I have been in my current position for over a year now, but I wasn’t on the job more than a month or so before I realized I was in a situation I had never experienced in my nearly 20 year long career.
I had co-workers who were not true believers.
That is, they were not working here out of some interest or passion for the arts. They did not know some basic industry terminology despite having worked here for five plus years.
One assumed the role when her previous supervisor left. The other had the seniority to bid into the position from an unrelated area. Each likes their job because it is interesting and varied, but they aren’t motivated by a deep abiding interest in any artistic discipline. They would work just as hard at an interesting job somewhere else.
Don’t get me wrong, they perform their roles with great proficiency and absolute devotion. There is never any hint of a desire to avoid working longer hours on a performance day or leaving a task undone until the next day. One made the decision to attend the board meetings when she recognized doing so would help her do her job better. I have no reservations about their work or ethic and would be anxious if I learned they found another job.
It is just that being able to get backstage and watch a performance from the wings holds no special allure for them.
I am not used to working everyday with people who don’t feel like some part of the job is filling a void in their soul. I guess this is what it is like working with normal people who just simply like their jobs.
As soon as I realized this was the case, I immediately remembered attending a conference session where Andrew Taylor mentioned a colleague, dissatisfied with job candidates with arts backgrounds, had hired someone with experience in a Sears call center to be their box office manager because they had a better sense of how to offer good customer service on a large scale.
Recalling that story, I knew I had to consider that we might be better off with people who were relatively agnostic about the arts. (And certainly given that they had far more experience running the facility than I, there was no question about who was more valuable to the operations.)
After I year, I have been pondering the trade offs of the situation. Perhaps the biggest asset has been using their relatively dispassionate relationship to the arts to assess whether a performance might have appeal to a wider segment of the population when we are planning the next season. In some respects, they are a better representatives of the community than the board members are.
On the other side, they aren’t as likely to be enthusing about an upcoming performance over beer with friends. They aren’t automatic brand ambassadors. But in that respect, they are a measure of how much effort I might have to invest in winning over the hearts and minds of the community.
I would be interested to hear any stories and insights other people have about this situation, pros and cons. Are these people taking jobs away from unemployed arts people who would truly appreciate the opportunity and happily work 10 hours overtime, to boot? Or is this balance the sort of thing arts organizations sorely need?
I am very much in favor of a mixed team of believers and professionals, because the outside perspective is too often absent in arts organisations, and thus they cater only to believers
Have you ever worked in such a situation? What were the dynamics? This is good in theory, but it might not be as good in practice. For many working in the arts provides an intangible reward, part of which is a sense of mutual belonging to a special group of people. Non-believers might feel and be viewed as not belonging.
It is easy for leadership to say these people ground our organization and need to be included and another to make including them feel organic.
On the other hand, they may not value being included in some activities, just as I had mentioned in my post. They may think theater people are crazy to want to sit around chatting for two hours backstage or at a diner after working until 2 am to load out a show.
There’s a lot to be said for the diversity of perspective that ‘non-believers’ bring. I’m married to one, and his input gives me great balance in my arts-org endeavors. He has a tremendous understanding of the orchestra business, but no sacred cows. How many people like that actually exist? He’s worth his weight in gold. I think the key to a mixed workplace is that the ‘non-believers’ must truly understand the business and what generates success. They don’t have to love it, just understand it. (It should go without saying that the ‘believers’ must not think themselves better than their co-workers).
I’ve witnessed the lack of this understanding in a church setting, where some admin positions were filled by the ‘I’m just here for the job’ types. The employees do their jobs very well, but they don’t have any concept of the role of church musician. They’ve spent years complaining and back biting to the higher ups that the musician employees aren’t there in the office every M-F at 9 a.m. sharp. It’s a poisonous workplace (thankfully, not mine!)
A picture comes to memory. I am seated beside only two other musicians around a large Board room table comprised of the symphony’s office manager, our General manager, Members of the Board and the orchestra’s conductor. There are three of us there who are musicians, two of us are auditors only and the other one is our musical boss, the conductor…The conversations turn to the subjects of the next season, musicians’ pay and how to spend a special donation given to the orchestra. Are we really talking about the orchestra players I work with? Every Board member has an opinion about the players’ issues. No opinion reflects our needs and desires or seems to relate to our lives. There is a sticky sweet compulsion around the table to be nice no matter what the difficulty of the subject, as though being so near an art form required of the Board members a sort of adorable other-worldliness or spirituality. There is a “them” and “us” and none of them have any knowledge of the kinds of orchestras that exist throughout the country, or a musician’s training beyond children’s lessons at a teacher’s studio. They don’t know of the different kinds of contracts and the existence of CBAs, or what the AF of M offers to players and what players need from their union. No one around the table but the three of us knows what kind of education a player needs to become a professional- one or two university music performance degrees and often several years of attendance at summer training institutes, early freelance playing as a student, and special masterclasses. These life signposts are part of the notes we play, are mixed into the joy and the struggles of being a player. When the Board and the managers don’t make it their job to learn the variety in and the details of the profession in the world outside their community it harms us more than does a lack of passion for the musical styles we play. Even most musicians don’t love every composer they perform!
You’ll probably find it isn’t the love of music that sets the office workers apart from us as players, but the familiarity with the kind of lives we live, and our daily routines, the focus we need when we work and practice, what is actually going on during each second of playing onstage. We have more in common in that respect with the lives of musicians 200 years ago than with the work of non-artists today. The more professional we are, the more we are focused in the moment combining mind, soul, body, hearing, visuals, notes, skills, theory, our action plan for the next few bars while always leaving ourselves open to the players around us. If they could experience the quality of silence and attention we create in rehearsals, the layers of knowledge that support every musical decision, the respect we have for those solo players who come to play concertos with the orchestra, our whole organization would make different decisions and relate differently to the public .
All of those elements of orchestral work were as though they didn’t exist every time I sat around the Board room table with the delightful, educated and friendly members of the Board. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, designers, professors, ministers. And over time that ignorance shaped the orchestra and the ways in which it went forward into the future and related (in ignorance) to the public. We don’t need musicians to slum as marketing personnel, phone ticket sellers or office managers as our orchestra becomes more and more professional and its services to the public more complex. Nor do we need employees to worship classical music the way we do -sometimes. We need to educate employees about our training, our lives, our rehearsals, be open and upfront about our guidelines, union regulations, pay, and our hopes for the future of the organization- which is to say the group of conductor and players, the hall, the office, and the audience in our city.