I would say that three years in the current environment isn't bad, especially for someone early in his career. Scott Adams frequently makes the point that if you're good at your job, you seldom get promotions or raises at a single employer consistent with your increasing value to the organization, and the only way you can realize that increased value, especially early in your career when you haven't built up vacation, pension, or profit-sharing benefits, is to go on the market.
Personnel departments hate that, of course, since their job is to keep personnel costs down. Let's face it, they'll prefer to hire a mediocrity they can predict will stay ten years at a 2% annual raise and more or less do a job (which of course justifies a 2% raise) than hire a potential MVP who'll want to be promoted or leave. So I'm disinclined to evaluate Mr Growdon purely on how much time he'd spent at a previous job. If he'd been there three years, he was a satisfactory performer; we don't know exactly why he left.
Another situation that happens is someone is hired -- and this may in fact be a capable and ambitious person -- and based on his assessment of the job, he may feel it's an opportunity to grow and excel, especially if he thinks the situation is a fixer-upper that may expand his range of experience. Remember that an employer runs a risk in making every hire, but it's less clear that everyone runs a different risk in taking a new job.
If a new hire can conceal bad parts of his record, the employer can also utterly falsify the working conditions. Obvious cases are when a good performer takes a job at Enron or Theranos based on what he's told in the job interview -- and even on his own independent research into the company -- only to discover that the place is a scam operation. Even if they don't weed him out as not a team player, he'll be out of work soon enough when everyone there is laid off.
So after a night's sleep, my sympathies tend to be with Mr Growdon. Consider that Fr Lewis's objective in hiring a new headmaster last year was to find someone who could take over and end the churning of personnel at the school. On the face of it, Lewis failed in this effort. My experience in the commercial-tech sector was that in such cases, the guy in Mr Growdon's situation was only the first shoe to drop, because someone was going to clue in that the problem wasn't with that guy they'd fired, because the problem simply wasn't fixed. Attention would inevitably turn to the guy who hired and fired the guy who lasted less than a year.
Let's recall that Fr Lewis's experience before he came to OLA was as rector of a smallish TEC parish without a school. Fairly soon after St Luke's went into the ordinariate, it gave up its building and became a tenant in Washington. Fr Lewis then had a somewhat vague objective of finding a new building for the group, which at minimum didn't happen while he was pastor there.
Instead, Bp Lopes moved him to OLA, a much larger parish, which had a school, major debt, and a property to maintain -- all of which were outside Fr Lewis's prior experience, even if we leave aside the issues at the parish connected with leaving the archdiocese and having the retired pastor live effectively on site. What were the strengths Fr Lewis brought to the job, versus the strengths that would be needed for such a job, versus the real (as opposed to the expressed) expectations Bp Lopes had of him?
My sense of Bp Lopes, based mainly on my experience working for dysfunctional tech firms, is that the one thing he doesn't want is a guy who will actually take charge and show initiative. (Good or bad, David Moyer had clearly been screened out of the candidate pool for the OCSP for similar reasons -- my wife, who served in the military, says the best officers spent time in the stockade at some point in their careers.)
I don't think it's a big step to surmise that the chemistry for Mr Growdon at Atonement Academy wasn't good, and I would also surmise that the guy has been heaving a big sigh of relief all this past week. I can't help but wish him the best of luck, and I can't help but think things will eventually work out well for him.
The real problems at OLA are higher in the organization.
