the Board had decided, formally or informally, not to sack Lila in their
November meeting then frankly "unanimous commitment to support her" is the
only thing they could have done.
The only course of action open to a Trustee who felt they *could not*
support Lila continuing, if there was no majority to sack her right away,
would have been to resign themselves (which none of them did).
Doubtless many of them used "support" in the meaning of "do whatever is in
their power to help improve Lila's performance and reduce stress on the
staff, while keeping a very close eye to see whether their original
instinct was in fact correct and whether Lila's departure was in fact
inevitable."
(I also fail to see how the knowledge that the WMF Board retained
confidence in the ED's abilities by a 5-4 or 7-2 or whatever vote would
have helped *anyone* in November)
Regards,
Chris