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Shorter Board Meetings? You Have My Consent!

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Last week a very interesting article came down my Twitter feed, (I apologize for not noting the source), written by Les Wallace about the best board meeting he ever attended.

What made it the best meeting he ever attended was a very effective use of the time, revolving around the use of a consent agenda. I had not really heard of a consent agenda before, but fortunately the folks over at Board Source wrote up a handy guide explaining:

A consent agenda is a bundle of items that is voted on, without discussion, as a package. It differentiates between routine matters not needing explanation and more complex issues needing examination.

[…]

With a consent agenda, what might have taken an hour for the board to review, takes only five minutes. Because it promotes good time management, a consent agenda leaves room for the board to focus on issues of real importance to the organization and its future, such as the organization’s image and brand, changing demographics of its constituents, or program opportunities created by new technology.

According to Board Source the types of things typically found in a consent agenda are the minutes of the previous meeting, confirmation of decisions, the CEO and committee reports, informational materials and routine correspondence. You don’t want to have financial documents and anything potentially controversial or requiring substantive discussion and decision making as part of the consent agenda.

It takes a fair amount of work to compile all this information. The organization has to be disciplined all the way through. Wallace mentions the work the CEO, staff and other board members did in advance to prepare the materials and have it placed it in the board section of the website for review two weeks prior to the meeting.

Wallace also mentions the board meeting moved from important to trivial matters rather than following Robert’s Rules of Order. The financial statements provided were color coded dashboard summaries of the organization’s financial position provided by the finance committee. An executive summary of staff and committee reports were provided at the meeting with more detailed information available online.

According to Wallace, this cut about 40 minutes out of the meeting and the board used that time to address strategic issues for the organization, attend to some board development and other governance issues.

The Board Source article has more information about how to use a consent agenda and exercises to use to help transition boards to this practice. It’s worth a look if this sounds the least bit intriguing to you.

One of my initial concerns was that the consent agenda could be used to hide problems amid minutiae or circumvent board members, but according to the Board Source guidance (my emphasis):

“If a board member has a question, wants to discuss an item, or disagrees with a recommendation, he or she should request that the item be removed from the consent agenda. Without question or argument, the board chair should remove the item from the consent agenda and add it to the meeting agenda for discussion.”

Using a consent agenda requires a great deal of discipline on the board if it is going to be effective-

“Just a quick question” is not an option when using a consent agenda. Either an item is removed and discussed or it stays put. This places the burden of facilitation on the board chair to be disciplined about stopping discussion and removing items from the consent agenda.”

Embracing The (Cost) Disease

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Hat tip to Thomas Cott for bringing Jon Silpayamanant’s intriguing refutation of the idea of Baumol’s Cost Disease being the doom of arts organizations.

Silpayamanant correctly notes that sports teams have the same challenges as arts organizations. Just as it still takes just as many people to perform Hamlet as it did 100 years ago, improvements in technology haven’t brought efficiencies to baseball allowing them to play the game with only 6 people on the field. I was flabbergasted to learn just how small a percentage ticket sales comprise sports’ teams total revenues.

“The NFL, the most profitable of the Leagues, takes in 20% of its total revenue through Gate revenue while the MLB, the next in line in profitability, took in 35% in 2006 (down from 40% in 2001). The NBA gets roughly 33% of its total revenue from the gate.

[…]

So we have a performance income gap in the Sports Industry which is practically no different than the “structural deficits” found in Classical Music. But the former is considered “profitable” while the latter is increasingly being referred to as being in crisis. What has made up the shortfall in performance revenue for sports then? The most obvious revenue sources are through corporate sponsorship, merchandizing, and most importantly for the purposes of this post–Broadcast licenses (i.e. Television).”

As Silpayamanant points out, only a few sports franchises are profitable but thanks to revenue sharing “(the highest earners will give a disproportionate amount of their gross to distribute amongst the lowest earners), the field as a whole remains profitable.”

Now given the whole “non profit” element, I am not sure a ticket revenue sharing arrangement among arts organizations is viable. Television as a medium looks to be on the wane, but content licensing through online and other media might be viable if anyone figures out a workable model.

Merchandising might hold promise if arts organizations in a community or across a discipline got together and created some interesting products or services to distribute/license and then had some revenue sharing related to it.

But will arts organizations have the discipline and will to bond together toward a common cause and then have the patience to let their plans come to fruition?

A commenter on Silpayamanant’s blog reminds us that professional athletes were not always well paid and often had to work in retail during the off-season. In one of my very first blog posts I linked to Chris Lavin’s 2002 speech, “Why Arts Coverage Should Be More Like Sports,” where Lavin recalls that Wellington Mara who owned the NY Giants football team would give Lavin’s father piles of tickets in the hope of getting people to actually attend the games.

Success didn’t happen in the course of a couple seasons for the sport leagues, nor would it come quickly for any cooperative effort between arts organizations. One of the first hurdles would be a change in operational culture. Lavin’s call for arts organizations to be more open and transparent to the media is echoed today by people calling for arts organizations to make themselves more open and accessible to audiences.

Given the frequent questioning of the validity of the non profit business model for arts organizations these days, perhaps a league of arts organizations focused on monetizing anything that isn’t nailed down can comprise a viable way forward. I mean, heck, many orchestras are already running parallel to sports leagues with the threats of lock outs and hiring non-union players.

Info You Can Use: Job Descriptions, Not Everything Is A Critical Duty

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Not long ago I came across a job posting for a non-profit organization that listed over 25 duties and marked each one of them as a core responsibility.

Now, my first thought was, if every job responsibility is a core one, why did they go to the trouble of applying a special symbol to each one.

My second thought following soon after was that this is why there is so much burn out in the non-profit field.

Theoretically, a job should only have 4-5 core responsibilities. Every other responsibility should be subsets of the core responsibilities or be something you do occasionally. (Vendor coordinator for the annual street fair, for example.)

Core job responsibilities are ones to which you should expect to devote a large portion of your day/week. If you have 25 core duties and even assuming you work at 10 hour day, you will only be able to devote 24 minutes each day to a duty. If indeed they are all core responsibilities.

If you have a job as a marketing director, your core responsibility might broadly involve promotional efforts, external relations and sales. In pursuit of that your a subset of your responsibilities might be supervising writers, designers, front of house staff, relationships with the boards, vendors and various constituencies. You will have many responsibilities, for certain, but most will be aspects of the core duties and not equal to them.

The ticket office manager’s core responsibility is to supervise the ticket office. If your core responsibility is listed as supervising the ticket office, marketing and publicity people, house manager, then you need to have as much contact time with those people each day as the ticket office manager does with the ticketing staff. Presumably those managers are competent enough that they don’t require such close supervision.

Your job descriptions may be very long in order to clearly define what your duties are. I had an email exchange with Drew McManus regarding this topic and he mentioned he has a history of advocating for detailed job descriptions.

I would probably agree with him. The way some job descriptions are worded, it often isn’t clear what the duties are. There are times I read job postings for executive director positions and I don’t know if the person will be supervising a marketing department or actually writing/designing promotional pieces themselves. With non profit arts organizations, one can never assume…

Now I will confess I understand the impulse to make everything a core responsibility. When you have so few people working for your organization, it is crucial that so many things be accomplished and you want to underscore for the job applicant—-it is IMPORTANT to our operations that these duties are successfully implemented.

(I will also confess this topic is something of a sore point with me since 90% my own job description is boiler plate putting “performing arts management” in place of the “facilities operations and management” hire the week before.)

But some things are more important than others and people need to know what the overriding priorities of their position are. The resources and personnel of the marketing department may be necessary to support fund raising campaigns and outreach programs in addition to promoting events.

Determining which of these functions receives the most priority will depend on a number of factors, but the marketing director’s position description should provide a basis for that decision. If the reality does not match the position description, it may be worth examining that fact during a performance review.

But that is a different entry altogether.

Info You Can Use: Doing Business With Board Members

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Since I am on the topic of board decisions this week, Non Profit Law blog recently listed a link about non profits doing business with their own board members.

While it is natural for non profits to seek out people from specific professions/skillsets to be on their boards in order to provide some expert guidance and advice, things get a little sticky when it becomes necessarily to contract professional services.

Since board members often have a personal investment in the organization, they may tend to charge extremely competitive fees for their services. As the article notes, it can also be a little awkward to be talking about paying someone else to do work that a board member in the room is perfectly capable of performing.

The article notes that not only is it difficult to avoid having some business dealings with your board members, it may be hard to actually get good people to serve on the board if they perceive there will be undue scrutiny of how their professional and volunteer activities overlap.

However, it is important to have a conflict of interest policy for board service. Failing to have one and follow it create potential problems for the organization, especially given the role non-profits serve in their communities.

Experts say one danger of so many veteran board members is that a nonprofit could lose touch with how a community perceives the awarding of contracts to members of its own board.

“Public legitimacy and support are very important, and a more isolated board may not be as aware of that,” said Francie Ostrower…

[…]

Board Source , an organization for nonprofit boards recommended by the National YMCA, suggests that board members who want to do work for the organization should donate their services. If they can’t, they should follow the board’s conflict policies.

Other critics of the practice such as Joshua Humphreys, a fellow at Tellus Institute, a Boston policy think tank, take a dimmer view.

“Best practice for nonprofits is to draw a bright line between board service and doing business with service providers,” said Humphreys. “It creates divided loyalties between the public purpose of the charity and the private gains someone is motivated by.”

Siegel (Jack Siegel, Charity Governance) said the practice chips away at the independent thinking of board members who are the recipients of contracts, as they tend to side with their supporters on the board in other matters.

“If you see conflict (of interest), you can almost bet there are other problems in the organization,” Siegel said.

The article goes on to quote Siegel pointing out that it is difficult to hold the work of board members to the standard you should because you have a relationship with them. This point struck a sympathetic chord with me as I remembered some occasions in my career where the quality of the work by a board member was never in question, but changes to elements no one really liked were never requested for fear of offending the board member by questioning their style/taste.

One of the suggestions for eliminating the conflict is that the person leave the board for the duration of their company’s contract under the assumption that if the person is really invested in the success of the organization, they will extend the same discounts as they would when they were serving.

What the article doesn’t mention is that if they don’t extend the same discount it may actually be better for your relationship with the person. If all those involved feel that a fair market price is being paid for the work, there is less potential for resentment on the part of the service provider over sacrificing time and income on a difficult project and less hesitation on the part of the non-profit to assert that their standards be met.

Still, this is all easy to say in theory. In practice, you run into the old question, “how do you fire a volunteer?” When people generously provide time, energy and expertise, they are investing a lot of themselves personally. It can be difficult to refuse their help without making it seem like you are refusing them as a person.

That is why it is good to have a well-constructed conflict of interest policy to which to point. When the situation arises where a board member will start to do business with the organization in a significant way, you can point to the policy and note that providing the service will, of necessity, change the board member’s relationship with the organization and as such the following actions must be taken per the conflict of interest policy.

Board Source has some general information on conflicts of interest on their website and some samples conflict of interest statements for purchase and download. (I have never read them so I can’t attest to their usefulness.)

To Close Or Not To Close, How Much Debt Is Too Much?

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A little over a week ago I received the news that one of our partner theatres decided to close its doors. That sent the rest of us scrambling to contact artists to see if we could salvage the tours with which the organization was involved.

The board has said they want to revise their business plan and perhaps reopen in 2013. In the meantime, come this Friday, the entire staff is out of a job. I am wondering if they will be able to resolve all their grants and settle other business in that time.

A conversation I had about their closing has had me thinking over the last week. When I read the news about their closing, I was somewhat relieved to learn the organization was $200,000 in debt. Given the debt amounts you usually see associated with failing arts organizations, this is relatively small. Though it is also more significant for their $1 million annual budget than for those with $10 million budgets.

Referencing this debt, a colleague asked if they couldn’t have simply gotten a line of credit from a bank to enable them to stay open. This got me thinking about how you determine when it is time to cease operations.

Given that they intend to revise their business plan and hope to restart operations, would it have been better to attempt a reorganization through the next season rather than lose momentum with their community and funders by closing?

Or given that their debt is about 20% of their operating budget, did they do the responsible thing by deciding to close in the face of what I assume to be dwindling attendance and fundraising prospects? Why saddle your new business plan with the burden of another year’s accumulated debt?

In the last couple weeks I read an article/blog post that criticizes a non profit board of a YMCA for being oblivious to the state of their failing organization. The article suggested the board should have seen the warning signs had they been paying attention to the financials.

Our partners were clearly paying attention and decided to do what they felt was the responsible course of action. There isn’t really any clear cut formula which dictates that you should close your business when your debt reaches a certain ratio of your budget because there are so many situational variables each organization faces. What one company can recover from may mark the start of a downward spiral for another.

