It is a truth universally acknowledged that to pick a fight with your chairman is to announce the end of your tenure – so I don’t. At least not without a pretty good exit plan already in place.
Picking a fight with another trustee is marginally less hazardous though still involves masquerading as a grandmaster in the three-dimensional chess of boardpolitik.
Take George. (No, please, take him now; it would be a kindness. To me at least.)
I always had a suspicion about his attitude towards me; the way he cuts across me in conversation (I don’t think I’ve finished a sentence with him in the past three years) – although this is also true of a number of my less deconstructed trustees and seems to be pretty standard male chauvinist fare.
He only ever has two gears: Smug Mode (where he is entirely at home to Mr Upmyself ) and Red Mist, when he sets out to destroy.
The other day he complained to my chairman about an email that a colleague inadvertently sent him when being careless with the reply-all function.
My hard-working and put-upon PA had forwarded and signed off an email from him as “RSolesRUs”. It was a harmless-enough encoding, I tried to suggest to my chairman.
Alas! George’s view was that by not sacking my PA, I had effectively sacked myself.
As my dear old dad used to say: “Blessed are the self-righteous for they shall see right up themselves.”
I fear the time has come for me to dust off an elegantly optimistic letter of application for a new job. How would Jane Austen start, I wonder?
Picking a fight with another trustee is marginally less hazardous though still involves masquerading as a grandmaster in the three-dimensional chess of boardpolitik.
Take George. (No, please, take him now; it would be a kindness. To me at least.)
I always had a suspicion about his attitude towards me; the way he cuts across me in conversation (I don’t think I’ve finished a sentence with him in the past three years) – although this is also true of a number of my less deconstructed trustees and seems to be pretty standard male chauvinist fare.
He only ever has two gears: Smug Mode (where he is entirely at home to Mr Upmyself ) and Red Mist, when he sets out to destroy.
The other day he complained to my chairman about an email that a colleague inadvertently sent him when being careless with the reply-all function.
My hard-working and put-upon PA had forwarded and signed off an email from him as “RSolesRUs”. It was a harmless-enough encoding, I tried to suggest to my chairman.
Alas! George’s view was that by not sacking my PA, I had effectively sacked myself.
As my dear old dad used to say: “Blessed are the self-righteous for they shall see right up themselves.”
I fear the time has come for me to dust off an elegantly optimistic letter of application for a new job. How would Jane Austen start, I wonder?
