This is a CTP of initiative: RIPESS/ APRES‐GE (Switzerland)
This CTP is about the loss in 2012 of a driving force for development, the first General Secretary of the Chamber. Thierry Pellet was in charge of this mandate between 2007 and 2012, which corresponds with the period during which the Chamber launched its two main projects (for more information, see the CTP called "Development and the launch of two major projects"). As the interviewee explains, "In every entrepreneurial, innovative or development projects, there are always key people who play a crucial role. [...] The first General Secretary of the Chamber who was hired, Thierry Pellet, was a member of the board and was completely aligned with us. I was President of the Chamber during five years and we formed a duo which worked really well". This great synergy had been central to the development of the Chamber, as we will see later-on.
Thierry Pellet was very important to the Chamber because he compiled a variety of key competences for developing the Chamber, including an expertise on Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) stakes, networking abilities and operational leadership: "He was an economist with a large background: he had a very good grasp of SSE issues and he was very competent for the development of operations. He had a very extensive network and strong political and interpersonal skills. He gathered all required skills for this start-up phase. He was kind of a five-legged sheep, as we say."
Consequently, he was difficult to replace when he left to become the director of a nature protection organization "When he left [in 2012], we were not able to find someone with the same skills and the person we hired (who was the best profile we could find) had many skills but not all of them. [...] We thought it would be enough but it wasn’t." This observation is all the more relevant in a context of emerging difficulties for the Chamber as from 2013 (which is the subject of another CTP called "Difficulties and loss of funding").
It is precisely because his departure happened during this specific period that it is considered as a CTP : "To summarize, I would qualify the period like that: after a phase of rapid growth, the Chamber had a consolidation and stagnation phase with a certain political downgrading which set the floor to a certain number of critics. In the absence of strong projects and without a counter-attack ability, the critics led to a number of difficulties". Indeed, his departure, which led to a certain weakening of the Chamber, left space for these critics and even reinforced them.
Two internal circumstances contributed to transform the departure of Thierry Pellet in a governance crisis: the inability of his successor to partner with the board and his relative absence of leadership.
The board is in charge of the strategic and political steering of the Chamber. Since the General Secretary is supposed to make the decisions taken by the board operational, it means that enhanced cooperation is needed. It means that even if the General Secretary doesn’t have all the required skills himself, he can appeal to the members of the board who have a great amount of strategic, political and operational insights and closed connections with potential external partners. As the interviewee explains, "What is interesting is that in the board of the Chamber, we are a dozen people. You have 5 or 6 directors of big SSE organizations (we are 3 or 4 to have at least 200 employees) who are familiar with practical management skills and with key SSE challenges. [...] Few of us had elective mandates or are close to political representatives. One of us was the mayor of a big town near Geneva and was a senator. All of this means that the volume of competencies in the board is huge. However, if the governance is weak, it means that the ability to enhance these competencies (and ideas) is nil. [...] In the absence of someone able to coordinate this volume of competencies, it was almost like they disappeared". Rather than know-how, greater coordination was missing: "Sometimes, social-movement organizations have periods of weaknesses because their board or their bodies lack some skills: here, it wasn’t the case. We had people with a high level of skills and experience but we missed someone who would be able to promote and use them".
Moreover, members of the board work on a voluntary basis, and they have a limited amount of time to give to the Chamber :"Just picture a board with a high volume of skills but which meets only once a month, despite exchanging emails and so on”. This amount of time is even more limited when a member has to cope with difficulties in his/her own organization, as was the case for our interviewee: “These last few years, I really had to take care of the insertion business I'm running because we went through tough financial times. As an historical pillar of the Chamber, I had less time and availability and I let the others handle the difficulties. They had to take their turns". However, it seems that nobody was really able to take the turn, which led to an internal crisis.