I am curious to know at what point people think organizations need to close. Does seeing other non-profits rack up huge debts before closing or declaring bankruptcy inure us and make organizations more apt to keep operating under the assumption they haven’t reached that point of no return yet?

Right People, Not Right Product Make A Great Company

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So as something of a follow up to my post earlier this week asking if foundation boards embrace non-profit values, I wanted to point to an article about what private enterprises can learn from non-profits.

The five points the article emphasizes are connecting with the community, understanding what motivates your employees, creating long term value, valuing people over the program or product and improvising.

Many of these points are representative of what the arts can bring to private businesses. While I don’t think the arts are exemplary in the diversity of employees and audiences it serves, improving that situation is a major topic of conversation and can help lead others to the questions they should be asking about themselves.

Likewise, while it may seem that non-profits don’t have a sterling record in respect to overworking employees, they do understand what motivates people to dedicate themselves to a cause in return for little material reward.

Lately one subject that seems to come up frequently is the idea that private companies have an unhealthy focus on short term gains at the expense of creating long term value. Many companies are starting to see that focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is crucial for doing business.

It almost seems that if the non-profit sector can come up with an effective program to engender even a partial shift toward a longer view, a great service will be rendered.

The one point I especially liked in the article was that great people have more value to a company than great products and services. I think it can be easy to forget that when you are being evaluated based on the numbers you achieve (which is especially the case for non-profits’ administrative cost ratios)

4. The right people (not the right product or program) make for a great organization (Chris Pullenayagem, Director, Christian Reformed Church)

Many private (for profit) organizations rely on products or processes or programs to be successful in their business. For those that do, this seems to be an inverted way of pursuing excellence. People bring vision, passion and creativity to their work as evidenced in non-profit organizations. If the right people are hired, every organization will move towards excellence in achieving its vision and what it was mandated to do. Any organization can show results, but only this type of organization will thrive with excellence.

Stuff To Ponder: Do Foundation Boards Value Non-Profit Values?

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There was an article on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) website in April that I felt started to give me some insight into why it seems that foundations and non profits often aren’t in synch with each other’s needs.

CEP President Phil Buchanan writes about research he and research analyst An-Li Herring did on the backgrounds of the CEOs of the top 100 Foundations. I was actually surprised to find that 60 of 100 came from outside foundations. Of those that came from foundations, only 21 were promoted internally from the foundation ranks. Seven had come from another foundation, four of them were already CEOs of those foundations, three of those four had come from outside philanthropy.

That seems like an exceptionally small number of people with philanthropy experience leading foundations.

The profile of the 60 CEOs from outside foundations broke down like this:

Twenty-seven had experience in the nonprofit sector broadly defined:

Those who ran operating nonprofits (not including institutions of higher education) number 14.

Those whose experience was in higher education, typically as a college president or dean, number 13.

Seventeen came directly from a role in business.

The remaining 16 CEOs who came from outside the world of organized philanthropy had positions in government, law, or other domains.

Since boards and CEOs set the tone and operational philosophy of the foundation, this can have a lot of influence on the manner in which they interact with non profits and the criteria they set for funding. After reading the article, I started to wonder if foundations have contributed to the pressure for non-profits to run themselves more like a business. I have never argued that operational discipline isn’t important for non profits, but they are quite different from for-profit entities.

Some observations Buchanan makes:

Second, foundation boards don’t much value experience at other foundations. Again, perhaps a focus on leadership development within philanthropy will change that, but moving from being a Vice President at Foundation A to CEO of Foundation B happens only very rarely (at least at the largest 100).

Third, experience as a grantee, if you exclude colleges and universities (which I’d argue are a different animal) isn’t much valued by most foundation boards when they’re searching for a CEO. It’s striking that there are more foundation CEOs who came to the position from a job in the corporate world than a job running a nonprofit (again, excluding colleges and universities).
[..]
All that said, I’d still argue that boards might want to prize operating nonprofit experience more highly than they apparently do. Leaders who have experienced the pressure to meet payroll with no endowment to fall back on, and have felt what it’s like to be on the other side of the table from foundations, bring something important. They come to the role with a hard-earned understanding of the challenges of doing the on-the-ground work foundations fund – and of what nonprofits really need from their funders.

After reading these findings, I wondered what it is exactly foundations value in CEOs if it isn’t experience, empathy and knowledge about the sector the foundation serves. Buchanan also makes an “if it ain’t broke” argument in support of foundation boards looking to promote internally rather than introducing a potentially disruptive element.

Having read the piece I am really curious to know if external hires are generally more effective than internal hires or not.

It would also be interesting to learn if non-profits would give the highest marks to their relationships with organizations lead by CEOs with a long career in philanthropy. Likewise, it would be interesting to know if foundations would give the highest marks/most support to non-profits whose practices/values are similar to those of the CEO’s past industry.

More Thoughts On Organizational Structures

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When I was applying to graduate programs in arts administration, the head of the program I eventually joined said something to the effect of I shouldn’t enter the program if I was a frustrated actor. I wasn’t.

Just in case, you know, you hadn’t already gotten the sense that I really like the arts administration field after blogging on the topic for eight years.

I have always been a little unsure where I should fall on the subject of how devoted to arts administration one should be. I agree with those who say that we lack well trained arts administrators and think that more people should devote themselves to its pursuit.

On the other hand, I have recently been writing about the arts and culture sector adopting new business and organizational models. I think of necessity some of that will include fewer distinctions between administration and performers.

Yes, people can fulfill both functions. I have occasionally talked about how I have been involved in providing the initial artistic vision and leadership on some projects. But once you reach the point of trying to deliver a certain level of excellence, something is going to suffer unless responsibilities are delegated.

At that point, even if you continue to perform many of the functions of your dual roles, some portion of the responsibility has to be delegated to at least one single person who is solely dedicated to one role or the other. Dispersing responsibility and decision making across many people will only work to a certain point before it becomes unwieldy.

I am not saying organizations which have these sorts of structures can’t be successful. At a certain point it becomes clear that specialization is required. That said, recently it has appeared that large arts organizations may not be the best structure for the future. Perhaps as we move forward, some of the most successful structures will be of a smaller size and be quite effective with all members contributing to both the creative and administrative life of the group.

One thing I haven’t really talked about is the situation of the frustrated artist my grad school adviser referenced. I have worked with people who were competent at the administrative side of things, but were clearly more interested in their art. They were essentially doing the administrative thing to support their artistic pursuits.

It certainly isn’t a new story. Inevitably the artistic desire won out and they moved on in the hopes of sating it. As much as I would like to live in an ideal world where everyone has an opportunity to support their dreams, I have to tell you, the organization was not as well served by these people as those who were fully invested in the job they were hired to do.

The difference in the quality of work between those with a split focus and those who preceded and followed them was marked. Arts organizations have enough challenges and deserve better than “what I really want to do is direct,” though that is often what they choose to settle for.

It occurs to me that one of the benefits of the current structure for arts organizations is that when you apply for a position, the expectations are pretty standard from job to job. Even if the duties differ, you generally know what roles you will be expected to fulfill based on the job description. If arts organizations develop new structures that include artists who also handle administrative duties, then the expectations would be particular to that group.

In light of this, it would almost be better to form the organization with the intent to dissolve after a certain period rather than with an indeterminate end. When the group forms, a certain dynamic will develop that everyone acknowledges and at least tacitly approves. If everyone knows that one person is more inclined to the administrative duties and another is more inclined to avoid them, when the first person leaves it might be difficult to find someone who shares the same exact view on how their duties should be split and doesn’t become resentful that the other person isn’t pulling their weight.

Better that the organization dissolves and reforms to tackle the next project in a manner that plays to the strengths of the existing members rather than to continually attempt to shoehorn new people into the group with the expectation that the founding dynamics remain preserved.

In contrast to the aforementioned current structure, in arts organizations with a more flexible approach to their structure and position descriptions, the frustrated artist may not feel that they need to leave to pursue their artistic expression. Less concrete expectations in a job description may allow greater latitude for how employees/members contribute to the company. With the understanding that there will be an opportunity to express themselves, there may not be a sense of a divided focus. But again, it is all going to hinge on the dynamics of the company.

Art Ain’t Easy

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Some members of the Student Media Art Collective (SMAC) we assembled had gotten an idea to create a mural on the construction wall by the college library. At one of the SMAC meetings, they had mentioned they were having a difficult time getting past all the administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. There was a plan to paint the mural at the end of March during the school Spring Break. When it didn’t emerge, I figured the hurdles got the best of the students.

However, I liked the idea and given that construction next to my building would cause a larger construction wall to encroach upon the courtyard in front of the theatre eliminating 1/3 of it for 18 months, I saw a pressing need to make the wall attractive. I broached the subject with the appropriate powers that be last week to lay the groundwork and smooth the road. I also spoke with a couple of the professors who were advocating for the library mural project to get their buy in. Everyone was pretty positive about the idea and the professors figured my involvement would help eliminate some of the barriers the students had faced this go round.

Happily, the students got the green light to do the library mural after all and worked throughout the past weekend to create it. The mural is fairly simple as you can see in the images below. However, it provides proof that the students can pull the project off within the parameters set by the various concerned parties. As much influence as I may or may not have, had they not done a good job it would have been that much more difficult to get a mural on the construction wall in front of my theatre.

 

I stood with to two of the visual arts professors who had been supportive of the work this morning and they were extremely pleased by so many aspects of the project. Just as I might be able to pick out various nuances in a performance, they were making observations about the execution of the piece that were not significant to me at all. (Like the way the black and white merged into each other at the bottom of the “H”.)

Amid all the gushing observations, they expressed pride in the students for pushing the project and their vision to competion despite all the obstacles. One of the group leaders wanted to give up a number of times. One professor pointed out that Christo had faced similar problems getting permission for his public art projects. Much of the professors’ pleasure probably derived from the fact that the impetus to execute the mural was generated entirely by the students rather than a class assignment. They were very happy to see students taking the initiative.

For me the mural represented an argument against those who claim there is little value for art in education. That mural required research, mathematical knowledge to execute in larger scale, politicking and advocacy, understanding the materials and media, artistic choices and team work. There was a lot of problem solving involved, which of course we all know is highly valued by employers these days.

In the middle of the project, one of the students commented that they didn’t realize how much work would be involved. The professor working with them chuckled and replied that he purposely never asked them if they realized how much work would be involved because he didn’t want to dissuade them.

This blog entry comes partially out of an email I sent out to the campus directing their attention to the decision making and problem solving required to bring the mural to fruition.  This was partially to  underscore the role of arts in the education process. I was also addressing the assumption that it was executed almost on the spur of the moment without much planning and preparation. It became apparent after speaking with a few of the people involved that concerns about a reckless execution was the basis for some of the impediments to authorization the students experienced.

Graduation is in a couple weeks and it is usually held in the library courtyard with the stage directly in front of where this wall is. This means the audience is facing the mural the whole time. I hope no one makes the decision to hide or cover it up. I think the sentiment expressed is perfect for a commencement.

 

We’ve Discovered Creativity!

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Creativity is getting A LOT of play lately. I have written on the subject at least six or seven times since the new year, including a discussion about the IBM study that found corporate executives value creativity over pretty much everything else. Thomas Cott features a cross section the subject in his You’ve Cott Mail today. There is the Creativity Post site which devotes itself pretty much entirely to the subject.

You’d almost think no one was aware of creativity until Richard Florida discovered it in 2005 launching a mad scramble to mine it.

Of course, it existed long before that..and we have proof! Maria Popova posted a videos of a talk John Cleese gave on Brain Pickings this weekend. At first I thought he just gave the talking in the last month, so timely did it sound. But he looked a lot younger than he did when I saw him a couple months ago. But you know, despite sounding so recent, he gave the talk in 1991.

Those of you who recognize Cleese’s name from Monty Python probably have no doubts about his credentials to talk about creativity. You may not know that Cleese also has a series of really good management videos, which come to think of it, I believe I first saw around 1991. He was the first to introduce me to the idea that good leadership means creating an environment which can effectively function in your absence, rather than requiring you to make every decision.

One of the things that Cleese says in the creativity video, which is borne out by research and recent writings on the subject, is that creativity is something you have to work at. He mentions that there was another member of the Monty Python troupe he felt had far more creative talent than he, but who would give up on an idea very quickly compared to Cleese because, in his view, there was a lot of discomfort associated with spending time working with a weak idea to make it stronger and more original.

Apparently research shows that people who are deemed more “creative” do spend more time playing with a problem trying to find a solution. These people learn to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty rather than reaching for the easiest solution in order to gain the satisfaction of completion.

The need to be decisive runs counter to the process of creativity because creativity requires weighing many options. Earlier in the video Cleese talks about how it is easy to do small things that are urgent rather than taking the time to do big things which aren’t so urgent, like giving yourself the time and space to be creative. In the same manner, it is difficult in today’s work environment to escape the sense that you should be doing something (be it internal or external) long enough to stimulate creativity.

