 from egg to caterpillar, it's all go in the world of the Hungry Caterpillar In this second of a series of posts about enabling ongoing change in organisations, I look at how organisational culture can encourage learning to flourish.
I’m starting with culture because it’s the most important ingredient in enabling learning in my view – tools, methodologies, approaches etc are helpful but what really matters is an organisation’s ability to create a working atmosphere in which staff:
- share ambition and willingness to take a few risks
- have the integrity to honestly say to one another what worked and what didn’t
- ask their users and stakeholders for their views and uses this information.
In a recent post US Museum Director Nina Simon talks about how she’s created what she calls an ‘experimental’ culture in her institution – and this has many similarities to the learning culture I’m trying to describe.
Organisational culture is a massive topic – I just want to focus on 3 practical things we can all do, whatever our role in the organisation:
1. Be positive
Reflection (e.g. evaluation) is an important part of learning. It’s very human to focus evaluative and feedback conversations on what didn’t work or what could be improved. That’s part of what we need to be asking, but it’s equally important to look for what works as well – so we understand what worked and why so we can replicate it or learn from it in other ways. Simply starting any reflective conversation by asking questions such as those below can be helpful:
- what went well?
- what am i most pleased with?
- what do I want to remember to do again next time?
2. Be honest when you get it wrong
Getting things wrong is an important part of learning and if you are not making mistakes then you’re clearly not being ambitious enough (or perhaps you’re superhuman – congratulations).
Modelling that it’s OK to make mistakes and get it wrong sometimes can be very powerful – especially if led from the top of an organisation. Readily acknowledging your mistakes – and what you’ve learned from them – signals there’s no shame in the occasional cock-up.
Pretending something hasn’t gone wrong and skirting round it can be very damaging to trust and morale – but some people find ‘less than perfect outcomes’ hard to talk about. Swift acknowledgment and constructive feedback (which I’ll come onto) clears the air and allows everyone to move on, having learnt what needs to be different next time.
Learning from your mistakes can be really powerful. Nobody likes to feel they’ve ‘failed’, but if things don’t go 100% to plan being able to understand what happened and know how to do it better next time is incredibly empowering. I know I’ve learnt some of the most useful lessons in my life through getting it wrong and learning from it – and it also makes me feel a hell of a lot better about messing up if I’ve feel at least I’ve learnt from the experience.
3. Give (and seek) feedback
How often do you give feedback to others, or receive (and ask) for it yourself? How helpful is the feedback you give and receive?
Good feedback is a gift – a specific, timely piece of feedback can do wonders for confidence and motivation. I was talking with a colleague recently who told me how some constructive feedback from her line-manager improved her performance more than any course she could have paid to attend. Feedback can both encourage and promote learning – so it’s a win-win for any manager. Ever wondered why companies constantly seek customer feedback and offer various rewards to incentivize it? It’s because feedback can be brilliant: if done well.
One simple model for giving feedback that I’ve come across is called BOFF:
Behaviour – describe what someone did
Ownership – explain what impact that behaviour had on you (this is important second-hand feedback can be dangerous territory)
Feelings – how did this make you feel. If you’re uncomfortable with this – e.g. if from Yorkshire – you can skip the ‘feelings bit’ and it still works more or less.
Future – ‘next time you could do XX differently?’ This last part is crucial it’s what turns a complaint into constructive feedback.
There are some other ‘golden rules’ about feedback I should mention. Make sure it’s expected or requested, and think where/when to give feedback so the receiver is most likely feel comfortable and able to listen without getting defensive. But make it timely – feeding back on something someone did 6 months ago might given the impression it’s been festering in your mind for a while. And don’t just given negative feedback – make sure there’s plenty of positive feedback too.
I sometimes use the idea of the feedback sandwich: positive, negative, positive. Or (and this is stolen from my son’s primary school) ‘three stars and a wish’: three positive pieces of feedback followed by one constructive suggestion for next time.
So, those are some of my top tips regarding culture – but I’d be really interested to hear what works for your organisation? In the next post in this series I plan to look at the process and tools for organisational learning – when, how and what to learn.
