Written by I can only imagine that running a professional sports team is not easy, especially one with historic success, at times, and tumultuous periods. During the good times, everyone wants to be involved, but during the tough times, most people want to keep their distance from the organization. The ebb and flow of professional sports organizations create opportunities for new employees and athletes to influence positive change and move the organization forward.
Over decades, there is natural turnover of personnel in an organization due to retirements, personnel looking for new opportunities, bad personnel and organizational fit, and toxicity. In the Raiders’ organization, we have seen almost every reason imaginable of why there were personnel and athlete turnover over the years…sometimes bordering on the bizarre. But there has always been a group of loyal employees at the Raiders, similar to long time Raider athletes and even fans.
However, the last few months have shown a trend of high-level staff members leaving the organization. Are these personnel leaving the organization due to the owner or president’s toxicity, a possible scandal, or is it a result of positive change weeding out those who are hurting the organization and its’ culture? We do not know the exact reason why yet, but all messaging seems to be due to a potential scandal. The President, Chief Financial Officer, Controller, and the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development have all resigned in the last two months. Even if all of the longtime employees did not resign due to a potential scandal, so many high-level resignations can only point to some sort of leadership or toxicity issue, especially when two C-suite executives departed in a short period of time.
As we all have seen too many times, a scandal normally exists because of poor leadership and toxicity. A scandal is normally followed by the organization “circling the wagons” to protect themselves from liability and to reduce the amount of outgoing information and is normally followed by an inadequate “internal investigation”. It will be extremely interesting to see where the Raiders go from here, how they message internally in the organization and externally to the NFL and fans, and if the organization looks to positively change their leadership team and culture. It will also be interesting to see if these high-level departures are a result of the organization already moving in a positive direction or are indicative of problems to come.