Besides, the new General Secretary was also subject to criticism by his staff and was not able to federate them : “On the ground, you have a team lacking leadership. If the General Secretary did not federate his team and did not do the interface with the board, it means he did not do his job as he should have”. However, the interviewee recognizes that the stakes were very high and that the difficulties faced by the Chamber were not entirely his fault. They were also enhanced by the weakness of the Presidency during this period: ”It would seem unfair to state that he was incompetent. He wasn’t totally able to cope with our difficulties but, to be honest, the challenges were very complex and the stakes were very high [...] And the conjunction of a weak General Secretary with a Presidency which did not do what should have been done did not help obviously".
Three major related periods or events can be relevant: first, the mandate of Thierry Pellet (2007-2012), the period of difficulties (2013-2015) which is mentioned in the “contestation” category and more extensively detailed in another CTP (we won’t detail it here) and the decision to adopt a new organization structure (2015).
In the communication announcing the future departure of Thierry Pellet of march 2012, the board of the Chamber took stock of the activities and the main developments of his mandate: “He led the Chamber during the first step as a professional structure. Under his direction, APRES-GE went from a 3 people-team [ie. The founders] to a staff of 12 people, and went from 40 to 250 member organizations. A variety of services were developed for members [...] and he had a crucial role in the better recognition of the Chamber and of SSE in general”. Besides these very concrete achievements, the communication also emphasized the relevance of his management style: “Beyond his sustained effort to develop the Chamber, he managed to initiate a new work working method, combining efficiency and skills upgrading, rationality and humanity, nourishing the delicate balance between project and files management and a strategy in favour of a view of the future”. In addition to acknowledging the success of his mandate, the communication also showed what was expected from his successor.
After a replacement of 3 years which did not meet the expectations of the board, APRES-GE decided to temporarily renounce to hire a substitute and to rethink its organizational design instead: “We tried to replace the General Secretary in a spirit of ‘one person leaves, one person comes’. We realized after 3 years that the person replacing the historical General Secretary wasn’t the good person. He left us because it wasn’t a good fit. And at that moment [in 2015], instead of looking for a third General Secretary, we decided to rely on the three poles of the Chamber in an attempt to avoid to put all our eggs in the same basket. We rethought out organizational design so as to rely on the 3 poles of the Chamber: the PPE+ project [on insertion], economic development and the build-up of our members’ network”. This governance structure choice was thought to spread the risk and the responsibilities in order to enhance the response capacity of the Chamber when coping with difficulties in the future.
As from late 2012, the Chamber was caught in a political storm consisting in regular attacks on its incubator project called “Essaim”. Even if it is the subject to another CTP, it also has to be mentioned here, because it helps explaining the kind of external difficulties the new General Secretary had to face. Moreover, internally, he suffered from mistrust from his employees.
The timeline was as such: "2012 corresponds with the departure of the first General Secretary, Thierry Pellet. The second phase (2013-2014) corresponds to growing criticism towards the Essaim incubator. In 2014, there was a first political attack in the framework of the municipal budget of Geneva: a right-wing group wanted to cause harm to the socialist representative who supported the incubator (extreme right-wing people hardly never support this kind of projects) and they proposed to remove the funding. However, since it was a project with an economic activity, it was difficult for them to call into question a project with an economic dimension”. Consequently, they had to think about another strategy to execute their plan: “Between 2014 and 2015, this right-wing group thought about a way to achieve their stroke and they finally came-up with this idea to transfer the budget to another entity (not related to SSE whatsoever) instead of removing it. It was a way to kill our project without having the image to minimize economic support: it was quite a political manoeuvre!". In the absence of a strong political sensitivity (e.g. an ability to form alliances), it was kind of an uphill battle from the beginning.
Eventually, the political storm resulted in a sizeable financial loss for the Chamber: "It was transferred to a semi-public entity which deals with small and medium sized enterprises financing but which does not deal with SSE because it's not in its mission. They had not asked for anything and, all of a sudden, they received 350 000 CHF (which is roughly equivalent to 325 000€). It was all about partisan politics".