 In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf... (the opening lines of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar)
What does change mean to you? Does the idea fill you with dread or excitement? Does the term itself reek of management-speak and bring back bad memories of poorly handled restructures (if like me you ever worked in the arts funding system you probably lived through a few of those). Whether you love it or hate it – it’s hard to avoid change. So the question is how to live with it?
A couple of years ago as I was nearing the end of my Clore Fellowship I had some funds left in my training budget and was casting around for a course that would be useful to me as a consultant. I settled on a Change Management and Leadership course at Henley Business School (which I’d recommend) and was dutifully drilled in change theory (such as John Kotter and Tipping Point ) and project management and those double-dip change curves. I then found myself working for a year as a change manager in an arts organization. But beyond this formal business-school capital-C-Change I think there’s a far more interesting and important conversation to have about how we enable change within cultural organisations.
Reflecting on this past year’s experience, and looking back over research I’ve done before with MMM about what makes for financially resilient and successful arts and cultural organisations, I’m struck by how important the capacity to change – or learn from experience – is for arts and cultural organisations. And rather than seeing Change as something we have to address from time to time in a formal, separate way, I’d argue it’s better it we embed it into how we work on a day-to-day basis. I’m not the first person to say this by a long way – and certainly Mark Robinson’s paper about adaptive resilience raised the same issues within a far more rigorous conceptual framework.
One of the things I have learnt about change is that people see it in different terms – improvement, quality, adapting, innovating, learning. Change as learning from experience sits best with my way of thinking. Reading around Action Learning recently I came across a quote from that summed it up nicely for me:
‘for an organisation to survive its rate of learning must be at least equal to the rate of change in the external environment’ – Reg Revans
Given the political, social, technological and economic maelstrom in which we live I’d suggest applied learning needs to become an organizational priority.
So how do we create the conditions for arts and cultural organisations to learn? Over the next couple of weeks I plan to post a series of thoughts and tips about encouraging organizational learning – and I’d be interested to hear what works for you too.
 First day at school for Alex and his friends My little boy started school a couple of months ago, and whilst it’s great to see him starting to learn how to read and write, what matters most to me right now is that he’s happy and confident at school. He clearly loves it.
Feeling secure, and therefore confident and happy, is a great foundation for learning. No matter how bright you are and how great your teachers, unless you feel happy in your learning environment then you won’t learn well.
This ‘lesson’ applies to learning at work – and by extension to how we improve our work. We need to feel confident to learn effectively because to learn anything you need to be open to discovering new perspectives and information and sometimes that can feel like admitting a weakness or deficiency.
About 7 years ago I worked for a third sector organization which was striving to be a ‘learning organisation’ (i.e. it set out to consciously learn about how it was doing so it could improve). Very laudably, in the spirit of transparency, we set about this publicly; sharing what we learned (in this case about developing financial resilience in non-profits) with our peers for the greater good. This felt very radical and exciting at the start. But as things started not going to plan and our main stakeholder began to lose confidence in us, we faltered and became less willing to be honest with ourselves – as well as externally – about what was actually happening. We began – as they say about the crime figures on The Wire ‘duking the stats’ – making it look better than it was. That brave and exciting feeling we had at the start quickly turned to cynicism and people stopped telling it as it was. Consequently we started making the wrong decisions. That story doesn’t have a happy ending (the organisation no longer exists), although I very much admire the people who were leading it and I’m glad they tried.
The experience leads to conclude that most mortals need to keep internal evaluation and external reporting separate if we are to be truly honest with ourselves and, therefore, actually learn anything. But too often these two very different functions end up being combined in arts and cultural organisations. Perhaps because too often we don’t evaluate unless an external funder requires, or funds (and often both), us to do so.
For this reason, whilst I agree we should ‘measure what matters’ (to cite the Happy Museum manifesto) I’m a little uneasy about the current promotion of economic measurement in the arts and cultural sector. I can see the logic of using methods to measure the value of what we do in the terms the policy-makers accept – ie economic. And there’s some very clear and useful information now available about the pros and cons of different approaches.
What concerns me is that I don’t see how these methods help us understand– and therefore improve – the impact or quality of what we do in the arts. In a time of reducing resources I’d argue this challenge of making best use of what we have is even more important than advocating for our funding and support. Of course ideally we should invest in evidence for advocacy and research to improve our performance – but realistically few organisations do both. And I wonder whether we’d achieve more by improving our performance than justifying it?