It has been suggested on Americans for the Arts Artsblog’s Private Sector Salons that the arts community has a lot to offer the private sector in terms of training in creativity.

My concern is that the arts community doesn’t really know how and why they are creative. There are things that we do that elicit creative thoughts like improvisation games, walks in the woods, etc., but we may not realize is that it isn’t the activities per se that make as creative as much as that they represent the carving out of time, space and environment separate from our daily lives in which we can be creative.

Teaching people to do improv games or telling them they should take long walks in the woods isn’t going to make them creative if they aren’t allowing their minds to leave their desks. If they don’t have the courage to embrace uncertainty, be wrong and appear indecisive, participation in playful activities won’t help. If arts groups are going to help private sector businesses become more creative, they need to be clear that the exercises they are teaching them are just tools to help them attain a creative mindset.

The activities are meaningless of themselves and interchangeable with many others that you may find convenient and enjoyable. Some are certainly more conducive to group interactions toward creativity than others, some may better suit the corporate culture, but no one activity is necessarily the key to magical creative synchronicity. You can be creative sitting at your desk if you have the discipline and courage to allow yourself to be.

The most interesting thing Cleese talks about is the importance of humor to solving problems. He notes that people may not feel humor is appropriate when addressing serious problems, but that it absolutely is. That is why I found it interesting. I would be afraid to interject humor into a serious discussion. Serious should not be confused with solemn he says. You can talk about serious matters of the day while laughing and it wouldn’t make the problems any less serious. Cleese seems to say that the use of humor can help mentally insulate you from the problem enough to arrive at creative solutions.

Distinguishing Yourself With Your Own Best Practices

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One of the big focuses on college campuses today is tracking student success. It is important that students both earn their degree in a timely manner and have developed appropriate mastery. Classes are scrutinized and numbers crunched to insure quality is being maintained but that instruction is not delivered in a manner that inhibits student success.

The students need to master the material, but the way the material is delivered may need to be changed to facilitate the learning process. As you might imagine, there are a lot of conversations about whether standards are being compromised along the way.

I hadn’t really seen many connections with the arts until I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week one of the early sections struck a chord.

1) Institutions should improve student success by focusing on practices within their control instead of blaming external factors.

When asked about the challenges they face in helping more students graduate, higher-education leaders tend to list external forces, such as budget cuts and poor academic preparation. Yet regardless of whether states or the federal government restore needed support, or our K-12 system produces better-prepared graduates, institutions can do more with mechanisms directly within their control to help the students they enroll.

Research has shown that institutional practices make a big difference in student success. Similar institutions (of comparable size, selectivity, and student composition) vary more significantly in their completion rates and success with underrepresented populations within segments than they do between segments—with high performers outpacing low performers by as much as 40 percentage points.

The same complaints are made by arts organizations- funding cuts, lack of arts exposure/involvement and other external pressures. The article goes on to mention that the profile of students diverges from traditional in some way and that they “swirl,” attending more than one institution, sometimes simultaneously.

Certainly the arts face the same thing with audience composition changing and splitting their arts and entertainment activities between many choices. Arts organizations struggle with the expectations their audiences bring to the experience in much the same way as colleges struggle to meet student expectations that their credits will transfer from other institutions.

Yes, even if you are adept at handling them, external forces impact your organization immensely and can not be ignored. But there are still many things within in the scope of your control which can positively impact audience experiences.

Unfortunately, unlike college, the arts are not seen as critical to life long success. Where colleges can answer the problem of poor K-12 preparation by offering more remediation and earning money by the effort, there isn’t as much money to be made from filling in the gaps in people’s cultural education.

Which is not to say educational programs can’t be successful for an individual organization, the necessity of bolstering one’s creativity and arts knowledge just isn’t as widespread a cultural value driving people to our doors. I suspect that this is where the second paragraph I quoted applies. Internal institutional practices can probably likewise make a difference in successful audience/community engagement and set one organization apart from similar organizations.

If you read as many articles and blogs as I do in the pursuit of improving your practices (and creating content for your blog) you may be intimidated by the long list of things you are supposed to be doing to improve your organization. I think one of the things that doesn’t get emphasized enough is to make sure your internal practices are playing to your particular organizations strengths rather than trying to replicate/adopt what you read other people are doing.

Using social media may help raise your organizational profile immensely, but the tone and frequency of your interactions should be your own and not mirror that of the big organization you wish you were. The same with your website, the people answering your phone, your ushering staff, curtain speech, lobby decorations, press releases. It should all play to your strengths rather than reflect industry best practices.

You would think all this would be a given, but think a moment and if your like me you can think of a few encounters you have had that ran contrary to the general environment and screamed “industry best practice.” (And if you think a little harder and honestly, you can probably identify some you have perpetuated.)

Granted, some times it is difficult to separate what you value about yourself from the actual organizational strength. For example, a farmer may view his expertise at growing a certain crop as a strength, overlooking the assets of the quality of the soil that can allow him to grow other crops now in demand.

This is a rather simplistic example, but in a similar way arts organizations can define themselves by their performances only, overlooking the asset of their production studios which can meet a burgeoning demand.

Intrinsic Value As A General Value

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Recently there has been a sentiment that the arts community shouldn’t use economic benefits as an argument for supporting the arts. I agree with this because there are a lot of problems with the argument which can weaken your position. The difficulty is that in trying to reframe the argument in other terms, you are fighting a sort of cultural inertia.

Arts Alliance Illinois Executive Director, Ra Joy retweeted lobbyist Dan Johnson who wrote “Instead of using the phrase “I’m a taxpayer” to legitimize a comment about government, we should use the universal phrase “I’m a citizen'”

We have a consumerist mentality which leads us to feel we get a say in how all our money is used and should expect a certain level of satisfaction. Businesses we make purchases from extend money back guarantees to assure our satisfaction so there is a tendency to apply a similar outlook to other areas of our lives. In addition to those addressing concerns to the government, students often use the my taxes/tuition pays your salary argument with their teachers.

The problem is, people often over estimate how much of the cost their share actually covers. Hamilton College recently launched a campaign at their students showing that after February 23, someone else was paying for their education. As most of us in the arts world know, a taxpayer’s share of the National Endowment for the Arts funding is below fifty cents.

And, of course, in many cases the price of a ticket to a performance at a non-profit organization only covers about 1/3 of the cost of the production.

Johnson’s suggestion to use “I’m a citizen” is essentially the argument for the intrinsic value of the arts. It harkens back to the social compact theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau that influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. (My first major was Political Science.) It is an argument that the government owes us based on the intrinsic nature of our relationship rather than our dutiful payment of taxes.

The influence of money which drives the concerns over the Citizens United decision and those of the Occupy Movement illustrate the problem of equating economic influence with general worth and merit. It is probably time to emphasize intrinsic value in general and not solely in the arts.

Arts Funding and Diversity in Oregon

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The Oregonian reported this weekend that the city of Portland would start to tie arts funding to the diversity of the art organization’s board, staff and ultimately audiences.

Specifically, arts groups will be asked to increase the ethnic makeup of their staff, boards and contractors. Their audiences, too, may become more diverse through marketing and outreach. Organizations will also be expected to spend more of their budget — 30 percent being the ideal — on communities of color.

It appears the hope is that by shifting the composition of the board and employees, the type of programming will shift to be more inclusive. Though I think there is some potential for problems, I appreciate the intention behind the plan. Change the culture of your city through its arts and cultural institutions. The arts and culture community is probably a good place to start with such efforts because they are likely to regard the goal as a worthy one.

There are some practical problems as mentioned in the article. First, federal law prohibits making hiring decisions based on race.

Another problem noted is the lack of resources arts organizations have to perform the assessments and programs to which the money is tied. That said, the article notes there are plans for a new levy to fund arts organizations and arts education in the schools. This is encouraging because it acknowledges that the arts require a more supportive environment in which to operate and pursue these programs.

One thing I am most concerned about is that the programs offered to communities of color be appropriate to those communities and not simply extensions of activities which appeal primarily to Caucasian audiences. While some programs may be equally well received by all audiences and it is just a matter of making them more widely accessible, we already know that the demographics who have traditionally comprised arts audiences don’t view traditional arts programs has having relevance to them. There is a good chance that people outside of those demographics will perceive the programs as even less relevant to them.

Designing a program that is meaningful to different communities is possible. It just takes additional time and resources, two things arts organizations have in short supply. It is much easier to use a similar approach in all instances. Is there enough funding being offered by the city of Portland to make it worthwhile to customize programming?

However, since many arts organizations currently have no choice but to change their approach to their audiences and communities if they wish to continue operating, perhaps this is the most suitable time to implement this policy. If you are struggling to discover how best to engage your community, you might be open to considering expanding the definition of your community.

Do you think Portland’s plan can succeed? Not all the guidelines have been set, but do you think this is the correct approach.

One last thing to ponder. In the article Mayor Sam Adams is quote talking about the criteria they will use.

“Adams says organizations shouldn’t be intimidated by the measures. Increasing racial diversity on staff and boards and spending more money on communities of color will be just two of several factors that determine public funding. And when they are used, they’ll be interpreted flexibly. Different groups face different challenges, he says. “

I felt a little relief knowing there wouldn’t be a hard benchmark for funding. I think there has to be flexibility. On the other hand, I am a little concerned about how flexibly the criteria will be interpreted. It is one thing for private foundations to favor the same organizations with large amounts of funding. But there needs to be a higher degree of equity and transparency in the process of disbursing public funding.

Better to have clear guidelines from the outset about the type of outcomes are valued by the funding program than to sanction loose interpretations which allow the rationalization why an organization should be funded.

My perception is that this is the toughest part of funding. How do you allow for both a small organization that works with the same 20 people once a week for 9 months and a large organization that reaches 20,000 people once in the same time frame? Which is valued?

Now throw issues of race/ethnicity in as a factor and it becomes more complicated. (Yes, I am aware that diversity encompasses more than just race, but race is generally the most volatile aspect and is one of the stated criteria.) The stakes become a lot higher when you say racial composition matters and people can see where the money is going. If a medium size organization increases diversity by three on their board of ten and a large organization only increases their diversity by one on a board of 25 and the latter gets more funding in proportion to their budget, what will people think?

Does it matter that the one person on the larger board is more influential than the three on the smaller board and will potentially increase the reach and effectiveness of the organization? Well, I guess it depends on the way the funding criteria is written.

And as I said, with race as a measure, the criteria needs to be very clearly written as do the awards panel’s justifications. Leave too much ambiguity in the rules or the funding justifications and you open the whole process to accusations of racism, raising tensions rather than alleviating them. Funding for the arts is enough of a political issue as it is.

Info You Can Use: Point Some Strong Light At Your Brainstorm

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Hat tip to Ian David Moss at Createquity who linked to a New Yorker article on brainstorming in one of his “around the horn” summaries.

The article talks about how the whole idea of brainstorming without criticism for fear of causing someone to censor themselves is less effective at generating good ideas than having someone work alone or engage in brainstorming with debate.

What was really interesting to me was how the importance of opposing ideas applied to artistic collaborations.

According to the data, the relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

[…]

The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy…A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success…It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

Brian Uzzi, the sociologist who is cited in the story attributes the success of West Side Story to the fact that Broadway veterans Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents brought the novice Stephen Sondheim on board.

So the lesson for arts organizations might be to keep turn over down so you maintain a good team of artistic/administrative collaborators but introduce people/concepts that take everyone out of their comfort zone a little bit. This applies to boards as much as administrative staff and artistic teams.

Adding an unknown factor to spice things up isn’t a new concept and obviously not the only ingredient for success, but still good to have a little evidence to support the practice.

The New Yorker article resonates with me because I have recently been thinking about the people who have been in the assistant theatre manager position the last few years. We have had three in the 7.5 years I have been running the facility. The first two left to enter graduate school in southeast Asia. Each one of them has brought a different set of skills and interests. I view this as an opportunity to employ their enthusiasm to implement some programs and ideas I have. (I have a few in the works I hope are successful enough to blog on in the next few months.)

Stuff To Ponder: What About Engaging Arts Organizations?

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Taking up where I left off yesterday, one of the last things I mentioned was that arts people might have an easier time shifting their perceptions to be more inclusive of what constitutes artistic practice and works of art than the general public might.

The thing is, while arts people may be more able to make the shift in thinking, they may not think it is necessary unless the necessity of doing so is pointed out to them. There is a lot of effort being made on a national, regional and local level to communicate the benefits of the arts to the general public but there isn’t a complementary effort to let the arts community know what their role is.

You can help in that effort by passing on or retweeting this post! 😉

But really, I recently realized the effort to get the general public to invest in the arts is a little one sided. Americans for the Arts will run ads telling people there are things they can do give their kids more arts experiences but most of the burden is on the parents to go online to the Americans for the Arts site and seek out arts organizations in their community. There may be an assumption that whatever arts organizations are doing to generate public awareness of themselves will be enough.

