If Robson was brought in for a specific function, then that should have been run as a project with him as project manager reporting to a CEO. He shouldn’t have been brought in as a CEO to run a project.
If people were not there for periods of time, such as Corcoran and Hamilton, it should have been clear who was taking on their duties, and which were being left, so people knew where to take issues to get action.
As soon as the ■■■■ hit the fan on Hirds birthday, the incident management plan, or disaster response plan, or whatever they had or should have had, should have swung into action with a formal management reporting structure with everything from media response to response to members, AFL, other clubs external and internal relationships, proactive and reactive responses, run through that incident management structure for consistency, with external oversight from crisis management professionals if necessary.
We clearly didn’t have a sufficiently robust processes procedures and structure before or during the saga, let’s hope we do now.
That AICD article would suggest that the Essendon Football Club has a long way to go to resolve these fundamental problems.
Telling the world how great their corporate governance was, or is, is a whitewash. People are still on the Board from the peptide era or from the ‘Stand By Hird’ ticket. The Club was established to field a football team and is wasting time and money on a computer games team (eSports not, they are just computer games) and investigating a basketball team in a national league in direct opposition to the AFL and the sport of Australian football. If EFC wants to invest in sport then invest in more Australian football teams and clubs firstly in the Essendon district and then around the rest of Australia. There are considerable failing in the leadership and direction of the club if these are seen as the way forward.
People do their best and mean well. But if they don’t get it right, or lead an organisation in a direction fundamentally opposed to the stated objects of the company then those leading the organisation should either wake up and move on themselves, or be moved on by the company members.
“according to chair Lindsay Tanner … he knew he was absolutely the right person in the right place at the right time.”
Does anyone else remember when EFC went out to get “absolutely the best person in the country”? Lindsay must have forgotten the Knights chapter in our sorry recent history or he wouldn’t have referenced himself like that.
So what is the problem at Essendon at the moment?
I don’t think it is greed. These are not board positions of the kind akin to a listed company.
Is it ego? Anyone standing for the board/committee of a football club must have a fairly well-developed sense of self to believe they can do the job better than the next person.
Is it hubris?
To be taking interviews for Company Director magazine - the Australian Institute of Company Directors magazine at a time when the Club hasn’t actually won anything for a long time and has a recent history of significant failures of leadership, governance and management - I don’t think it is time for people to be taking such public curtain calls.
Get the basics right for a few years in succession. Keep a focus upon the main game, not the delivery of PR puff pieces, irrelevant adventures in computer gaming and sports other than Australian football. Deliver a team and a club community in which everyone can feel comfortable and not like they are being fed empty platitudes while at the same time being fleeced of your hard-earned membership fees. Do that for, say five years, then, after you have retired from your position on the EFC board, let someone else tell good stories about you.
Yes, I distinctly recall EFC declaring they wanted a new coach from a culture of success. Then they appointed the former captain of the least-successful team of the previous 20 years. Go figure.