 Leonardo involved a lot of queueing and looking at the back of other people's heads Patience is a virtue, but not one of mine, so the queues that were a prominent feature of my visit to the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery today were not my idea of great visitor experience. There were queues snaking outside the building to buy tickets (fortunately I escaped those as I had one already), queues to get in the galleries, queues to look at the pictures…
Fortunately the exhibition is, very much, worth the wait.
I’ve been thinking a lot about audiences and visitor experience recently so beyond enjoying a fantastic exhibition, I was also interested to observe so many people engaging with art. Also, as I don’t actually know anything about Leonardo da Vinci, despite having a PhD in History of Art, it was interesting – from a professional perspective – to be in the position of a visitor with little prior knowledge of the exhibition. (I acknowledge I’m accustomed to galleries so not equating myself with a first-time visitor).
So, for the first time in my life, I used the audioguide and found it an incredibly useful and interesting source of further information that enabled me to get more from visiting the exhibition.
I was also struck how many others (probably the majority) were also ‘wired for sound’. Those works which had an audio track were by far the busiest as people studied them as they listened to the curator explain more about the work on display. As I have often noticed now that so many people are surgically attached to their iPods in public spaces, wearing earphones seem to either make people oblivious to others or give them permission to ignore you. So the experience of being in a very crowded room with lots of people wearing earphones wasn’t great – I got stood on, shoved, pushed and rudely walked in-front-of quite a lot. I rather like talking to other visitors and listening to what they are saying – which doesn’t happen when you’re all wired up. But on balance, having access to that extra info as a solo visitor was great and meant I didn’t have to bother reading the labels unless I wanted to know who owned the work (not sure I’d want the audio guide if visiting with a friend though – as I often do – it felt very anti-social).
Overall, this was a very interesting (as well as enjoyable) gallery experience for me in terms of thinking about galleries and museums. Many of us talk about galleries being a space for people to make their own meanings, to discover art for ourselves and ourselves through art. I still subscribe to that vision about the museum and gallery as a civic space where we can come together to enjoy art and share art with one another. That involves experts facilitating those experiences – but also recognizes that much of what we value about art is the personal and collective experiences it enables us to create, be those aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, political, social.
But I was reminded today that not everyone wants that kind of collective or co-produced experience. Some people want – what I must stop thinking of as a more old fashioned – passive experience of consuming or receiving. Sometimes – such as today – I want that. I knew nothing and I wanted an expert to help me understand what I’m looking at so I could get more from the experience – more everything, more knowledge about Renaissance painting, patronage and society, more appreciation of the skill and beauty, more understanding about art history and conservation, more food for thought about art and its role….
Other times I want to get a big red pen and cross-out the labels and wall texts which tell me what to think. The challenge for the gallery or museum is how to cater for these very different needs.
 One visitor's response to this year's Turner Prize at Baltic Last week Sir John Tusa published an article arguing we need to get better at making the case for the arts. That we are not very good at expressing the ‘intrinsic’ value of the arts is no revelation – it’s been a constant refrain in UK cultural policy for at least 7-8 years. I’m interested in why it seems so difficult? Why do a group of otherwise highly intelligent, self-aware and articulate people struggle to say why it is what they do?
I wonder if one the reasons we find it so hard to talk about why the arts matter because it can be so personal (i.e. about who we are and our lives) and hence we know that’s subjective?
Talking to Learning professionals in the arts, they talk in terms of art having the potential to create emotional, social and intellectual responses and changes in people. I think this is a helpful framework in which to think about the effects of encounters with the arts and so applied this model to thinking about my own experiences:
Across my cultural ‘diet’ (mainly visual arts, film, literature and popular music – I don’t ‘do’ much theatre, opera, dance or classical music) I have all three types of response – emotional, intellectual and social.
