The Sounding Board

As many of my colleagues, readers, and clients know, I have been heavily involved with a professional organization devoted to Virtual Assistants for a few years now. I’ve done a great deal of volunteer work for that organization including giving permission to publish my articles, assisting other members with article submissions for the organization’s own publication, providing text and audio testimonials, assisting with planning virtual events, making connections with speakers for seminars, etc. I did all of those things because I believed in the values and objectives the organization’s founder proposed. I wanted to help promote what I thought was a great and noble cause - elevating our profession and giving like-minded professionals a place to freely share ideas, inspiration, successes, failures, and mutual support.

We all know that any healthy organization must change and evolve over time in order to stay current and responsive to the community it serves. That is paramount to a healthy, sustainable business. However, when the organization’s core values, beliefs, and objectives evolve to such a degree that the organization is no longer recognizable from its original roots? Unfortunately, then it’s often time for key members to disengage and move on. This is the path I have found myself on over the last year - increasingly distancing myself from an organization whose core beliefs and objectives are no longer in line with my own. I simply cannot support, nor sit idly by, while a once vibrant and open community that celebrated critical thinking and intelligent debate becomes a community of censorship driven by a single dictator who makes no room for any opinion not in line with hers.

You would think that growth would be a positive thing and that growth which causes a separation in ideals is simply healthy maturation of an organization. Separation should be dignified and professional. You simply agree that you no longer see eye to eye and the best course of action would be to part ways and wish each other the best. Unfortunately, this is not the case with this particular parting. Instead, I find myself feeling betrayed and used. In the beginning, there were specific boundaries for where the organization would and would not go in terms of growth. There were things each of us understood to be unacceptable in terms of the kind of community we all wanted to help create and foster. I have operated under that understanding since the very beginning.  I have given freely of my time and my expertise in support of that goal…only to find that I was misled. The goals we all work so diligently towards were never the “real” intended goals. What was deemed “unacceptable” in the beginning is now the status quo and the goals for the whole organization. The “community” we helped to create has become the vehicle for promoting only one.

I cannot help but feel betrayed and saddened that one person could take such advantage of all those who gave so freely of their time and effort to build a noble, elevated community - only to have that community stripped from us so that one and only one person can reap the benefit of a combined effort. That, in my opinion, is the epitome of unethical behavior. It has also been a hard, painful lesson learned in terms of volunteering the time and energy, much less the image and integrity of my business.

Have you learned a similar lesson in your business? By all means, feel free to share your experience by posting your comments below.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Ethics, General Business, Virtual Assistance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.