On a more internal level, the fact that the recruited General Secretary wasn’t from SSE circles created mistrust within APRES-GE employees. “Among others, the new General Secretary had a limited grasp of the complex SSE issues. He was more of an entrepreneurial manager than a specialist of the subject. [...] This created legitimacy and credibility issues firstly internally and then externally”. The board thought this mistrust would disappear over the years but instead of weakening, it increased.
The implications of the departure of Thierry Pellet, on an internal and external levels, were not anticipated by the Chamber. On one side, they were not aware of the specificity of the functions of a General Secretary in a SSE Chamber, and, consequently, of the potential difficulties to find a replacement. On the other side, they did not anticipate in time the necessary changes in the governance structure.
As the interview explains, the Chamber was not aware of the multi-faceted feature of the function: "For this kind of jobs, you need to master SSE challenges, to be able to handle a 10-people team, to steer an incubator and to be able to maintain and foster public relations (including political ones). We did not realize how many skills this kind of job (ie. General Secretary) in our kind of organizations (with a strong transformative dimension and, consequently, major political challenges) required. And we didn't realize that this kind of profile is actually rare. To be honest, we were not good on this".
Since they did not anticipate the specificity of the job, obviously they did not see that replacement would be a major challenge. In particular, they did not anticipate that salary could be an obstacle: "Another factor of weakness is that the number of people, who, like Thierry Pellet, have a high level of competency (ie. economist, master degree, 20+ year experience) and accept to work for the salary we offer in our kind of network... is very limited! They are pretty rare and the probability to find them is near zero. And this took us a long-time to acknowledge this...".
On top of that, they realized afterwards that the departure of the General Secretary and his replacement was just one of the many explanatory factors of their inability to cope with this period of difficulties: "A very concrete situation which happens in many social innovation projects is when, all of a sudden, there are the wrong people in the wrong place: and we have a lot of associative organizations which do not manage to let them go because these are very tough decisions to take. [...] However, this wasn't the case for us. We faced a lot of difficulties and we suffered from plenty of weaknesses. It's by lining them up, with hindsight, that we say to ourselves that we should have seen much quicker that the General Secretary would not manage to cope with these challenges and that we should have rearranged the governance". As a consequence, they realized they should change the structure governance much later, in 2015 (once the political storm had passed).
The main lessons the interviewee drawn about this weakness period is the importance of interpersonal relations, the imperative to reduce dependency on one person at the internal and at the external levels and to adapt the governance structure in this sense.
First, the interviewee acknowledges that one reason explaining why the departure of the first General Secretary was hard to take is because when he left, the “dream team” disappeared: "We could move forward quickly because we got along very well (which is quite important at the human level) and because we were very complementary. As a result, the cooperation was more than effective. When this kind of situation happens, it is a blessing but when it breaks, it is difficult to repair". He realized afterwards the importance of getting-along to move projects forward.
However, the biggest lesson was about the necessity to reduce the dependency, either on one member of the structure or on a political representative. On the internal level, "the biggest lesson is about the strong dependency we had on the first General Secretary. This dependency led us to give up for now the idea to have a General Secretary. Instead, we decided to reinforce the 3 poles of the Chamber [...] We decided on a flatter structure in order to avoid being dependent on a conductor who would be difficult to recruit anyway". On the external level, they realized they should have relied on a diversified set of political parties: "We were very dependent on this socialist representative and we had enough contacts with other political parties to do some damage control".
Finally, they realized they should have thought quicker about a way to adapt the governance structure, despite the obstacles of the associative decision-making: "This episode also shows the limits of social movements which decide to adopt an associative structure. In a network like the Chamber [...], which has a cumbersome governance structure, responsiveness is slow [...] When you're in a network, you cannot re-position without consulting the members. And the board, which is a high-level board only meets once a month". Regarding the governance model they finally decided to adopt, it was meant to answer to the challenges of the period: "To summarize, we need a governance which is less dependent of one conductor; which allows the valorisation of the competencies of the board (which has a high volume of skills but a very limited amount of time)".
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