Music is – for me – emotional: escapist, celebratory, consoling, uplifting and distracting (when I’m bored). I revisit artists and songs that I love and don’t particularly want to expand my ‘canon’. Poetry fulfills a very similar role for me. Familiar friends. It’s not transformational – but it’s very emotional and important to me. ‘La vie en rose’ is forever the song inscribed inside my wedding band. Pulp wrote my anthems about growing up a bit ‘different’ in Sheffield in the 1980s (taking on the relay from The Smiths but locating it on my manor).
Literature, on the other hand, is escapist – my window on other worlds. I like to read about other lives, other people, places and periods of time – and lots of international writers to learn about them. Anything I’ve ever learnt about history and other cultures is through poetry, novels and films (and the occasional holiday). Partly then my response to literature is intellectual (it’s about learning things and seeing the world in new ways) but also its social in that what I’m seeking to learn about is people: human nature and relationships. And there’s nothing I like more than chewing over what I’ve read and seen with others. Judging by the success of book clubs I guess I’m not alone.
The visual arts is the sector in which I’ve worked for 15 years and I’m mainly interested in art from an intellectual perspective and hence I prefer art that engages with those issues (e.g. conceptual). I’m fascinated by what art is and can be and how it can challenge my thinking. Maybe that’s because of I trained as an art historian and have hard-wired myself into thinking about art rather than feeling about it.
Sculpture – in particular – also evokes quite a strong physical and emotional response in me –I can’t keep my hands of it in the way great music makes me want to dance. Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre (which you may know as ‘the Tate bricks’) the sculpture that whetted by interest in contemporary art. Three Forms by Barbara Hepworth now represents to me a mother’s startling realization about the difference and independence of her newborn children: when I first encountered it I saw it purely in formal terms as an innovation in abstract sculpture.
I do wonder if I don’t particularly ‘do’ much opera and dance because they seem – to me – to lend themselves best to emotional responses and I tend to be a head rather than a heart person – but that’s just a theory. I know others respond very differently to literature and art and value different types of response more than I do – so I suspect ‘value’, like beauty’ is very much in the eye of the beholder.
So why does this matter?
I believe art changes us at an individual level – incrementally and perhaps quite often imperceptibly. I remember working for the British Council and being expected to account for our funder’s (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) outcomes in my work. They seemed a million miles away from my day job of promoting cultural dialogue between France and the UK – in fact I stuck them on my kitchen cupboard for a laugh as the idea that we could realistically ‘avoid war and conflict’ by promoting a book tour for a British writer was risible.
But is it? Only if you are looking for short-term and simple, measureable, outcomes. How else do we understand ourselves, the world around us and one another if not through our culture in its broadest sense? There’s no simple cause and effect between one book and one action or outcome. Art is more subtle and cumulative than that and we each make our own meanings from and with it.
My enjoyment and engagement with the arts is very subjective and personal (embarrassingly so at times). I’d find it hard to extrapolate from this personal perspective a wider ‘value’ that applies to other people’s enjoyment. Of course there are ‘social benefit indicators’ we could use to group such as personal development, community cohesion, individual or community empowerment, identity development. Some clever people in the USA have even created some intrinsic value indicators – but they don’t excite me either. Somehow generic terms don’t capture the power and passion of my experiences with art, music and books: it’s a very personal passion.
Perhaps we all need to share more what we personally value in the arts – and more importantly, ask audiences what they value and experience through their arts experiences. We don’t do that nearly enough – we’re so fixated on who they are in terms of the age, ethnicity, etc we rarely take the time to ask why they came and what they took away? Perhaps if we asked more of these questions to our audiences we’d discover whilst experiences are often highly personal and subjective, there is plenty of common ground and common themes. If we could ‘prove’ that, then perhaps we’d be more confident and competent about how we can talk about this common ground.
It’s been two years now since I started this blog in November 2009 and I’ve published over 100 posts during this period on a range of topics from arts funding and policy, to business models, audience engagement, leadership in the visual arts and being a working mum.
You can sign up to receive posts by email on the top right of this page – and apologies but to those of you who were subscribed I’m afraid WordPress accidentally lost your details during a recent catastrophic upgrade so you’ll need to sign-up again – but in case any slipped past you, I thought I’d share the top viewed posts from the past two years.
1. Well it is the $64million question so I shouldn’t be surprised that my post what do resilient business models for arts and cultural organisations look like? is the most visited on my site – although I’d recommend looking at the series of posts I wrote about the findings from that project – this post just sets out the research outline.
