As promised, I am posting the video of the “Five Minutes To Shine” speech my former colleague and assistant theatre manager, Lehua Simon gave at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference luncheon. The video APAP posted on their site didn’t include the slides (it was difficult to get both the speaker and the video screen in the same shot) so Lehua kindly added her slide presentation to the video below.
As I mentioned in my early post, she got a great response and some of the speakers who followed after her made reference to parts of her presentation. (By the way, that is me at the end yelling “hana hou” which is means “do it again,” basically the Hawaiian call for an encore .)
As you probably noticed, she started to tear up a bit in front of the audience. Half the people at my table were colleagues from Hawaii and told the other half I was the theatre manager in the story who left. There were a lot of whispered questions about what I did that would drive her to start crying in front of 3,000 people. While I possibly did not prepare her well enough for my departure, I had given four months notice and there were many conversations about issues and potential problems during that time.
The questions she was sending me after I left mostly dealt with the new fiscal reporting system that the university had changed over to a few months before I departed. There were a number of things that did not transition from the old system as might be expected. But it is difficult to answer these questions from memory 5,000 miles away.
As frustrating as that was, probably the bigger source of frustration was the new policies and procedures being created as after the furor followed the university athletics program’ attempt to contract Stevie Wonder for a concert that saw $200,000 sent to a company that took the money and ran.
The university was formulating much more restrictive policies as I was leaving and when I was asked to comment on the drafts, I pointed out there was nothing wrong with the old policies, it was the fact they hadn’t been enforced that lead to the problems. When I spoke to the new theatre manager, he said the policies were still shifting to the point every contract they have signed has come back with new requirements.
My purpose in mentioning this is not to scorch bridges, I really valued the opportunities afforded by that job. Rather, I think this is a good illustration of the claim made in the Netflix Human Resource slide show that companies start curtailing freedoms and start instituting more processes the larger and more complex they become.
State universities don’t have the flexibility to hire in the manner that Netflix can, but many organization do if the will to do so exists. It may be worth thinking about whether your processes are helping or hindering your organization’s purpose as well as impacting your employees’ happiness with their jobs.
I am sure Lehua’s discussion of the spiritual fulfillment she receives from doing her job resonates with many of you, whether you work in the arts or not. That sort of joy comes easily when you work in the arts without very much intentional effort by the employer. Companies in other industries have to add amenities to make employees happy. Arts organizations just have focus on getting impediments like onerous processes out of the way. (Lack of funding, alas is a tougher nut.)
Netflix points out that there are some areas that absolutely require processes. So make the processes where necessary and enforce them strictly, but resist making new processes just to answer every problem that pops up. I am sure we have all come across a rule or some requirement in a contract that is so strange, you know there is some sort of story behind it. As Netflix noted, in creative environments it isn’t necessarily cheaper to prevent errors than to fix them when they occur.