While Americans for the Arts had some requirements if you wanted to partner in their last kids and the arts campaign, what perhaps they should have also done is gone to the arts organizations and said, listen, we are going to run a slew of ads in your area encouraging people to take their kids to performances and museums and sign them up for classes. We are going to tell them to look for this little smiley guy logo. You can benefit by putting this logo on your website, in your ads and on the side of your building like the Safe Place logo they have on fire stations so people can easily identify organizations that offer these services.

The NEA starting a long term campaign communicating a “its all art and you should be reaching out” message to arts organizations through various channels would help to get arts organizations on the same page with them. That way the arts groups can start providing a public message complementary to the NEA’s and begin to shift themselves and the community to a more inclusive mindset.

Heck, what might actually be effective is a national campaign like the one Dominos recently ran that acknowledges people’s complaints about arts experiences. It could simultaneously address public sentiment and let arts organizations know they have a responsibility in the relationship as well.

Of course, lacking the unified will of a corporation, the campaign can’t make concrete promises of improvement across the arts sector. And honestly, unless it was incredibly well-designed and coordinated, it could alienate the general public, arts organizations or both.

But it would also be the first time that these issues were acknowledged and addressed nationally. Those of us who regularly read blogs and attend conferences are likely well aware of the need for change. But many arts people, including board members, aren’t participating in these conversations and may not be as aware of the shifting realities. This would put the topic front and center.

There isn’t just a need to do a better job of communicating our message to our local community, we need to apply the same techniques to communicating among ourselves. Which may in turn increase the number of organizations effectively communicating with their local communities.

There are already a few communication channels being used to rally arts organizations and their supporters to contact their legislators prior to crucial votes. Those are a good starting point to mobilize arts organizations but the message needs to come from different sources: blogs, television, radio, YouTube video, tweets, Facebook. In other words, the same channels we are urged to use to engage our communities can be used to engage arts organizations.

Whatever the message is needs to be light and encouraging rather than declarative and directive. Just like our audiences, arts organizations should be hearing more from their national, state and local leadership than OHMYGOD! THEYAREALLAGAINSTUS YOUMUSTMOBILIZENOW!

There should be Van Goghurt commercials made to encourage arts organizations to do better and point out resources organizational leaders can consult.

The nonprofit arts world in the U.S. is so decentralized it is hard to effectively communicate with most of the organizations. If the government provided higher levels of funding, more organizations might have closer relationships with central funders and it would be easier to provide training and information in best practices. For many it is not worth the effort required to apply, so they remain unidentified and out of touch with service organizations.

Instead of providing a few arts organizations with the funds to improve community participation, maybe foundations/funders should focus on establishing stronger channels of communication and relationships between service organizations/arts councils and arts groups, as well as between the arts groups themselves. Once that is achieved, instead of many individual organizations trying to re-invent the wheel alone, they may become better aware of the practices of those around them which will hopefully translate over time into a community engaged with the arts rather than with specific arts organizations.

As it is now, the best engagement practices developed by the exemplar organizations being funded will only be disseminated to a few hundred people attending a conference or reading a report. Better engagement and communication between arts groups and the arts councils/organizations that serve them could multiply the impact.

Helping The Rising Tide Lift All Boats

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I have been following The Producer’s Perspective, the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport, for a number of years now. While I don’t have solid evidence, I suspect he is not like other Broadway producers. He is often curious to learn about the audiences for Broadway shows, where they are coming from, what motivates their purchasing decisions, etc. While this may seem like basic marketing surveying, the information doesn’t really exist so he is often sending people to query folks standing in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square.

Taking some inspiration from Zappos, he decided to create a toll free number to have his office staff answer questions about Broadway to help dispel the notions his surveyors and focus groups discovered people have.

Well, that’s exactly what I thought . . . so then I wondered . . . why doesn’t Broadway have a hotline? Why doesn’t it have a toll free number that people can just call to find out stuff? Ivory Soap has one. Coke has one.

[…]

Yep, we created 1-855-SEE-BWAY (733-2929) to help answer your questions about Broadway.

It’s staffed by a bunch of the nicest Broadway theater lovers you could ever imagine (they also happen to be my staff, in a very Zappos-inspired “we all answer the phone including the boss” structure), and we guarantee we’ll get you the answer to whatever question you have about Broadway theatergoing.

Need to know what’s playing? Need to know at what times? Price of tickets? Suitability for kids? Location? Parking? Restaurants nearby? Sure, we got that. And if we don’t, we’ll get it for you. Promise on our autographed original cast recording of Company.

Oh, and before you ask . . . no, we’re not selling anything. This isn’t about us trying to make any money. This is about a service that should exist. And needs to exist if we’re going to grow our audience (just like Zappos increased theirs).

I bring this up not so much to promote his service (though I think it is great thing to offer) but to wonder if this signifies that arts organizations are moving toward a more collaborative “tide raises all ships” approach and a way from a competitive “ne’er the twain shall meet” stance.

About six years ago I wrote about an effort by the Broward Center for the Performing Arts to provide people with information about all the performing arts in town rather than solely about themselves. I am not sure if they sustained the effort, especially when the economy got worse, but I took the fact that they were even considering it as part of their business model as an encouraging sign.

This year I am partnering with three different groups to present as many shows. In the past, we have partnered with maybe one other organization and the sharing of responsibilities (and revenue/expenses) was not as extensive. I am not sure about next year, but I hope to continue similar relationships even with the additional work it entails.

There have also been times I have assumed other organization’s obligations so that the show can go on. Perhaps as involved as I am in this type of activity, I am seeing a trend…or wishing for one, where it doesn’t exist yet.

I am all for making the effort to turn it into a trend though.

Don’t Forget Leadership and Teamwork

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I was helping out a local high school by conducting mock interviews with their students today. I enjoy doing this because the school does a great job preparing the students for the experience. I often don’t realize just how nervous the students are until the sweaty palm handshake as they depart. The last student I spoke to was applying for a position as a nurses aide and I was pleased to hear him talk about how his experience as the section leader in his band conferred leadership and conflict management skills. I made sure I complimented him on mentioning that and coached him about mentioning it in future interviews. (My interview partner who was not an arts person did so as well.)

It occurred to me that when I have read about the benefits of the arts recently, leadership and teamwork didn’t seem to figure largely in the lists. Given the recent push that education make someone employable, it is probably important that it be emphasized more.

I did a quick and, by no means exhaustive, survey of articles listing the benefits of arts education and found that my suspicion was generally true. Many talked about the cultivation of very desirable traits like intellectual and emotional development, flexibility of worldview, judgement, problem solving, expressiveness and ability to anticipate consequences.

In our desire to justify ourselves by identifying some distinctive advantages conferred only by the arts and creative expression, we seem to have forgotten some basic benefits a high school kid can cite. Speaking of which, while we are touting these benefits, it probably behooves us long term to make sure high school kids who are having these experiences can cite the benefits.

The intellectual and emotional development advantages frequently referenced are often individual achievements. Leadership and team work are assets in the social sphere and warrant inclusion. It may seem of little consequence now, but I suspect there is a fair chance that in the next 10 years technologically induced anti-social/introspective tendencies may be be deemed a crisis and these qualities will be highly prized.

This all being said, there are a lot of benefits to arts education and it is tough to list them all. If you are looking for a list to keep handy, here are some great ones. (A couple which list leadership and teamwork). Again, these are some I personally find helpful rather than an exhaustive list.

Americans for the Arts
National Assembly of State Arts Agencies
Miller-McCune
Artsblog post by Kristen Engebretsen

Feel free to add a few of your favs in the comments section.

Who Is More Important? The Event Or Organization?

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I had a small disagreement about marketing with one of the people partnering on a show with us that raised the question about what is more important, the artist or the organization.

The disagreement was pretty simple. We had designed an ad to promote a show. Between the sponsor and creator logos/credits and the general design of the ad, there wasn’t a lot of room left. To maintain a clean, attractive look for the show, I suggested that we omit the three names of the presenters. We would have the name of the theatre, but not “presented by X, Y, Z groups, each of which were fairly long.

My feeling was that the show was what would attract the audience. If we credited the three of us, it would look cluttered and the pertinent information would be lost. If we reduced the font size to the point the ad didn’t look cluttered, it would be too small to be of value and not worth including.

Since we had already advertised the show via brochures, posters, postcards and email blasts, most of those who associated our names with quality already knew we were involved with the show. Those whom we would be reaching with the ad would be making decisions based on the show, not who was presenting it. Therefore, our names were not as important in this particular communication channel.

My partners disagreed with my point of view (though they praised the ad image as much better than the brochure and poster images which was gratifying) and we included our names in pretty small type.

It got me to thinking, is there ever a time when the event is more important than the organization taking credit? Choosing to cede space in favor of a funder might be done out of a concrete sense of obligation (or lack thereof, I am aware of some organizations that choose to omit funder recognition.) Valuing the event/artist above the organization is a bit more theoretical and nebulous a decision.

I don’t know that it should be a default organizational policy where you decide the artist always comes first and people will have to work to find out whose efforts were responsible for their experience. There are some cases where people won’t be familiar with a work where the organizational reputation for quality will provide the confidence an audience needs.

In some cases, you may want to take credit for an experience but get very little recognition because the artist’s reputation will eclipse your own. We recently presented Ben Vereen and it was clear from the phone conversations we were having with patrons that our involvement played no part in the decision to attend.

Both Elton John and Neil Diamond are performing in town in January and February and I couldn’t tell you who the promoters are. I could make an educated guess of 3-4 different people. That is probably the best rationale for making sure your name is associated with your productions. Get a reputation for quality and people will attribute great experiences with which you had no involvement to you.

Surveys show that audiences don’t have much awareness of the tax status of the organization providing their nights’ entertainment. If people aren’t discerning between profit and non profit organizations, how aware are they of whether a show is being presented by me or someone who is renting our facility? There are times of the year that bring especially high numbers of calls from people expecting us to resolve problems with tickets they didn’t purchase from us, so I know some people aren’t aware of the distinction.

Knowing that people may not be making as great a distinction between you and everyone else as you might hope, are there situations where the event is more important than your organization? I am not talking about simply leaving your name off marketing material for the sake of aesthetics. I am asking if there is some program you have or dream of having where it doesn’t matter if anyone knows you did it?

Is it possible for a non-profit to get to that place? Do the producers of a Broadway show care if they have high personal/business name recognition if the show is profitable? Can a non-profit be that blasé as dependent as they are on attracting funders who want assurances their support is making a difference?

I don’t know the full answer to these questions because I have just started considering them and it is a complicated matter.

I don’t think the inability to subsume the organization name to that of an artist necessarily has a direct correlation to the situation Diane Ragsdale discussed in November about low pay for artists. As I note, there are many important reasons to keep name awareness high. However, the organization’s perception of artists certainly is going to factor into the question.

With all the instances recounted by Inside the Arts blogfather, Drew McManus, of orchestra boards answering the question pretty decisively in their own favor, it may be a question that needs to be asked more frequently.

Arts And The Four Year Career

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An article recently posted on the Fast Company website talks about how transitory people’s jobs, and increasingly, career paths, are.

“According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s…Statistically, the shortening of the job cycle has been driven by two factors. The first is a marked decline in the “long job”–that is, the traditional 20-year capstone to a career. Simultaneously, there’s been an increase in “churning”– workers well into their thirties who have been at their current job for less than a year. “For some reason I don’t understand, employers seem to value having long-term employees less than they used to,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton”

Given the idea that arts organizations need to be more nimble in the current fast changing environment and that corporate CEOs value creativity in leadership, it made me wonder if arts organizations might not be able to take advantage of this trend by creating mutually beneficial employment situations.

Essentially, if there is going to be a lot of employment churn, the arts might be able to benefit in both the short and long term by making sure a jaunt in the arts is included in a person’s itinerant career path.

Arts organizations experience a fair bit of turn over in their employees. (In fact, I will bet that is what you thought the title of the entry referenced.) It may be worthwhile to hire people without backgrounds specifically in the arts into positions. Since you are probably just as likely to have to replace a person with arts background as someone who doesn’t, you aren’t overly wasting time and resources by hiring and training someone without industry experience.

The potential benefit to the arts organization is introducing some new ideas and practices to the organization. The employee gets a broader experience to add to their hodgepodge resume which may make them more marketable. (Needless to say, the work environment must be such that it accepts the former and confers the latter.)

Of course, as the article mentions, the trick is to separate those who are really driven in their pursuits from the dilettantes. Arts organizations in general aren’t particularly well skilled in those type of human resource practices. It would be worthwhile to have someone on the board with the ability to provide those services in some form, even if you have no intention of ever hiring a person without an arts background.

