We were that close.

She thought she was protecting the community.

That was the problem.

Of course there wasn’t anything wrong with wanting to keep the group safe and we had clear processes in place and a team that deeply cared about the work.

The problem was that she had started deciding, on her own, what required intervention and then acting without being asked to.

I did not see it clearly at first.

This was 2018. Female In’s culture was already deeply relational and you could tell just by watching how everyone on the Admin team related to one another.

It was a really chill vibe. We were close.

In our admin-only chats, we talked about our lives. We showed up for one another. Women sent each other gifts. They supported one another through hard things.

One year, members of my team secretly coordinated flights from different parts of the United States and showed up to surprise me for my birthday.

Yeah, we were that close.

I’ve always had deep relationships with women. Some of my closest friends today are women I’ve known since childhood.

So when I referred to someone as “sis,” told her I loved her, or thanked her for showing up for me personally, that was not out of the ordinary.

That was the culture.

And somehow, inside all of that closeness, I still had processes for damn near everything.

Because closeness does not remove the need for structure.

A call to action.

The incident that finally forced me to face that distinction started with an old allegation that someone on our admin team had shared our internal conversations outside the team.

I knew about it.

I had already looked into it.

There was not enough there for me to justify escalating it.

The way I see it, people talk.

Friends talk to friends.

People complain about their teams, say stupid shit, let off some steam.

When working with others, there’s just no avoiding conflicts, loyalties, personalities, bad days and poor impulse control.

None of those things automatically mean we suddenly have a group problem on our hands.

That’s where my threshold has always been.

I intervene when behavior threatens the group, violates our processes, or adds to a larger pattern that screws with the work.

One of my moderators, let’s call her Marlo, had a different threshold.

And somewhere along the way, she began acting on hers.

After a conversation in which I said I did not have evidence to take the old allegation further, she contacted someone herself.

When I discovered this, I asked her directly:

"Did you attempt to discuss with anyone else after we talked about the moderator sharing conversation we had?"

She said yes.

Her explanation was that I had said I didn’t have evidence and told her if she got anything she should read it carefully.

I immediately realized what had happened.

"that worries me you considered my comment as a call to action. It wasn't meant as one at all"

She had converted something I’d said in passing into authorization.

She had decided an investigation was warranted.

On whose authority?

When I learned she had been asking questions and rubbing people the wrong way, I tried to explain why her method concerned me.

This was not simply about whether the original allegation was true.

She was creating a second problem in the process of trying to solve the first.

I told her:

"i feel your interference isn't helping at all"

And then more plainly:

"i also feel this is my responsibility and not yours."

She still did not understand why I was concerned.

At one point she said:

"I got enough info I needed."

She had run with whatever she felt needed to happen. She checked it out and reached her own conclusion.

She was not merely giving me advice anymore.

She was acting on her own judgment now.

She asked me:

"So what you're saying is if it is FIN-admin related, all FIN admin back out?"

No.

That was not what I was saying.

There is a huge difference between caring about what happens on the team and deciding on your own that it’s your job to police everybody else.

So I tried another way.

I asked her to imagine that another moderator, Vicky, decided something had happened and began contacting Marlo and other members of the team to investigate it without my knowledge or instruction.

Would Marlo simply think, Of course. She's on the team. This is normal.

Or would she wonder:

Why is Vicky asking me these questions?

What does she think I did?

And most importantly:

"On whose authority is she policing the rest of the team?"

There it was.

That was the question underneath the entire conflict.

On whose authority?

“BUT we are not a cult.”

Marlo believed she was protecting FIN. But she was starting to take steps that simply weren’t hers to take, and her actions were already causing problems.

The disagreement became even clearer as we kept talking over the next day.

She was disturbed that members of the team might speak negatively about FIN or one another privately.

She said:

"I just expect better from FIN admin."

Later:

"If you don't like your team, get out. No need to bad mouth your team."

My position was different.

I did not expect every woman who joined my team to feel fuzzy feelings all the time.

People were going to talk behind one another's backs sometimes.

They were going to dislike each other sometimes.

Some would behave immaturely.

Some would have personal issues.

I literally said it:

"BUT we are not a cult."

Which still makes me laugh.

But I meant it.

Membership on my team did not put me in charge of every feeling or shit talk the women shared with someone else.

I was far more interested in whether someone could actually do the work. And in our all-volunteer team, we were all doing plenty.

I told her:

"i am more likely to be more concerned about burnout and a non-functioning team member than someone who said they don't like me behind my back. Which one directly matters more to FIN and can potentially threaten FIN?"

That was my thing: outright harm, process violations, weird patterns.

I even explained that another moderator, Dolly, had been removed because she repeatedly violated our conflict-resolution process.

There was another problem with what she was doing: the way she chose to investigate actually reproduced the very behavior she was concerned about.

I was hearing from teammates that she’d gone into their inboxes to question them herself.

So I asked her:

"do you however see the parallel in what you said they did wrong and you going into Sima's inbox in 2018 to discuss something that's essentially a FIN issue?"

Her answer:

"Hmmmm"

Exactly.

Her attempt to investigate the alleged breach could itself create another breach.

I was also thinking about what happens next.

What happens when the woman she contacted tells someone:

A FIN moderator came into my inbox trying to find out who leaked something because apparently the team doesn't trust one another?

Now the investigation has become its own source of chaos.

Eventually I said:

"if your trying to address something is not producing that intended result, I think its fair to shut it down and let the process we have in place deal with it."

That should have been enough.

It wasn't.

I think we should act.
Therefore I acted.

The original issue was no longer the real problem.

The real problem had become:

Could she disagree with me and still accept that this decision wasn’t hers to make?

Marlo kept trying to move my threshold for intervention toward hers.

She thought the issue warranted more scrutiny.

I did not.

She believed more investigation was justified.

I did not.

And instead of bringing that disagreement to me and leaving the decision where it belonged, she had already begun taking action.

That is when advice becomes something else.

A moderator is allowed to say:

I think you're underestimating this.

A moderator is allowed to argue her case.

A moderator is allowed to think the founder is wrong.

But once she moves from:

"I think we should act"

to:

"I think we should act, therefore I acted"

That’s when disagreement becomes a power tussle.

By the early hours of February 10, I was done trying to negotiate something that should not have required negotiation.

At 2:11 a.m., I sent her a message removing her from the moderator role she’d held for more than a year.

I told her:

"I would like you to take an indefinite break as FIN mod until such a time when we can both arrive at a place where I no longer have to be concerned about you making utterances or unilateral decisions which undermine my ability to successfully lead my team."

Then I wrote the sentence that, looking back, captured the problem exactly:

"a leader and a helper cannot work in competition. We do not occupy competing roles. This fixes that.”

Good intentions
do not create authority.

By then, it was clear we had an authority problem.

She could care about the group and disagree with me about the call.

What she could not do was quietly substitute her judgment for mine and then use her role to act on it.

That is the line.

And it is one of the hardest lines for community leaders to see because the people most likely to cross it are often our most engaged admins and moderators.

They are the people who care the most.

They are helpful.

They are vigilant.

They are invested.

They are convinced that what they are doing is in service of the community.

And sometimes they are absolutely sincere.

Sincerity does not solve the problem.

Good intentions do not create authority.

Access is not authority.

And conviction, no matter how righteous it may feel, does not give a moderator the right to act outside the authority they were given.

A healthy team can be strengthened by disagreement.

What it cannot survive for long is when everybody start deciding for themselves which decisions are theirs to make.