Reasonable Resignations

Is it reasonable to ask leaders to resign?

I’ve been mulling this over since I was invited to sign an open letter to the Pillar Nonprofit Network’s Board of Directors, asking for its members to resign and support a transition to new leadership.

Upon first reading, I was hesitant to sign. The letter’s call to action — for the current Board to resign — seemed a little bit, for lack of a better word, harsh.

The word harsh was a yellow flag.

In my experience, it is most often employed by the powerful as a means of accentuating their reasonableness in the face of unreasonable calls for accountability from those with lesser formal power or stature. It’s used to transform not only ideas, but the individuals who hold them into something unreasonable.

The strategy is insidious and effective because it shifts the narrative away from the expression of accountability to one of decorum or politeness. In other words, the powerful say, “you can call for accountability, but do it nicely, and make sure that when you do, you ask for something that is acceptable to us.”

This isn’t real accountability, it’s an unreasonableness trap.

I didn’t want to trap the people who had written the open letter to the Pillar Board, so I asked why the act of resigning might seem harsh…