In the long term it could be helpful if businesses started to identify arts organizations as a good training ground for the skills they seek in employees to the point where it was as de rigueur on a resume as extra curricular activities are on a college application. It also wouldn’t hurt if the experience engendered an appreciation in the arts in the transitory employee that they will carry on to positions creating business or government policy.

Desperately Seeking Arts Managers

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Artsjournal.com had a link to a story on ArtSeek about the difficulty arts organizations in the greater Dallas-Ft. Worth area were having finding arts managers. A good many positions are going unfilled. The article also cites the example of the NY Philharmonic being turned down by six candidates before finally hiring an Australian.

Now I know some of this is due to the level at which a manager must operate for some organizations. From recent conversations with colleagues, I know that some places have had close to 200 applicants for their director positions. I suspect there may be some applicants for the jobs linked to in the ArtSeek piece but they didn’t approach the minimum criteria for consideration.

But I am reminded of the Building Movement report and Ready to Lead reports I wrote on in 2008, and the Daring to Lead follow up report that came out this past summer.

All three addressed the problems perceived with the lack of mentoring and succession planning in non-profit organizations as well as the reluctance young emerging leaders felt toward assuming executive director positions.

Daring to Lead noted that while executive turnover was a concern, the rate was less than had been expected. Based on that, I assumed the recognition of the problem would be delayed a little while. Perhaps leadership turn over at arts organization has occurred at a greater rate than non-profits as a whole or Texas just has an atypical cluster of vacancies.

Regardless, the ArtSeek story points to the necessity to start to really examine whether the arts industry is sufficiently cultivating the next generation of leaders it needs to sustain its organizations.

Arts Presenters 2012 Edition

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I have been attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference this past weekend. I am sure I will have more to say on the subject in future entries, but I wanted to post a few reflections and impressions while they were fresh.

First, I wanted to give some congratulations and props to Mario Garcia Durham, the new President and CEO of APAP on this, his first conference with the organization. I had met Mario a handful of times before in his capacity as the Director of Artistic Communities and Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts. I was always set at ease by his open and welcoming manner when I had consultation sessions with him.

I took it as a good sign that he invited the Emerging Leadership Institute participants and alumni (of which I am one) up to his suite to discuss what we felt was the future for the field. We didn’t have a lot of time with him, but it was a promising sign. I also thought it was a promising sign that he got a standing ovation at the start of the conference from the membership. (And even more promising that he decides to discard a long speech he had prepared at another gathering!)

For this conference, I decided to break out my laptop and do a little live tweeting from different sessions. I had a great time doing it and could really see the utility of the activity for the conference, and somewhat by extension, for Tweet Seat programs that have been emerging at various arts events. I will say though that I really felt that I ended up missing many aspects of the sessions I was attending. Not only in terms of not entirely absorbing points people were making, but also some of the nuances of what they were saying. Even though my brain and multi-tasking abilities may not be on par with those of the younger generation, I can’t help but think they would indeed suffer from the same situation.

I was also surprised given the size of the attendance that more people weren’t tweeting from the various discussions going on, at least not on the official hashtag, #APAPNYC. Didnt see much on the counter-conference hashtag #APAPSMEAR, either. Many people used the hashtags to promote their showcases, but didn’t really seem to overdo it.

I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more people tweeting from the sessions because there were often a number I wanted to attend running concurrently and with a few exceptions, no one was reporting what was transpiring in those rooms.

On the other hand, there were a fair number of people following along. I appreciate all those who signed up to follow my twitter feed. Between those who started following me and those who were tweeting themselves, I found a number of new interesting people to follow in turn.

One interesting thing I noticed was a change in the underlying theme of the discussions at the conference. In the past it has often been about declining attendance and funding. This year it seems to be more focused on social and cultural trends, perhaps thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movements. People were talking about loss of identity, disenfranchisement, fragmentation and polarization of society.

Questions were raised about what role arts organizations would have in addressing this and place in the community rather than how to get more people through the doors. One of the major speakers at a few of the sessions was John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, PA who has attracted a lot of national attention for his efforts to revitalize his town and reverse the decline by the use of art and community efforts. As part of one effort, they took the bricks from a demolished garage to make a communal bread oven.

I will try to post more on the conference in the weeks ahead as I am able to digest the experience.

Diversity vs. the Brand

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Apropos to the recent aggregation of articles on You’ve Cott Mail about diversity in the arts, I wanted to point back to a post I did a few years ago about the pressures of protecting the brand image which may make it difficult to achieve diversity.

In the post I point to how everyone from Ivy League universities to car companies will willingly eschew the opportunity for immediate gain in order to protect their brand image. Arts organizations may have the best intentions for diversifying audiences, but the fact that funders/donors/sponsors may desire to have their name before the eyes of certain demographics will drive many choices that are made.

Give The Gift Of Autonomy For Christmas

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So the big tragedy of non profit arts organizations is that while we are the champions of creativity, we don’t really provide all our employees the most conducive environments for being creative. Sometimes good things happen despite us. Because the workload to personnel ratio is usually slanted in favor of the work load, there often isn’t a lot of opportunity for people to stand back and do some creative problem solving that might result in the alleviation of some of the work load.

A recent post on the Drucker Exchange criticized the industrial age view that long hours and great effort equates to productivity when that simply is not so any more. Andrew Fuqua recently made a related post on the benefit of “slack” in the work place. His post was generally about the computer programming industry, but there were many lessons non-profit arts organizations can take away.

One of the things he says a programming company should do is, “managers must stop assigning tasks.” Instead, it is up to teams to decide how the work will be done. Of course, for non-profit arts organizations, this assumes there are enough people to comprise a team rather than 1 person (or half person departments). But essentially he says, managers shouldn’t be making assignments, handing out work or be an individual contributor.

“Well, gosh, then what should a manager do? Well, I’ll tell ya! You could manage more people. You can still step in when the team needs help (but not too quickly). You are still an agent of the company, handling legal stuff, signing off on expenditures, etc. You can still manage risks, especially if you are a skilled Project Manager.”

Even if that doesn’t sound like something that is viable given the size of your organization, there are other things he suggest that are definitely applicable.

“Keep an eye on the system, looking for improvements
Ensure cross-training is happening (not by making assignments, but making the team handle it)
Understand the dynamics of the organization
Understand how value is created
Protect the team from interference
Make the organization effective; learn to look at it as a system
Support the team
Clear roadblocks
Watch interpersonal interaction — watch when one team member pulls back, withdraws in a brainstorm (for example)
Help the team learn TDD by making room for them to learn (time – remove the schedule pressure while they learn)
Understand the capacity of the team (also a team and scrummaster job)
Think through policies, procedures and reward/review systems and improve them (what messages do they send?)
Understand what motivates knowledge workers (see the previous reference to Pink) and let creating that kind of environment be an imperative”

Arts organizations can definitely benefit from looking at the dynamics of the organization and looking at themselves as a system of interrelated and interdependent parts rather than different segments performing different functions. This approach will help the organization understand where the value they possess lies. It may not only be the stuff you are selling tickets to, but in the expertise that is possessed by the group.

You will see a lot of these factors mentioned as valuable in management texts. The one suggestion Fuqua makes that jumped out at me was in regard to watching when a team member pulls back and withdraws in a brain storm. That can say a lot about the interpersonal dynamics of the organization. It may be viewed as one less person providing opposition to your ideas, but it could be damaging to the organization long term to have someone feel disassociated from the rest of the organization or team.

You might note that Fuqua references Daniel Pink and his talk about what motivates knowledge workers. That motivation is autonomy which repeated studies have shown is more effective than cash rewards.

One of the things Pink talks about is a Australian software company, Atlassian, which periodically gives their employees 24 hours to work on whatever they want. The only proviso being that they share it with the entire company at a party they throw at the end of that period. Apparently the practice has contributed to the solving of a number of problems and the creation of new products.

Imagine what might be produced if you let a bunch of creative arts people loose of their everyday constraints for 24 hours with the promise of beer at the end!

One of the things I know is very important to a lot of people I work with in the arts is professional development opportunities. Again, this is something Fuqua references. Often the biggest thing inhibiting arts people from getting the professional development is the funding. One solution to this problem goes back to my comment a few paragraphs ago about understanding that the value possessed by the organization may not solely reside in the product you are selling to the public.

Your organization may possess expertise that is valuable to other arts organizations and for profit businesses. You might arrange for a cooperative professional development day where all the arts organizations get together and have their staffs provide learning opportunities for each other. You might be able to likewise trade your expertise to area businesses in exchange for training or advice.

Best of all scenarios–your organization (or cooperative of arts organizations) puts together training programs to sell to businesses based on your expertise. Perhaps seminars in team building, creative brain storming, or the selection and lighting of visual art in commercial office spaces.

Info You Can Use: Internship Guide For Arts Organisations

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The subject of paying interns has been in the news fairly frequently. This summer I noted that while non-profits are currently exempt from some of the rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act, this may not be true for long. Classifying employees as interns or independent contractors may not be valid, even for non-profits depending on their work situations.

In the England, arts organisations (yes, I am intentionally using British spelling) have a legal responsibility to pay interns according to minimum wage standards. The Arts Council of England just published a guide to these rules. While these wage laws don’t apply the entities in the U.S., the criteria for what constitutes an intern are very close to those applicable to for profits in the U.S.

The guide also provides suggestions for designing a meaningful internship experience and for writing appropriate ads for these positions. Therefore the guide can be a good resource for those looking to get ahead of possible changes in the labor laws and seeking to provide a positive working environment.

Info You Can Use: Arts Marketing Standards

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Thanks to Tim Roberts at Arts Research and Ticketing Service Australia who recently linked to UK Arts Marketing Association’s new Arts Marketing Standards. The standards outline what abilities you should have at four different stages of your career:

Level 1 – Assistant – officer
Level 2 – Senior Officer – new manager
Level 3 – Manager
Level 4 – Head of department/director

These standards are rigorous and thorough. Level 1 standards run 130 pages and each subsequent level adds about 20 pages. Actually, since some of the standards don’t apply to Marketing Assistants, there are many pages that just read “It is not anticipated that Marketing Assistants will have responsibility for…” and it isn’t as intimidating as the 130 page count may seem. On the other hand, the head of department/director has 190 pages entirely full of standards they might be expected to meet.

They also have devised some toolkits to help different entities use the standards:

Employer’s Toolkit
Marketer’s Toolkit
Trainer’s Toolkit
Job Description Templates

The employers toolkit suggests the following use for the standards:

“This booklet outlines how the standards might be used by those working as employers of arts marketers within cultural organisations across the UK to:
•Plan the marketing role/s and job descriptions needed in your organisation.
•Carry out a performance review, building understanding of where the current strengths and skills are within your marketing team and gain a clearer insight into skills gaps within the team
•Input into appraisals and planning of staff training and development

There are eight modules that comprise the full standards. I will leave the reader to explore them all. To give a sample of what is contained,  the first module, “Provide marketing intelligence and audience, visitor and participant insight” has 3 subsections the first of which is, “Assess the marketing environment.”

That in turn has three subsections, the first of which is “Map organisations within their current and future marketing environment.”

The standards for that look something like this (click to enlarge):


So the obvious question is, would these sort of standards be helpful for U.S. arts organizations to adopt?

Actually, I don’t think there is any doubt that they would. The true question would be whether they could and would be effectively applied on a large enough scale to bring about meaningful and significant change.  If so, should similar standards be developed for other roles within arts organizations?

These standards in conjunction with the toolkits might be of the most help to some of the smallest arts organizations who might have the least experience with marketing. The toolkits provide grids noting the general expectations for different positions normally found in a marketing department including box office.   It can help them construct expectations that are suitable to the needs and resources possessed by their organization and make more appropriate hiring decisions.  In other words, people may think they need a director of marketing when they need someone to perform the tasks of a manager or senior officer.

 

It’s Not A Genius Grant. It Might Actually Be Much Better

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I just got around to reading up on some of the new granting program initiatives the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has recently announced.

In the interests of correction right from the start- Contrary to what I retweeted last week, the Doris Duke Leading Artists program is not their version of the MacArthur genius grants. Program director Ben Cameron explicitly makes that point. Sorry about that.

There were a number of things Cameron wrote that I was pleased to see a major foundation acknowledging (my emphasis):

Does project support force an artist to follow through with the production of a work that may be, after exploration, of less interest or less feasible than originally envisioned? Do regrant programs by their very nature favor projects that can garner consenus from a panel (a sort of comfortable middle) and disadvantage less conventional, more extreme or riskier work that an artist might wish to do? How can programs encourage more artistic risk while still acknowledging and supporting “failure” or “dead ends” that can be celebrated for their lessons, without necessitating further investment of production resources? With so many grants offered at nominal levels, how can an artist piece together a life of economic dignity? And now, with so many artists approaching their latter years, financially unprepared for retirement, have we been derelict in not supporting longer-term artist life needs and more aggressively helping artists prepare for this phase of life?

