Updated to include comments from former county manager Tony Gardner.

The recent departure of Arlington County Manager Michael Brown has left more than a few unanswered questions. Among them: what makes a manager not a good "fit" with the county?

Despite the fact that it was originally presented that Brown left of his own accord by resigning last week, Arlington County Board members changed their tune  this week, acknowledging that they asked Brown to resign because "his fit with our organization was not what we had hoped for."

So how does someone who looked so good on paper end up not working out so quickly? For this question, we asked someone who was by all accounts a good fit with the county: former Arlington County Manager Ron Carlee.

Carlee served as Arlington’s county manager for eight years, and worked for the county for more than 20 years before that. He also knows a few things about the relationships between boards and managers; he left his post in late 2009 to take over leadership of the International City/County Management Association.

The board and the manager have to work very closely, he says, and if they are not seeing eye to eye, that can be a problem. “It’s an extraordinarily close relationship between the manager and the board," Carlee says. "You can’t function if there’s a disconnect between the board and the manager."

Another former county manager we talked to, Tony Gardner, says that like anything, the relationship between the board and the manager can be "complicated." Gardner served as manager for more than 10 years, from 1987 to 1998, and now is on the faculty of the University of Virginia.

"Sure, there are always things that emerge where there are differences of opinion," says Gardner. "Soemtimes that might produce some tension. But the job of the manager is to make sure the board and the community are satisfied, and to resolve that tension."

The board has been largely mum on the reasons they found Brown wasn’t a good fit for Arlington. Brown previously worked as the city manager of Savannah, Ga., and board member Chris Zimmerman said Thursday that Brown's experience turned out to be "not as comparable" to Arlington as the board originally thought.

"Sometimes the board is really just looking for a different style of leadership and way of interacting with them," Carlee says of county managers. He notes that two of the four managers before him were let go by Arlington County. "Neither of the managers that got fired in Arlington County did anything you could point to as being illegal, unethical, or inappropriate," says Carlee.

We reached one of those county managers, William Donahue, by phone today, but he declined to be interviewed for this story. The Sun Gazette pointed out the similarities between the cases of Brown and Donahue in a story this morning, although Donahue served for more than two years before he resigned.

Another question is whether Arlington is doomed to hiring internally for the County Manager’s position. The board was gung-ho to do a national search for a new county manager last year in order to bring in a fresh perspective. But as we've now seen, external candidates can come with their own set of challenges.

"It’s like going on three dates together, and then moving in with each other," says Carlee. "How often do you think that’s going to work out?"

Carlee says he does believe that internal candidates have a slight advantage in localities throughout the D.C. area, because the complexities of a three-state region, the federal government and the military can be difficult. "There were any number of times when I was manager that I thought, if I didn’t have the relationships that I’ve built in the community over 20 years, how could i get this done?"

Carlee spoke to Brown about the job before he was hired, but hasn’t spoken with him since he parted ways with Arlington. "He is a member of our organization, and his reputation is a very strong reputation," Carlee says of Brown. "I would have hoped that it would have worked out ... and there’s nothing objective that suggests that it wouldn’t have been good for him and for the board."