2. Quite a few of my posts, like this one From Social Media to Social Organisations, are reports from conferences or seminars. Writing about these events help me process my own learning from them, but also as I enjoy reading others’ accounts of events I’ve not managed to attend I like to share my experience in case it’s useful to anyone or their dog.
3. I also regularly blog about research projects – partly to seek input as I go along but also to test out hypotheses as they emerge. The third most read post is about my research into joint leadership models summarised the interim findings. You can also download the full report here or read the recent series of posts based on it.
4. Last year I published a provocation about how I think galleries and art museums need to change their relationships with audiences and this popular blog post is one of the many posts which muses on this issue. This one didn’t make your top ten – but it would have been in mine.
5. Much of my independent work (and in former roles at Arts Council and NCVO) has been about exploring ways in which arts and cultural organisations can diversity our income streams. This post Shopping or investing reflects on a shift in mindset about funding that I think we need to encourage.
6. I try and use the blog to share interesting articles or books I come across and US-based writer John Falk’s books about learning in museums have been the subject of two posts, including this one about the importance of learning for museum business models. More recently I also posted about some of the key findings about visitor experience in his latest book.
7. Readers also really like this post – outlining why I’m writing this blog. It was one of my first and has always been one of the most viewed. It’s a bit dated now and I’ve learned more about how I like to use blogging in the meantime so I plan to write a sequel soon.
8. Coincidentally, this post reflecting on my first year of blogging is also in the top ten. Perhaps some of you are interested in blogging per se, and not just what I blog about?
9. I confess, sometimes I use the blog to rant – usually about a lack of concern for audiences among some of my peers or about the trials of being a working mum. Over the past couple of years I’ve come to realise that being a working parent is actually a great asset, and I think some of my more recent posts express this more clearly than the early rant people read most!
10. Finally, in tenth position. One of my favourite ways to use the blog is to capture insights and observations – light bulb moments – and see whether the make any sense in black and white. Some clearly don’t, but judging by the number of readers of this post questioning our love affair with anything ‘international’ – others do.
So that’s your top ten most-read posts. Hopefully the list has introduced you to 1-2 you found useful or interesting – if you’d like to subscribe to receive the blog via your inbox then please sign up at the top right of the page. And if you have any reflections or comments then – as ever – I’m very happy to hear from you.
A few weeks ago, I came across a story running in the charity sector press about the appointment of the new CEO of the Institute of Fundraisers: the professional membership body for those working in fundraising. The article focused on how the successful candidate wasn’t a fundraiser by profession, but a general manager. There was no implication that the individual concerned was unsuitable to run the organization, but given the frustration of many in fundraising roles that there are few career progression opportunities for them it added insult to injury that not even the Institute of Fundraising was run by a former-fundraiser.
In my own sector, visual arts galleries and museums, the only route to the top is a curatorial one. Exceptions to this rule can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Arguably those working in learning, marketing and fundraising are just as likely to be potential senior managers and leaders, why is it that so few end up running an organization?
‘The traditional route to senior roles in the visual arts has been curatorial and so that’s the skills-base people start with and value [...] So I think there’s a sense within the visual arts you profile and that will lead to a senior position.’
The vast majority of art galleries and museums in the UK are run by people who began their careers as curators and this has been the traditional career path for gallery directors since exhibition galleries first emerged after the Second World War. But running an art gallery or museum in 2011 is far more challenging than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Those seeking to lead galleries and museums today can no longer expect to learn all the fundraising, business, managerial and strategic skills they need in today’s environment while ‘on the job’.
Nor – I would argue – can curators single- handedly expect to master all these diverse skills alongside their core expertise of continually developing their knowledge of artistic practice.
Over the past 10-15 years we have begun to see the emergence of Deputy Director and more recently Executive Director roles in the visual arts, often during periods of major growth (such as capital developments) or in response to major change. But for cultural reasons, many visual arts organisations prefer to recruit single leaders (and curators specifically) although many of those I interviewed for my research felt that there is a problem with supply of suitably experienced candidates. Research into the university sector shows that for knowledge-rich organisations (such as art galleries) having leaders who understand the core business is important for standards and internal and external credibility. It also has a demonstrable impact on business performance.
