I said last night that I’d unload on the band’s board of directors today. After I started typing this, I found myself going on and on and on, and I realized that there was no way I’d be able to get the entire story into a single post. Therefore, if you don’t want to read about this garbage, then you won’t need to bother coming back here for a few days. This is going to take a while.
I first joined the board, along with several other people, about two years ago. For the first year or so, we were basically an inefficient but harmless group. If a gig came up, we voted to do it. If we had to spend money to bring in an outside conductor, we voted to do it. If new players were needed, we voted to have auditions.
Basically, we did nothing except conform to the structure that the band’s by-laws demand.
Last year, however, things went sort of nuts. As you recall, the band again came in second in the second-level (“1st Section”) of the North American championships. We lost by a point to the same band that beat us by three points in 2009. This finish was apparently unacceptable to a small group of people in the band. One of those people was a member of the board of directors. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll call him Bob.
Let me retract something. Bob probably didn’t care at all about the fact that we got second place. He was more upset with the fact that we competed in the championships at all. I can only speculate about why he didn’t want to compete, which I will do now – first by establishing a few background facts, and then by rambling.
Bob, who is in his early 30s, is quite proud of the fact that he’s been involved with brass bands for 20+ years. He loved the genre and its main face in America (NABBA) so much that he applied to be on the NABBA board of directors about three years ago. Unfortunately for him, he submitted his application shortly after he had widely distributed an email which was extremely critical of the organization and had originally been sent to a sitting board member. How Bob got the email, I don’t know; but he wasted no time in sending it to basically everyone that he knew, urging them to complain to the existing board. He didn’t have all of the facts of the issue, nor did he make any attempt to get them. He simply blasted the organization.
It was not surprising, therefore, when he was not selected to serve on the board.
Shortly thereafter, he began lobbying to have our band stay out of the competition. We went anyway, but before doing so, the existing board of the band (consisting then of just the three officers) decided to sit a full board (you may recall that this was one of the recommendations put forth by the planning committee which I – and Bob – served on. Perhaps it was a bad idea).
Bob and I both applied to be on the new band board, and both of us were selected. As I said earlier, for the first year, not much was done; but Bob did manage to make it clear that he was going to attempt to run things his way – or at least make it very difficult for anyone else to do something that he didn’t want.
And, as I’ve noted, Bob didn’t want us to compete.
He nearly got his way two years ago, after nabba’s board inexplicably changed some key rules of competition in their September meeting, which caused a fairly substantial outcry from member bands. I didn’t like the way the rules changes were handled and I was willing to vote with Bob to keep us out (and I think we might have had at least one or two other people vote with us); but the big board eventually rescinded the rules changes (and had a major shake-up of their own), and Bob ended up being the only one to vote against our participation.
Now…we’re back to where we started. We competed, we came in 2nd, and a few people (notably a couple of the new players who joined the band as a result of the auditions) apparently began meeting at a bar after our rehearsals to complain about this. Their main theme was one of, “We could win at the highest level if we had a better director.” Over time, this self-named “Players Committee” came to include key personnel from nearly all sections in the band.
It also included Bob, who didn’t bother to inform the board of directors that this group existed, or that there was general unrest, or that they were discussing the idea of hitting the director – who is also the band’s founder, and who has done more than anyone to keep it afloat for the last decade – with an ultimatum: “Either you step down or we’ll all quit.”
A few days before this proposed ultimatum was to happen, some on the board got wind of it and – in an effort to calm things down and cut the legs off of a rebellion before it started – a survey was sent to everyone in the band asking them what they liked, what they disliked, what they thought needed to change, how they felt about competing, etc.
It had the intended effect, as it’s tough to complain that you’re never consulted about anything when you’ve just been asked, in writing, for your opinions.
The board got together about a week later to discuss the survey results and to read a letter which had been drafted by “The Players Committee,” complaining about various things. One name noticeably absent from this letter was Bob’s – he began insisting that he’d never had anything to do with the group. He also began openly challenging anything that was brought up in board meetings or on the phone or in email and even during a special “clear-the-air” meeting that was arranged, with an outside moderator, for the entire band.
He also began insisting that he wasn’t challenging anything – he was simply “stating my opinion.” Nothing was ever personal – “it’s just business. My feelings don’t come into play.” Nothing was uncalled-for, rude or hypercritical. “I just want for us to be the best we can be.”
In a very short time, Bob managed to alienate the entire board.
Even the one board member who was usually in his corner quit abruptly, saying, “I don’t want to be involved with this drama.”
A few days after that, after I’d read one of Bob’s emails to the board which was pointlessly critical and had several people fuming, I sent him a private email and asked him point-blank what it was that he was trying to accomplish. At that point, I considered Bob to be a friend; but I didn’t pull any punches in my email. I told him that he was being rude and counter-productive and that his involvement with a group that was actively working against the board (the “Players Committee”) was, at best, suspect and that he needed to tone things down before he ended up tearing the entire band apart.
I expected him to see my email for what it was, which was an attempt to calm things down without embarrassing him in front of the rest of the board. He was, as I said, a friend.
His initial response – along with all of his responses in what became a private email thread between the two of us – pretty much blew me away, destroyed whatever friendship we’d had, made me dislike other band members who I’d never really thought about before, and ultimately convinced me to quit the board myself…before I completely lost my temper and ended up in jail.
We’ll get into that tomorrow.
TWD