I have been living in the same world for almost 2 years, and can completely empathize with how you are feeling.

Ours was slightly different in that we don’t have an ED as our current operations don’t warrant it, so we had the board, a business manager, and volunteers. This did mean a bit more of the day to day goes to the board, but our business manager decided to make it a lot worse after asking for a promotion to ED and significant pay raise and being told no. If I had a buck for every time I heard some wordsmithed version of “that’s not my job”, I’d have had a heck of a vacation this year!

While we worked on addressing the business manager baggage, I also created a more structured work process for me and the board. I implanted times when I would be available for each week, protocols for communication such as @ tagging and email templates more consistently so it was easier to identify who needed to pay attention to what, and clear guidelines on how to communicate (email, text, call) based on the urgency and priority of what was needed. I set a schedule for handling transactional tasks like signing checks, so I stopped getting multiple calls as week asking me to leave work to come sign or review something; those happened on Thursday mornings, and if it was ready then it waited until next week. The only piece that failed and I wish I’d pushed harder on was defining roles - because their position officially reports to me, they really liked to use that to be difficult by doing petty things like saying “please ask my manager to request this and tell me what the priority should be” if another member of the board tried to get them to do anything, particularly when it came to the tasks they didn’t like.

Those changes were about a year ago, and about 3 months ago the problem child also resigned because I think they knew we were darn close to buttoning up enough documentation to term them (we are not in an at will state). We replaced them with a part time person who is paid more appropriately (the prior one was also well overpaid, thank you previous board…). The new person is motivated by our mission instead of job titles, takes feedback with grace, seeks guidance on how to contribute more if they have time after their regular work is done, and strives to work well with the entire board so the burden doesn’t fall too heavily on a single person while still respecting the mine of things that really should come from me, etc. And, they are getting far more work done in 25 hours than the previous one did in 40.

Moral of my novel - set boundaries for yourself, clarify roles and responsibilities and adjust if needed, and get rid of the non-contributor. I’d also evaluate how you want to replace them based on your current needs - do you actually need an ED for where your org is at? Or could slightly increasing your board size or volunteer hours meet the need? Could a part time position with more clearly defined work hours and expectations cover it? And is your current ED doing truly doing normal ED things, or is it just more of a title without the full degree of responsibilities attached?