Art galleries and museums should be led by those with a deep understanding of our core mission. But the core business of arts organisations is not just the art product – it is equally the way we engage people with the art and yet we very rarely appoint learning or marketing experts to executive leadership roles in visual arts. We might take it for granted that curators have this knowledge of ‘the core business’, but they do not necessarily have expert knowledge (or a vision) about how people engage with art.
Curators should lead art galleries and museums, but so should other visual arts professionals with expertise in audience engagement, such as learning and marketing staff. And if we want to develop a wider and stronger pool of future leaders in the visual arts then we need to value management and leadership and encourage curators to develop their competencies in these areas, alongside their curatorial expertise.
The language of personal relationships often dominates discussions about joint leadership models in the arts. Several people I interviewed for my research referred to these partnerships as ‘professional marriage’. Some Artistic / Executive Director pairings in theatre (e.g. Tom Morris & Emma Stenning, currently at Bristol Old Vic) are long-term commitments which endure beyond one organisation with Artistic / Executive Directors applying for roles together in some cases. ‘Personal chemistry’ is often cited as a reason why some pairings work (or fail), and less than ideal situations are described as ‘forced marriages’.
Regardless of how a pairing comes together, interviewees and the wider literature concur that, as with romantic love, it takes time – and effort – to build an effective relationship and stressed the importance of partners sharing common values. Just as sometimes ‘opposites attract’, difference of approach and experience was also apparent and found to be highly productive in professional relationships.
It is this difference which is considered the greatest asset of collaborative working – the grit in the oyster which makes the pearl. And yet it is also this difference which can lead to conflict within partnerships, ultimately poor performance or even breakdown of the relationship. For collaborative leaders (and I’d argue all joint leaders have to be able to lead collaboratively), awareness of their own preferred way of interacting with others, combined with the ability to adapt their style for different situations, (‘emotional intelligence’) emerges as a key competency.
Beyond their own working relationships, collaborative leaders are adept at managing the inherent tensions within non-profit arts organisations between the different agendas of mission and money, artistic innovation and audience experience. The skill of collaborative leaders is to create an environment, a framework and an organisational culture, in which difference can support and result in a synthesis of ideas, rather than a battle between opposing camps – characterised as ‘creatives versus suits’.
So joint leaders have to be collaborative leaders, but in the arts and cultural sector what can be overlooked is that single Directors also need to be just as (if not more) collaborative as joint leaders.
While many working in the arts may aspire to collaboration: relatively few achieve it. As MMM highlight in their excellent report on collaborative working, participants often know what is required in theory and have good intentions but lack the competencies required. Collaboration is demanding and the necessary values to achieve success also often run counter to prevailing attitudes and ways of doing things within our organisations. Recognising the systems and behaviours that underpin collaboration and having in place measures that reflect how leaders (and organisations) work and not just what they achieve is imperative if Boards are to be able to support and challenge executive leaders.
So what should Boards be looking for if they are looking for a collaborative leader? Below I set out a ‘person specification’ I suggest is the foundation of any leadership/management role when partnership or collaborative working is important (i.e. any role!). It starts by outlining the values which underpin successful collaborative leadership of arts organisations, moving onto identify the key competencies required:
What to look for in a collaborative leader?
Values
- Genuine respect for artists and audiences. Believes arts organisations exist to create art experiences for audiences and have responsibility to support and develop innovative artistic practice.
- Believes all staff are creative and have mission critical roles: not just the artistic team.
- Believes arts organisations play a wider role in society and their local, regional or national context.
- Takes pride in collective effort and does not seek lime-light or personal recognition.
- Recognises the distinctive role of different arts organisations in a wider ecology – i.e. looking to smaller organisations to profile emerging artists and using the resources of a larger space to develop audiences and to provide curatorially rigorous appraisals of an artist’s career, to offer fresh insights.
Competencies
- Determination: strives to achieve exceptional results; holds others to account; looks to constantly improve; learns from experience and adapts behaviour accordingly.
- Communication: uses informal and formal communication to build relationships; is able to address conflict constructively and encourages open and timely conversations.