In an earlier paragraph, he acknowledges that foundations often establish long term relationships with organizations, but infrequently with artists, even those who are well established. In a later section, he refers to the amount of gratitude artists exhibited upon receiving an additional $10,000 no strings attached grant as “frankly, depressing in the knowledge that an unrestricted grant of $10,000 could be both so extraordinary and so life-changing for so many.”

One of the problems that I and other blogs have frequently discussed is that grantees often feel like they have to report everything turned out as good, if not better than anticipated in the grant proposal. If only grants did have the magical power to contravene the effects of real life, they wouldn’t be needed as frequently and in as large sums as they are. I was pleased to see a funder say they realized what the reality was. Overall, I was happy to see that they had decided to make a commitment to bolstering support to artists into their retirement.

The only thing that gave me pause was that the foundation decided to select recipients of support in their Doris Duke Leading Artists program from the pool of past grantees. Given that they had started to wonder whether their past selection process might reward mediocrity over risk taking, it seemed a slightly flawed approach. But honestly, there isn’t much alternative to deciding to how to make the awards. Besides, Cameron never suggests that the artists being awarded grants might be lacking in talent, only that the granting process encouraged highly talented people to moderate their ambitions.

The Leading Artist program is the one that most excites me, even though I won’t be remotely eligible. Even though the grant is for less money and there are more requirements for how it is used than the MacArthur genius grant, my claim that it might be much better stems from the potential change it represents in the approach to supporting artists. If successful, this program might become a model for other funders much as the programs of other foundations have provided the inspiration for the three that Cameron introduces.

It may also engender the idea that a healthy artistic practice involves some investment in one’s work, some effort in audience development and some investment toward retirement. (my emphasis)

“Recipients will receive an unrestricted grant of $225,000 over a three to five year period—a schedule to be determined by the artist recipient. An additional $25,000 will be available to the artist specifically to support work around audience connections or development. And a final $25,000 (which must, however, be matched by the artist) will be available for retirement purposes, bringing DDCF’s potential investment to $275,000 per artist.

We’d like to make clear that there are things these grants are not: They are not life-time achievement awards. They are also not “genius” grants, nor are they project grants. They are investment grants, designed to offer support with minimal administrative burden to exemplary professional artists who are dedicated to work in the nonprofit sector and with maximum flexibility and empowerment for the grantees.”

The second program is Doris Duke Performing Arts Fellows “these awards acknowledge that there are artists who have yet to achieve the same level of recognition as their colleagues in the Leading Artist category, but who nonetheless might have significant impact on their fields.” These people will be chosen by anonymous nomination with 20 grants awarded annually for each of the next five years. The awards are scaled down in both time and amount, but are meant to be used for the same purposes – creation, audience connections and retirement.

The third program is somewhat intriguing to me as well. Doris Duke Artist Residencies is meant to address a perceived adversarial relationship between artists and arts organizations by providing funding to essentially find a better way to do things.

“…All of these organizations can create residencies for artists, not only from within their fields but for artists from outside their disciplines. While a theater can clearly request support for a playwright or actor, a dance company can request a dancer or choreographer, and a jazz organization can request a musician, a theatre could instead request a dancer, a dance company could request a playwright, or a jazz organization could request a videographer. This flexibility allows for the possibility of important, cross-disciplinary learning.

…Ours is instead about supporting a partnership between an artist who wishes to explore and reimagine institutional life and behavior, and an organization willing to open itself to that exploration. It is also about reimagining how an organization and an artist connect to their community and supporting a pilot effort to behave in new ways. And, they are about the creative engagement of audiences in ways which give the organization and artist an equal stake.

As such, we recognize that these residencies will not be of interest to everyone. Those looking for a traditional artist in residency program will inevitably be disappointed that this initiative does not support those efforts, even while we support them through other initiatives in our grant portfolio.”

What I appreciate about this program is that it appears to be trying to give artists and organizations some breathing room and security to experiment as partners some new ways to engage audiences. This program will be open to applications some time in Spring 2012.

Arts Instruction Is Critical…As Long As You Volunteer To Do It

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Last week I came across a link to a story about Columbia University students who created a program to provide after school arts experiences in NYC. I absolutely applaud the efforts of these students for seeing the need and providing arts experiences to public school kids for the last seven years.

However, the title of the piece sheds some light on the underlying problem – “Students sub for arts teachers at underfunded MoHi school.”

Artists Reaching Out (ARO), the program created by the Columbia students is now teaching arts during the school day. While this is a positive step for the group since their reach has increased beyond those they can serve after school, it a poor reflection on the NYC Public School system that has replaced arts teachers with unpaid volunteers. This great learning experience for the Columbia students is marred a bit by the fact they won’t be able to use the experience as volunteers teaching the arts to find employment teaching the arts in NYC public schools.

I give credit to Reginald Higgins, the principal of P.S. 125 where the ARO program is teaching during school hours. He seems to be trying to lead his teachers toward integrating the arts into the subject instruction.

“It’s really hard for teachers to include dance, music, and theater in their lessons,” Higgins said. “It’s a lot easier when you have it built into your schedule and when you have individuals come in to help you learn ways to work with your students.”

The Columbia students make an effort to learn what topics will be taught in the coming weeks and customize their activities to complement the instruction.

Given the dichotomy of instruction which is especially marked in this school, the efforts of the Columbia students seems particularly valuable in the lives of the PS 125 students.

“PS 125 shares a building with two charter schools, which receive public funding but are privately managed.

“They’re surrounded by children in uniforms who have arts programs, have more resources, and that affects me,” said Emily Handsman, BC ’12, ARO co-coordinator, and head copy editor of The Eye.”

As I read this piece, I thought about an interview Sir Ken Robinson recently gave where he spoke about creativity not being an add on. As I went back to watch the video of the interview, Robinson’s made a comment about a literacy program in the UK where teachers had to provide a prescribed unit of instruction for an hour and how he felt there were those in the “government who hoped they would recommend a creativity hour…on a Friday…after lunch.”

That comment barely registered on my conscious mind at the time, but popped to the surface when I looked at the ARO website and noticed their program required “Volunteer commitment of 4 hours/week, Friday afternoons, off-campus.”

That is certainly nothing more than coincidence, of course, but as the article describes the experience of the ARO participants in the schools, there is much the same sense of the arts instruction being relegated the status of an add on and being viewed by some as an inconvenience.

“The ARO students are building the capacities of my teachers,” some of whom are “art-phobic,” he [Reginald Higgins] said, adding that teachers of older students were worried ARO lessons would take away from time to prepare for standardized tests.

Fox said that increased attention to standardized tests has nearly wiped out exposure to the arts in public schools, but that teachers’ concern was “definitely legitimate.” “We’re really, really aware we’re taking time out of the school day for this, so we want to be sure we’re helping the teachers and not placing an additional burden on them,” Handsman said.

It is a bit dispiriting that the ARO students view their activities as taking time away from more important efforts. Ken Robinson made a comment that made me realize just how un-student centered standardized testing is. He points out that instead of serving education as a guide for making changes, instruction serves the standardized test. He notes that no student gets up in the morning inspired to help increase the standardized test score rating of their school.

Students don’t become unemployable adults because someone looks at their 5th grade standardized test scores, they are unemployable because there was a lack of engagement in their learning. The tests have meaning to teachers, principals, superintendents, legislatures, governors, Congress and the President of the United State and fulfill their needs, but have no direct significance to the students whose educational lives they will purportedly help.

The 5 minute video of Ken Robinson’s interview is worth watching. He points out the “there is not enough time to do it right first time around, but time to do it over” status of the U.S. education system observing that most remedial programs are geared personally to the student after discovering what inspires them. It would be cheaper to have a more individualized focus on instruction than to pay multiple people to teach the same thing to a student more than once.

Can Arts Orgs Play Moneyball With Their Staffs?

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Ever since the movie Moneyball came out, I have been thinking about whether similar system can be applied to the arts. I mean a system by which baseball teams with small budgets were able to compete on par with the most well-funded teams by assembling a team of under utilized misfits? Heck, I am describing the place you work, right? It seems ready made for the arts!

I was happy to see a recent post by Shawn Harris on the TCG website raising the same general question. I agree with most of what Shawn suggests, including taking an objective look at different aspect of our operations and audiences to determine whether we are truly serving the interests of the community or just perpetuating assumptions.

One assumption I feel pretty safe in making is that what motivates people to attend a baseball game is different from what motivates people to attend an arts event. While celebrity is certainly a factor, people attend baseball games looking for an engaging contest. If they don’t know a lot about each of the players, that is okay if the game was well played. Can the same be said about an arts event? If someone is unfamiliar with a performance, will the fact that statistically speaking, the actors, while unknown, are the most effective performers in a period play?

Probably not. But then again, you shouldn’t be selling the show based on statistics anyway. Even though stats are a huge part of sports, that isn’t what primarily sells tickets. While a well-known artist would make it easier to sell a show, in the long run it is going to be better to take the “brains in the seats” view and work on engaging audiences in the organization, one aspect of which is going to be based on the quality of your personnel choices.

That is what I first started thinking about when I was considering whether Moneyball could be applied to the arts–are we hiring the best people? More over, are we actively seeking the best people or just casting a net and taking whatever swims our way?

I recall going to an Arts Presenters conference where Andrew Taylor talked about how a lot of arts organizations didn’t know how to effectively evaluate the skills of job candidates. He said there was a tendency to hire to the specifics of a job description rather than to the general needs of the position. Though he did mention an associate who hired a person who managed a Sears call center to run their ticket office after some unsatisfying interviews with people from the arts field, it seemed the exception rather than the rule. Taylor said he teaches his students to take control of the interview in order to illuminate their skills and illustrate how it applies to the criteria laid out in the job description.

While I am reluctant to put arts people out of work by suggesting that you look to hire those without any industry experience, I think it can help to always be mindful of the basic abilities you seek in employees. I once had lunch with some representatives from Enterprise Car Rentals and they were so impressed by the affability and service provided by one of the wait staff, they tried to recruit her at the end of our meal.

When was the last time you even thought about adding a person you met outside the context of the arts to your team? In fact, other than pursuing people who would increase the prestige of your company, when is the last time you tried to recruit someone way from another arts organization based on abilities and effectiveness alone?

When I think about the Moneyball model of finding success putting together a seemingly mismatched set of players few other teams desired, I wonder about our collective ability in the arts to effectively identify and cultivate the talent of people who aren’t necessarily shining in their current position. I know this can be tough in the arts where everyone wants to be the star actor/dancer/artist/director. Even if you are perceptive enough to see their talent lay elsewhere, people may be resistant to taking a different role.

The thing is, non profits should be pros at identifying and leveraging undiscovered skills. With all the volunteers we use to assist us with our programs and to serve on our boards, we should be championing seemingly unorthodox hiring decisions. But if Andrew Taylor is correct, the hiring practices in the arts are actually more orthodox than in the for profit sector.

If that is the case, perhaps we aren’t using our volunteers’ skills as effectively as we could, as well. That question starts to bring me back to my post last week featuring Aaron Hurst’s suggestion that certain volunteer programs may be a waste of time.

The research he cited found little difference in effectiveness between well- and poorly- managed programs involving less than 50 people. I wonder though if well managed programs might have beneficial side-effects for organizations in the form of improved hiring skills. In other words, the capacity to identify and employ highly capable people may be developed in the process of effectively doing the same thing with volunteers.

Info You Can Use: Efforts You Can Skip…Maybe

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From time to time I advocate for carefully evaluating the technology tools ones organization uses rather than jumping on what appears to be the hottest new thing everyone is apparently using. Not every tool is appropriate for every organization.

It was with great interest that I started to read Taproot Foundation president Aaron Hurst’s piece, Five Investments You Can Skip. In it, Hurst follows a similar theme in suggesting that non-profit organizations of a certain size and scope consider giving certain “must haves” a pass. Upon reading them, however, I was a little skeptical about some. The five he suggested were:

1) Volunteers. Recruiting and managing volunteers generally isn’t worthwhile unless you use at least 50 per year, they do at least 50 hours of service each (or fewer volunteers and more hours each), and you invest in volunteer management systems. Short of that, it’s almost certainly a waste of time.

2) Websites. Most nonprofits (the small neighborhood ones) would likely be fine with just a Facebook page. A template site would do the trick for slightly larger group. Only 25 percent of nonprofits need customized web design.

3) Board. There is a tremendously high fixed cost to training your board to facilitate donations (in kind or cash). If your board can’t generate a large part of your budget (say, 20 percent), you are likely to find them getting in the way of fundraising success and eating up senior staff time (and increasing burn out). If that’s the case, your organization would likely see more success with a smaller board focused solely on audits and the legal requirements of governance.

