Reporting to Nobody
Working for someone you cannot respect is a specific kind of madness.
Not dislike. Not disagreement. Contempt.
You try to adapt. Make something out of nothing. Build what isn’t there. All while she has yet to produce a one-year plan, let alone a five-year strategy.
Where she came from, major donors called at the end of the year. Gifts tumbled into her lap because donors needed a write-off. It didn’t matter who was sitting in her seat. Philanthropy was entrenched. The gifts were coming regardless. She mistook the institution for herself.
That world is not this world. This one requires something different; sleeves up, grit, building from the ground.
A donor agreed to match every dollar up to $50,000. The campaign closed. She stopped by my office doorway. Oh. I didn’t think those things worked. No adjustment. No curiosity. Just the next thing.
You reported to someone who reported to her. They were not aligned. The messages were contradictory. Impossible to untangle. You were not caught between two people. You were caught inside a structure that was failing. The structure wore both their faces.
You tried to prove yourself. Despite a track record that speaks for itself. Against an impossibility. Because her perspective and reality were not the same. She was living in a different program entirely.
Here is how she got the seat.
Not through a track record. Not through a body of work that preceded her. Through a relationship. A well-known recruiting firm that collected its fee and moved on. A CEO who called her to tell her how proud he was of his placement.
He was not proud of her. He was proud of himself.
Together they managed to convince everyone on the outside that she was the professional the organization needed.
This is how it works in this sector. The people who make hiring decisions are often the furthest from the work itself. They see the performance of competence, not the practice of it. They hear the language; strategy, pipeline, relationship-based fundraising, millions closed without knowing what it looks like when it is actually done. And so they choose well. By their own measure. By the measure of someone who will never have to sit inside the culture they just sanctioned.
Here is the paradox of this work.
Fundraising is measurable. It is one of the functions in this sector where performance has a number attached to it. Gifts closed. Moves made. Donors retained. You would think that would make incompetence visible. You would think the numbers would speak.
They do not. Because the numbers belong to the team. And the team is doing the work in spite of her. And there is always room, at the top of a structure, to stand close enough to results you did not produce to make them your own. To be in the room when the gift closes. To send the email that thanks the donor. To tell the story of the campaign in a way that centers the strategy she did not write.
The best people go quiet first. That is not a side effect. That is the point.
And the confusion, the contradictory messages, the impossible charges, the reporting structure that cannot be untangled, that is not dysfunction. It is utility. Confusion serves the person at the helm. When expectations are muddled there is always a reason you fell short. When the structure is broken enough, you become the problem.
Not her. You.
That is not an accident. That is architecture.
I have written about what scarcity produces in this sector.
What it produces, sometimes, is her.
And what she produces is a dynamic where your competence becomes the problem. Not the solution. The more you know, the more you are a mirror she cannot look into. So the mirror gets reframed. What you bring becomes a threat, then a liability, then evidence of ineffectiveness. You watch it happen and you cannot stop it because she controls the language. She decides what the work means. She decides what you mean.
You are being managed. Just not toward anything.
So you stop trying and start planning your exit.
One day, you notice the disgust has stopped being occasional. It is just there now, under everything, steady. Disgust for her. Disdain for that colleague, constructed complicity in the flesh, who supports her publicly and privately, crucifies her. Proximity to power is safer than honesty.
You are just waiting now. Existing in the remaining space while you search for the exit.
‘I worked with the department head. Ophthalmology.
A news anchor had taken her life. Victim of the fine print in a LASIK contract.
I told him: I wish she had known about you.
That is what is at stake.
The people who could have done the work were spending their time surviving it.
You may still be in this.
This essay belongs to you.
When she finally left, long after I was gone, my phone rang.
“Ding dong the witch is dead.”
Constructed complicity in the flesh. Calling.
Constructed Complicity: the performance of loyalty in service of power rather than truth. Public support. Private contempt. A calculated positioning that protects the self while enabling the harm.
Competence Inversion: the reframing of expertise as ineffectiveness by the person least qualified to evaluate it. A self-protective mechanism that requires the demolition of the people most capable of exposing it.
Placement Immunity: the condition in which a recruiting firm bears no accountability for the culture its placement produces. The fee collected. The relationship protected. The damage left to those who remain inside.
Institutional Misattribution: when the infrastructure does the work and the person in the seat takes the credit long enough to believe it.
Reflected Appointment: When the hire exists to confirm the judgment of the person who made it. The placement is not about the candidate. It is about the one who chose them. The credential is borrowed. The accountability is not.
— Keira Haley | keirahaley.com