Oblivious
I thought the problem was the people. It was the structure. On nonprofit culture, turnover, and the language that taught me to look in the wrong direction.
I am sorry. I was oblivious.
Not in the way that excuses itself. Not the obliviousness of someone who didn’t care or wasn’t paying attention. I was paying attention. I cared deeply. I was watching the room constantly.
I just didn’t know what I was looking at.
I saw a culture that I believed was being driven by the people inside it. Their energy. Their choices. The way certain people moved through a room and left it smaller than they found it. I called it mean girls in my head. I thought if we could change the people we could change the place.
I did not yet have language for what I was actually seeing.
Culture is not behavior. Behavior is the expression of culture. What people do changes when people change. What persists underneath, the accumulated weight of what gets rewarded, what gets silenced, what gets assigned and what gets protected, that is the structure. And the structure was already there before any of us walked in.
In institutional advancement the people turned over constantly. Development officers. Major gift staff. Annual Giving teams. New faces, new personalities, new energy. The culture did not change. The room kept producing the same dynamics with entirely different people inside it. That was the first evidence I did not know how to read.
I could see the suffering. I was not oblivious to that. What I could not see was its source. I misattributed it to personalities, to poor fit, to the particular difficulty of certain people in certain roles. The suffering was real. My explanation for it was wrong. And wrong explanation in a position of authority is its own kind of harm.
I was managing inside it. I thought I was managing through it.
The sector does not give you language to see the structure. It gives you language to manage what the structure produces. Turnover becomes a retention problem. Conflict becomes a communication issue. Exhaustion becomes a self-care deficit. Every symptom gets a name that points back toward the individual. The structure remains unnamed. And unnamed structures are invisible structures. I was fluent in the language I had been given. I did not yet know it was teaching me to look in the wrong direction.
In our last meeting I told her one day she would thank me.
I believed it. I meant it as kindness. It was the most generous thing the culture had language for.
What I did not know was that the language itself was the culture. I thought I was giving her perspective. I was giving her the only explanation the system had taught me to offer.
And I was handing it to her on her way out the door.
Years later the structure turned in my direction.
And I understood something I could not see then. The gratitude I had imagined for her was never for the way I handled her departure. It was for leaving. For no longer carrying the weight of a room that had mistaken endurance for commitment and confusion for professionalism.
I had occupied multiple positions inside the same architecture. Manager. Leader. Witness. Exit. The people changed. The structure didn’t. The pattern I had read as personality I eventually lived as something else entirely.
The lexicon exists because it should have existed then. Not as a gift. As a reckoning. With the structure. With my own place inside it. With what I handed to people when confusion was all I had to give.
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.