4) Social Media. Does it drive your advocacy, fundraising, or program success? It does for likely less than 2 percent of nonprofits. Everyone else is wasting a ton of time and energy on it. Much like my local car wash that urges me to “like” it on Facebook.

5) Strategic planning. You need a strategic plan, but for most organizations it can be a lot lighter than most MBAs want to admit. It doesn’t need to be perfect and frequently should be more of a living document.

Numbers 3 and 5 I can agree with pretty readily. The suggestion to eschew websites in favor of a Facebook page in number 2 seems to be contradicted by the implication in number 4 that social media, including Facebook may be a waste of time and energy.

I did consider that what he says might be true for non-profits in general. I don’t think it is applicable to arts organizations where providing up to date information about events and activities pretty much necessitate a web presence that is adaptable to your specific needs. I have a difficult time imagining that Facebook is a good option for most non-profits given that they need a site that distinguishes them and their mission from everything else one might come across on the web.

His suggestion that only about 2% of non profits are seeing any benefit from social media made me wonder 1) what he based that on and 2) if true, it may just as likely be due to lack of understanding about how to use social media effectively.

Number 1- Not investing in volunteers, held a number of reversals of opinion for me. At first I assumed he opposed investing in Volunteer management software, then I realized he meant not having volunteers at all. This seemed the most controversial of his points as reflected by the long and impassioned comments that followed. Hurst answered those objections with some research that supported his assertion that volunteer programs weren’t effective below about 50 people.

“When an organization reaches 50 volunteers AND achieves an effective volunteer management model, not only do they lead and manage their organizations better, but they are also significantly more adaptable (i.e., reflect the capacity to be a learning organization), sustainable and better resourced (i.e., have skills, knowledge, experience, tools, and other resources to do their work).”

On the other hand, the way I read it, a small number of volunteers, even poorly managed, help to leverage organizational effectiveness at lower budgets.

“Organizations with 10 to 50 volunteers, regardless of whether they are managed well, are statistically equally as “effective” as their counterparts without volunteers on all measures of organizational effectiveness (capacity), yet their average (median) annual budgets are almost half…This implies that organizations that break the barrier of 10 volunteers, regardless of whether they have figured out all of the best practices necessary to manage those volunteers, are equally as capacitated as their non-volunteer-based organizational peers, at perhaps just shy of half the cost…it is important to challenge the assumption that an organization cannot aspire to a more fully “volunteer-engaged” organizational model. Lastly, it is important to acknowledge the need to conduct further rigorous research to test the cause-and-effect assumption of this important finding.”

The other thing about the study Hurst cites is that it seems to be focused entirely on whether volunteers contribute to organizational effectiveness in executing their programs. It doesn’t seem to examine the role of volunteers in furthering organizational goals in terms of advocacy, awareness building and generally representing the organization to the community. If these factors are measured as part of some criteria, it is not clear.

Despite the doubts that one may harbor about whether all his points are well supported, there is some validity to Hurst’s essential idea that it may be worthwhile to assess whether the implementation of all those best practices everyone knows you need to be employing really provides the best return on investment. It is understandably difficult to be a confident skeptic in the face of widely recognized best practices, but these days it could contribute to long term survival.

Organizational Culture–It’s People!!!!

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Rosetta Thurman recently relinked back to an entry she did last year about organizational culture and the importance of not feeling like you are helpless in the face of it. Her basic premise is that organizational culture emerges from the practice of people and not from immutable laws written into the founding documents and the actions. (Though certainly, the initial culture establishes the precedent from which the organization develops.)

Her assertion that individuals in the organization are responsible for whether the culture changes or not struck a chord with me. I have been frustrated with organizational inertia both as a supervisor and subordinate in many places I have worked. While you can feel constrained by the (in)actions of your supervisor, the situation flows both ways. The entrenched reluctance of those you are trying to lead can cause just as much apathy as when the same characteristic is exhibited by one’s leaders.

I generally experience an optimism about a new hire starting work  similar to what I feel when I start a new job myself. I am eager to see what opportunities may be available by virtue of the skills and knowledge the new person brings. Given that most people in the non-profit field are overqualified for the job they are doing, each new person represents a great deal of potential.

People look at taking a new job as an opportunity for a new start. Employers should approach the arrival of a new hire in a like manner. Admittedly, most of the time in the non-profit world a new hire represents the opportunity to clear the backlog of work piling up on your desk. But if you view a new person as a replacement cog, chances are that is how you are viewed as well, perhaps even by yourself. The arrival of a new person is a good time to work on changing that aspect of the corporate culture for everyone’s benefit.

I just hired a new assistant theatre manager in September so these dynamics are at the forefront of my mind. Those who previously held the position provided different benefits to the theatre. The current person is in the position to either maintain or improve upon the gains of her predecessors. Having been in the job for about 45 days, she has enough understanding of the organization to start making suggested improvements.

I will confess that I reflexively feel a twinge of resistance when she starts a sentence with something like “I think that we should think about changing…” How could a new person dare to judge what we do! It is with some relief and then joy that I find that significant elements of her suggestions align with goals I am hoping to accomplish.

Granted, if you have done a good job during the interview process, this should be the result. However, I work for a state institution and the process seems oriented more toward CYA than hiring the best candidate. It is pleasing to realize you did hire the right person in spite of the process.

In any case, the most important factor in creating an environment where new endeavors are either encouraged or inhibited is the participation, or lack thereof, people.

But, of course, people have always been the most valuable ingredient.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/8Sp-VFBbjpE[/youtube]

Info You Can Use: Emergency Planning Tools For The Arts

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Two entries today you lucky readers. My list of things to blog on is getting longer than I handle and still have the subjects remain relevant.

Technology in the Arts blog had a very cool tool for the arts featured this week- Arts Ready, an online tool to help arts organizations create a plan for any emergency, including “incapacitation of a key staff member, a financial crisis, and of course a natural disaster.”

The tool helps you create a readiness assessment which generates a to do list of changes to be made and sends you periodic reminders about deadlines or to re-evaluate the plan. It also offers the ability to store critical documents at a cloud computing site in case the physical documents get damaged. They also have a “battle buddy” tool used to develop relationships with area organizations.

“…so that you can build a relationship and eventually become Battle Buddies- pledging to lend a hand if the other needs help. If you do need to declare a crisis, you can choose how much information to share with whom, and you can track your progress towards gathering the needed resources online.”

It would be great if organizations developed partnerships and alliances constructive to their daily operations in the course of seeking allies to assist in the event of an emergency.

There is a cost to the service, but because this sort of thing is only really effective if a lot of organizations are involved, the developer, SouthArts, is seeking support from state arts agencies to help offer discounted memberships.

Intersection of Artist And Audience Engagement

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Via Andrew Taylor’s Twitter feed last week, I became aware of an entry on Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog about use of space to engage arts attendees in different ways. What was really interesting about the entry was the conflict of views held by Nina, the Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz and one of the artists being exhibited in the museum’s Creativity Lounge about whether the lounge activities were contributing or detracting from the exhibit.

I appreciate that the artist came to realize that the lounge was actually contributing to people’s enjoyment of her work, but what I really loved was that the theoretical conversation about the purpose and role of a museum and the experience visitors should be having was actually being played out in practice. It is easy to talk about audience engagement activities in the abstract and project the wonderful benefits that will ideally be realized. Reality challenges that when an artist feels that the grand experiment is leading to their work not being taken seriously.

Granted, artists’ vision being compromised is nothing new. Historically other artists, administrators, producers, donors and patrons have all contributed to undermining artistic expression. That’s no excuse not to think about the impact of our decisions as we take up the task of trying to engage our patrons.

One of the big debates now is over the place of social media in live performances. Do you allow people to update their Twitter and Facebook posts during a show or do you try to suppress it. If people are engaged and are telling their friends about how much they enjoy the experience, that is a plus. If the glow and activity is distracting performers and audience members that is a bad thing. If people are splitting their attention between the performance and texting, that can be a negative as well.

The fact that back in the day people spoke and moved about during Shakespeare’s plays and Mozart’s concerts is often cited as an argument against the current restrictive nature inherent to live performances.

What isn’t often mentioned is that Shakespeare’s actors didn’t spend 8 hours or more a day for 4-6 weeks rehearsing for the show. I suspect Mozart’s musicians didn’t all invest hours a day from the time they were 8 years old practicing for the chance to compete against others of the same experience for a single seat on an orchestra with whom they would spend additional hours.

High demands are placed on artists these days and they want to be taken seriously for what they are bringing. When they see something happening that seems to undermine that, it is understandable that they be a little skeptical and wary.

One thing I take away from Simon’s post is the need to execute some engagement programs in as careful and deliberate a manner as the design of a performance or piece of art. When the program experience intersects with the art experience, you can’t just say, lets try this and see how people like it in the same way you might try out different ad campaigns to see which approach might be most effective.

Simon’s Creativity Lounge could have fallen flat and been just awful had the environment not been carefully considered. It is clear from her posts and responses in the comments section that it was.

For me this post was very timely because I am immersed in discussions about renovations to our facility. Part of the plans include razing and moving the ticket office and adding a concessions area. We have the opportunity to change the environment in the front of the theatre to one that has a more welcoming vibe through changes in lighting, landscaping and seating design. The factors we need to consider are just starting to percolate to the front of my brain.

Fund Making Long Term Investment In Performing Arts Orgs

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For a few years now people have been calling for foundations and other funders to provide more long term capital investment in non-profit organizations. The Social Velocity blog has an interview with Rebecca Thomas, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at the Nonprofit Finance Fund. (NFF) (h/t National Endowment for the Arts) The NonProfit Finance Fund is in the fourth year of a decade long effort to provide $1 million of what they term change capital in each of 10 performing arts organizations they selected.

One thing Thomas talks about is how many non-profits are mis-captialized in that they have sufficient capital, but that most of it is in the form of restricted funds. She touches upon this in a separate publication, Case for Change Capital in the Arts and Financial Reporting Done Right, which I have briefly looked at and hope to blog on in the near future.

The thing that caught my eye was her discussion of how capital and revenue are reported on non-profit financial reports.

One of the things we learned early on in this work is that changing the financial reporting—to separate capital flows from recurring revenue—would not be an easy sell, for understandable reasons. Executive directors are reluctant to take a chance presenting new formats to donors who don’t understand the technique, and many board members aren’t inclined to re-learn nonprofit accounting principles. Moreover, NFF’s suggested methodology is not required by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and auditors don’t always feel comfortable suggesting novel formats, even when they provide heightened clarity.

[…] suffice it to say that when capital and revenue are conflated, an organization’s reports do not present a realistic view of operating performance. Unintentionally misleading information can lead to poor planning and decision making by nonprofit leaders, boards and funders.

Longer term, it will take aggressive education and advocacy efforts to convince nonprofit executives, board members and funders of the value of producing transparent financial reports and audits that reveal business model economics separate from capital infusions. Nonprofits will need to be convinced that they won’t be penalized for producing statements that may, at times, show temporary weakness in operating results during a change or growth period.

Since NFF is in it for the long haul to help the 10 organizations in their pilot program institute substantial change, my guess is that they are trying to develop a way to effectively educate and communicate the validity of this different approach in financial reporting to boards and funders.

The first thing that came to mind when Thomas talks about mis-capitalization is how the Philadelphia Orchestra declared bankruptcy while possessing a substantial, but apparently restricted endowment. I couldn’t help but wonder if implementing the type of reporting discussed here would have made the real financial situation clearer earlier on.

I also wonder if they may not be the perfect candidate for using this reporting going forward. Even with the bankruptcy, they probably have the wherewithal to alter their accounting method where most arts organizations wouldn’t. Given their prominence, they could serve as an exemplar to non-profits, their boards and funders as to why these reporting methods should be adopted and properly understood.

One thing to note if you are hoping NFF’s pilot program becomes a trend, according to Thomas not all organizations are good candidates for change capital. They have to already possess strong management and self-evaluative processes which include data informed decision making.

Stand By Your Non-Profit Until The Bitter End

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Interesting piece on the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the responsibilities of non-profit boards to attend to the dissolution of their organizations.

Janet Kleinfelter, a deputy attorney general in Tennessee, talks about a case where a non-profit abandoned their organization after they realized it could no longer continue. They passed a resolution essentially saying the bank could do whatever it wanted to dispose of the assets and then resigned.

Kleinfelter writes that boards are required to give proper notice to state and federal regulators about the impending closure of their organization and submit the documentation in support of that action.

It is actually better for board members to stay involved with the organization than disassociate themselves. (My emphasis)

“Legally the board is required to dissolve the nonprofit, but when it fails to do so, that responsibility falls to the regulators and the courts.

This process will probably involve subpoenas to members of the former board, which may require board members to retain personal legal counsel at their own expense. What’s more, by resigning, board members may no longer have the benefit of directors’ and officer’ liability insurance. Former board members may even be personally liable for actions done in the name of the nonprofit while it is unmanaged.“

Examining Your Non Profit Career

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Rosetta Thurman posted her 15 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Nonprofit Career Many of her questions dealt with personal ambitions and what image you had of ideal situations.