- Emotional intelligence: understands their own motivations and style and is able to manage and adapt leadership style according to context; actively listen and seeks to understand others; builds empathy.
- Facilitation: ability to frame constructive and purposeful meetings and conversations which encourage understanding, develop solutions and find consensus, an ability to delegate and does not need to control everything.
- Influencing: builds shared vision; ability to inspire and engage others.
- Vision: ability to articulate how artistic mission relates to wider world; ability to see beyond their short-term interest and contribute to wider goals.
It sounds like a tall order! And of course, Boards will also be looking for candidates with particular expertise depending on the mission of the individual organization.
But perhaps the pool would be bigger if we were willing to consider a wider pool of potential arts managers and leaders from among our ranks to progress to the top positions? In the final post in this series I consider why we don’t see more leaders emerging from fundraising or marketing roles and ask whether only curators are equipped to run art galleries?
 Some people get very uppity about job titles and what they call themselves: I’m not normally one of those people. But when it comes to visual arts managers I think we have an image problem and that the job title doesn’t help.
In my book, a job title should give you a clear sense of what that person does, and perhaps (if it matters for the sake of clarity or credibility) where they sit in the hierarchy of the organization. That’s the raison d’être of a job title: but, as with the title of a book or film it probably helps if the title sounds a bit interesting too.
One of the things I struggled with when undertaking my research into leadership models in the visual arts and theatre was what to call people doing the ‘managing’ jobs (as opposed to the artistic jobs for which they are clear titles like Artistic Director or curator) in a way that was clear – so I wasn’t talking at cross purposes with my interviewees. People were called a variety of titles: General Managers, Deputy Directors, Executive Directors, Head of Business and Administration, Head of Amin & Operations, Administrator, CEO. Often people in different organisations were doing very similar things under a different title – or called the same thing but had very different roles.
Also – and you’ll just have to take my word, or read the report to find out why this isn’t a sweeping generalisation, as otherwise this will be a very long post – there’s a problem with supply of suitable arts manager candidates in the visual arts and curators who go on to become solo Directors rarely have the opportunity or inclination to develop adequate management and leadership skills. So we desperately need 1) more people to consider a career as a visual arts manager and 2) curators to want to develop their management and leadership skills more.
This led me to conclude that we needed to re-brand and re-name arts manager roles in the visual arts so that people who work with them (and may consider these roles as career paths) have a clearer, and more positive, sense of what they do.
So what do we call them and how do we describe what they do? As discussed in my first post of this series, successful senior arts managers in the visual arts are usually extroverts, defined as ‘Resource Investigators’ in terms of Belbin’s team roles; put simply they are outward- facing, risk-taking, entrepreneurial people who make things happen, not the traditional accountant or administrator stereotype.
In theatre the senior management role (the Executive Director) is often linked with that of Producer. Some ED positions incorporate being the lead Producer in the organisation, or in a trading subsidiary. Many people now working as EDs have been producers earlier in their careers. When talking about what made a great ED, one theatre Director I interviewed explained it in terms of the producer role:
‘What you need in a producer is someone who’s extroverted, who likes to get on the phone, get out there… Producers have to be risk-takers and have to have a rashness about them [..] An OK producer just makes it happen, a brilliant producer exploits it; they get international touring, they get people excited about it. The producer is doing the external identity of the company. You need to have someone who’s good at external relations, so that you can do that thing you’re good at which is direct plays.’
One useful description of the manager role in an arts organization (which came to me c/o Battersea Arts Centre) is ‘Organisational Producer’. There is a major difference between the role of an administrator looking at the day-to-day running of the organisation and the far more strategic ‘organisational producer’ role which helps shape and market ideas, and enables their successful realisation through securing the resources and creating the conditions required. One is an operational role, the other strategic.
Viewing arts managers leading organisations in these terms – as organisational producers – offers a better understanding of what they do, the benefits a good arts manager brings and the competencies required to do the job well. However, in the visual arts, the concept of ‘producer’ is less familiar than that of curator – although arguably many curators (especially those who are independent or working in small spaces) are often undertaking many aspects of a producer’s role. So whilst I think the ‘organisational producer’ term has merits I’m not entirely convinced this translates to the visual arts when the term ‘producer’ has less currency and status.
