Leadership at HRC is regularly in the weeds in a way that is both demeaning to staff (who are highly qualified, intelligent, and motivated), and hugely wasteful. Loads of company time spent inefficiently. Senior leadership team is possibly the least trusting group of people I’ve ever worked for.
Leadership is overly focused on the donor base in a way that severely undercuts the organization’s tangible utility. Basically: there’s no way to actually serve the community when keeping the lights on (read: paying the obscene salaries of the president and senior leaders while obsessing over the organization’s visibility in the news cycle) is clearly the only real priority. Other organizations manage to balance these competing needs, HRC does not seem to be able to.
The work itself is often traumatic, especially if you’re LGBTQ+. Additionally, however, the workload is truly untenable, and there’s no real effort made to care for staff and their mental health beyond a Calm app subscription. There is a regular expectation of night and weekend hours, which contributes to a culture where there are no real or respected boundaries for staff. This is especially problematic for an organization with HRC’s mission: refusing to provide adequate, structurally integrated care for workers (especially LGBTQ+ ones) is antithetical to the project of collective liberation. In my many years of professional experience, I’ve never before seen qualified, smart, mid-career employees walk off the job with no new position solidly lined up, and during several years at HRC I saw 7 or 8 quit from my division alone. The stress and emotional toll of working at this organization is not to be overlooked.
Since Obergefell, HRC leadership’s inability to pursue a coherent vision beyond their myopic and craven thirst for relevance is utterly shameful. As a result, staff is regularly brought in on or handed organizational priorities that ultimately aren’t truly embraced. Overall, upper management’s lack of foresight and inability to execute substantively on big picture ideas creates unnecessary urgency and cost for the organization, and an incredibly toxic and disempowering environment for workers.