That means I’m still looking for a term that sums it up nicely. I’d be very interested to hear your suggestions about how we describe these senior management roles in our sector – answers on a postcard (or via Blog Comments or @claireant are very welcome).
Talking to various people about my research it was also often difficult to describe what arts managers did without resorting to framing this in negative terms (I heard several people say they did ’everything except the art’ which was neither accurate nor a particularly attractive job description). It was rarely this simple – artistic, programming, organizational and business strategies are related to one another closely in most organisations. Leading the ‘business’ end of an arts organization can’t be a wholly separate endeavour from leading the programme/ artistic side of things – or you’ll soon encounter problems. Therefore ensuring both artistic and organizational leaders are able to work collaboratively is also essential.
In the next post in this series I share what I discovered about how senior managers need to work with artistic staff if executive director, general manager etc roles are to be successful in practice.
These are difficult times for arts and cultural organisations (if you hadn’t noticed). We need to generate new income streams reduce costs; to attract, volunteers, funders and staff and audiences in an increasingly competitive marketplace; keep up with technology, keep up with artistic practice – the list is terrifying. No wonder we ask so much of those running organisations – judging the job adverts and role descriptions for Director or CEOs these days.
Increasingly we are seeing more and more visual arts organisations seeking to increase their management capacity (hurrah) by appointing Executive Directors, Business Managers, Deputy Directors. There’s been a number of new posts emerge in recent months – and since I published my report advocating for investing in strategic management I’ve been keeping a close watch on developments.
If as an employee or Trustee of an arts organization you’re thinking about changing your staff structure to bring in, or develop within existing staff, more managerial capacity then this series of 4 posts about what makes a good senior arts manager and how to recruit one is for you. In the first post I ask what kind of people are we looking for in these new roles.
Given these challenging times, it’s tempting to think what we are looking for in a manager is ‘a safe pair of hands’ to guide and support the artistic leadership. But my research suggest otherwise – those ‘arts managers’ who are really making a difference to theatres and galleries are not the back room number-crunchers and managers conjured up by job titles like ‘Head of Admin & Operations’, ‘General Manager’ or ‘Business Manager’. No they are creative, risk-taking, visionary and entrepreneurial.
For my report I asked 34 leading arts managers what made an excellent arts manager. The consensus was that rather than looking for a business administrator, they wanted people who worked more like producers (and language is something I’ll return to in post 2 in this series). One theatre Artistic Director explained the role as follows:
‘What you need is someone who’s extroverted, who likes to get on the phone, get out there… Producers have to be risk-takers and have to have a rashness about them [..] An OK producer just makes it happen, a brilliant producer exploits it; they get international touring, they get people excited about it. The producer is doing the external identity of the company. You need to have someone who’s good at external relations, so that you can do that thing you’re good at which is direct plays.’
An Executive Director in theatre I interviewed emphasized the ability to deal with the unexpected:
‘I once described the role as being like a nursery teacher because you are changing subject every ten minutes […] I think you’ve got to be somebody who likes flying by the seat of their pants – you’ve got to be comfortable waking up everyday not quite knowing the answer to the questions you’re going to face.’
Contrary to popular belief, few senior arts managers have the comprehensive finance, fundraising or other specialist skills many organization set out to find when they advertise for these roles. And it’s worth noting if you are recruiting that over-specifying a job description by insisting this one person needs to single-handedly raise the money, do the accounts, manage IT, HR and building etc and all the other things no-one else can do is unrealistic and unappealing to potential candidates.
The kind of manager you really need may have experience in one of those areas, but more importantly they understand the business of theatre and are comfortable working with experts across a wide range of topics (‘a jack of all trades’ as one put it). Outlook (style and values) matter more than experience or technical skills to one Artistic Director I interviewed who had worked with several individuals with very different experiences.
So, out with arts administrators and in with arts managers who care and know about the business of theatre or the visual arts and can marshal the resources required in an entrepreneurial and creative way. In the next post in this series I’ll consider whether the language we use to describe what arts manager do and how we do it could better convey the purpose and approach required.
|
|
Wed 16th May 2012 9:07
(1)
Loading...
Recent Comments