The questions that engaged me the most though were numbers 11-14 which challenge you to look at the factors which are causing you to operate less than effectively.

“11. In which areas am I holding back in sharing my true gifts with my organization and community?
12. Am I making a real difference in my current role or position?
13. What’s really keeping me from deepening my level of commitment to my organization or cause?
14. What is the biggest opportunity I have in my nonprofit career right now that I’m not taking advantage of?”

Number 12 reflects a common sentiment that probably enters the minds of all people who work in non-profits. Probably especially those who work in the arts who may tend to wonder if their devotion to their art may be better applied focused on the ills which plague the world. Often when you are seeking funding, you are competing for money with the ills of the world so it is difficult to not wonder about such things.

But the other questions– holding back your gifts, not being fully committed, not availing oneself of opportunities– these are some real interesting questions. One of the first things I thought of whether these questions are different when pursuing a career in the non-profit sector versus the for profit sector.

If you have low self confidence then there may not be any difference. In either case you may not feel you are qualified enough or appreciated enough to have your abilities valued. You may think that others are more deserving of training or opportunities to work on career enhancing projects than you. Perhaps you don’t feel you get paid enough and so the business doesn’t deserve your full commitment of energy and talent.

But if you are more assured and confident and have a sincere commitment to your job and the work of your company, there are areas where there can be a real difference between non-profit and for profits. You may not invest yourself and your talents more because you are afraid you may be asked to do more without any additional compensation or even increase in scope of your authority.

This can easily be true in both the for profit and non-profit spheres, but I am specifically thinking about the reports of how many non-profit leaders were reticent about ever taking on the position of executive director perceiving it as a thankless job with little support and poor prospects for a work-life balance.

In terms of taking advantage of opportunities, even the most self-confident person may be reluctant to take advantage of professional development opportunities for fear that they are diverting resources away from the core purpose of the organization. The result is that some extraordinarily talented people may lack the training and guidance to become truly effective and never develop a network of contacts who can act as a support network and knowledge base. Even if concerns over the cost of attending conferences and seminars is never stated, an organizational culture of always economizing may make people feel guilty that time and money is being invested in them.

Meanwhile, an employee at a for profit is probably more likely to view the professional development opportunity as an investment by the company in their career and perhaps even something they deserve in return for their dedication to the business.

I would really be interested in seeing a survey done to learn if there is a large difference in the way non-profit and for profit employees approach employer sponsored professional development opportunities.

I am sure there are other reasons and motivations that factor into all these questions–and Rosetta Thurman is too. She is asking people to share their answers to at least one of these 15 questions on her blog. If you have something to say, by all means stop by.

Info You Can Use: Correct Organization Of Personnel Files

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Hat tip to Emily Chan at Non Profit Law blog for sharing a link to a Blue Avocado piece on how personnel files should be maintained. More specifically, what information should not be stored in a personnel file, if retained at all, and what should be kept in separate files.

Some of the prohibitions made sense given the need to maintain privacy of medical records and the fact that some documents must be released to federal inspection and it is inappropriate to provide access to the details of an entire employment history. It makes sense that nothing should be placed in the file that employees aren’t aware of.

There are some other factors I don’t know I would have ever considered when setting up a system of personnel records.

Following are the most important items to exclude:

* Any writing regarding the employee’s performance that the employee has not seen should not be in the file. For example, while the performance evaluation that was presented to the employee should be in there, a complaint memo from a department manager about an error the employee made that was never shown to the employee should not.

* Working notes or logs that a supervisor has kept for her own benefit, usually to assist in the drafting of a performance evaluation. The notes should be destroyed after documenting anything of importance in the annual performance evaluation.

* Any medical information (including drug testing information) about the employee from any source should never be in the employee’s personnel file, but rather in a separate, more restricted confidential medical file. This separate medical file could also include any medical-related information such as documents related to Workers’ Compensation, FMLA and ADA.

* Complaints or investigation reports (harassment, discrimination, ethics, licensing etc.). Any complaint about an employee that is subject to an investigation should not be in the employee’s personnel file, but in a separate complaint file. For example, if an employee is accused of sexual harassment, the only thing that should be lodged in the personnel file is any disciplinary action taken against the employee or a substantiated report of wrongdoing — but not the original complaint or investigation notes.

* These items also should not be kept in a personnel file, but in separate, confidential files:
o Hiring Documents, such as letters of reference, background investigation reports, or I-9s
o EEO Statistical Information for the EEO-1 Report
o Payroll records

In short, to manage all of this personnel information we suggest four sets of files:

1. A personnel file for each employee
2. A separate medical file for each employee
3. One folder that has Forms I-9 for all employees
4. A file (or set of files) for all employee payroll records

Ellen Aldridge, who wrote the Blue Avocado piece, also provides a downloadable check list of items to include. She follows the material cited above with information about what things employees can add to their files, how long you need to keep information, how to store the files and suggested policies and protocol for accessing and reviewing files.

The one thing I questioned, (literally-I ask about it in the comments section of the article), is the suggestion that notes a supervisor has been keeping to base a performance evaluation on be destroyed. The supervisor might be documenting incidents of absence, mishandling of cash or even episodes when customers praised an employee to a supervisor or were witnessed using exceptional judgment and initiative. Wouldn’t you want to retain this evidence if the employee challenged a poor evaluation or to defend the employee against potential layoffs?

There hasn’t been a response to my comment as of publication time. Perhaps the the advice will be to formally include these records as part of the evaluation and the destruction advice refers to informal handwritten notes versus a spreadsheet the supervisor has been maintaining.

If anyone has insight or wants to share their own best practices, I would be interested to learn the answers. My guess is that a modified version of these practices should be applied to volunteer records as well.

Trespassing Won’t Make You Many Friends

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The Non Profit Quarterly had a piece by Simone Joyaux which I suspect reflects what will be the necessary practice in fund raising for the future.

She asks fund raisers to stop asking their board members to trespass on their family and friends.

Trespassing is when you ask your friends or colleagues to give gifts and buy tickets . . . just because they are your friends and colleagues. This is the personal and professional favor exchange. This is obligation to a person rather than a cause. It’s a lousy way to raise money. It’s offensive. It alienates the asker and the askee. And it’s not sustainable.

[…]

How often have you, as a fundraiser, asked your board members to name names? How often have you asked them to bring in a list? Did you ask your board members to write notes on the letters that you planned to send to their list?

I say again, trespassing is a bad idea. It alienates board members. It alienates the friends and colleagues of board members. It doesn’t produce loyal donors or sustainable gifts.

Joyaux advises asking board members to suggest those they believe might be interested in supporting one’s organization and then inviting them to learn more about the organization. In the process of interacting with these people, one can gauge whether they are interested in what the organization does and perhaps what specific manifestation of the mission they may be disposed to supporting. From there you can work on cultivating a relationship with them that may see them more involved with the organization.

This suggestion isn’t terribly earth shattering or new. I have heard Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser say this is essentially what he does to garner support for the organizations he leads. When I first heard him speak about how he evaluates what people may be interested in and only really approaches them in relation to their interests, it seemed a less daunting and more considerate approach than soliciting everyone for every cause, even though it is much more time consuming.

As Joyaux notes, existing supporters like board members are probably going to be more comfortable implementing an organizational relationship building approach. After all, they invested the time to develop their personal relationships with friends and colleagues. While they may be willing to donate the fruits of that investment to their favorite non-profit, those relationships were built on entirely different circumstances which may not be entirely compatible with a request for support of a non-profit.

Now that social media allows people to be approached for their support every time they turn on a computer or pick up the phone, it is likely that only those organizations that take the time to cultivate a relationship with people will earn sustained support.

Not that social media won’t be a good tool for keeping people engaged with the organization’s work. It may just not be the strongest method for the organization and individual to gain a good mutual understanding and appreciation of each other’s priorities.

N.B. My apologies. Some how I ended up omitting the link to Joyaux’s piece when I first posted this entry.

What’s Good For The Grágás Is Good For The Arts Organization

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I was reading that Iceland is in the process of updating it constitution and is soliciting feedback from its citizens. The constitutional council is posting drafts of each section online and are integrating some of the responses into the constitution. Actually, because so much of the activity is occurring online, they have suggestions from an international audience via their Facebook page. I am not sure if they have implemented international suggestions, but the people running their Facebook account seem to be doing a pretty good job of responding to those who post about the process.

I was thinking that this might be an approach that an arts group looking to serve a community might use as they began to generate an organizational structure. There seems to be some wisdom in getting everyone involved at the point of constructing the framework and having them continue to feel invested in the organization years into its operation because it has taken the community’s needs into account. A barn raising of the Internet age, if you will.

Of course, the tricky question is the degree to which you involve everyone. Trying to please everyone on a committee doesn’t end up pleasing anyone as we well know. There has to be a small group of people deciding what the focus of the discussions will be about. That is the function the 25 member constitutional council in Iceland serves.

On the other hand, going into the process with a lot of pre-conceived notions around which you will plug in community suggestions might also yield a product that no one really gets excited to be involved with. Deciding from the outset the organization will do Shakespeare when the community indicates a live music and visual art center is needed, for example.

Crowd sourcing feedback is probably never going to be a substitute for the good judgment based on hard work and research that starting any business requires. A serious look at demographics may show that the population can’t support a music and visual arts center for more than five years versus the prospects of a destination Shakespeare festival. However, using social media tools to disseminate information about why a music and visual arts isn’t going to viable may garner a good deal of faith and respect in the burgeoning organization when the community clearly sees they have done their homework.

Obviously, the same process can be used by existing organizations to strengthen their place in their community or even realign themselves with the existing needs. Iceland isn’t starting from scratch, after all. But there has to be real conviction in the organization to effect change. There can be a lot of organizational inertia trying to keep things from truly changing. If the change is coming due the realization that the faith and investment of the community has been lost, there could be a lot of resistance to overcome before truly constructive conversations about changes can transpire.

By the way, Grágás refers to the Grey Goose laws of Iceland that were in use until the 13th century. Therefore, I took some poetic license in the title of the entry to make it fit the goose-gander saying. The constitutional council using social media is known as Stjornlagarad.

Those Daring Leaders Of Non Profits

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A nod to our friends at the Non-Profit Law blog for noting that CompassPoint Non Profit Services and the Myer Foundation who teamed up three years ago to bring us the report I blogged on, Ready to Lead, studying trends in emerging leadership of non-profits, has come out with a new Daring To Lead, studying the status of non-profit executive directors.

The last time they studied this topic was 6 years ago, before the recession. Their new findings are worrisome in terms of the lack of succession planning but encouraging in respect to the amount of enthusiasm and lack of burn out the majority of executive directors feel in the face of the recession. Their three main findings deal with those topics: succession, the recession and executive director morale.

Finding 1
“Though slowed by the recession, projected rates of executive turnover remain high and many boards of directors are under-prepared to select and support new leaders.”

Due to the recession impacting their retirement plans, fewer executive directors left their positions than planned. A small percentage (9%) of respondents cited the lack of an appropriate successor as a reason for remaining. So while there hasn’t been as large an exodus as was once feared, little has been done to prepare for that eventuality.

“Executives and boards are still reluctant to talk proactively about succession and just 17% of organizations have a documented succession plan. Even more problematic is the extent to which many boards are unfamiliar with the dimensions of their executives’ roles and responsibilities. Just 33% of executives were very confident that their boards will hire the right successor when they leave. Performance management is a critical means of being in dialogue with an executive about success and its metrics, yet 45% of executives did not have a performance evaluation last year…Without consistent, meaningful engagement in what the job requires, many boards are under-prepared for their critical role in executive transition.”

The report also cites some numbers which indicate a series of mishires by boards and unclear expectations by boards and executives. One of the biggest challenges executive directors face is establishing an effective partnership with boards and getting the support they need in the early years of assuming the new role.

“It appears that many boards see executive transition as ending with the hire, when in fact leaders—nearly all of whom are in the role for the first time—need intentional support and development as they build efficacy in the executive role.”

Finding 2
The recession has amplified the chronic financial instability of many organizations, causing heightened anxiety and increased frustration with unsustainable financial models.

Hardly a surprise that many non-profit leaders are worried about whether their organization will continue to exist in these difficult economic times. Many executive directors reported having less than 3 months of cash reserves. According to the report, the common guideline is to have between 3 and 6 months. Many first year leaders are faced with the most daunting of situations.

“Thirty-two percent (32%) of executives in their first year on the job have less than one month of operating reserves; in other words, those on the steepest part of the learning curve often have the smallest margin for error.”

It it any wonder than that a listening tour by Building Movement in 2004 found a lot of prospective leaders in the next generation, while chomping for greater responsibility in their organizations, were reluctant to assume the executive position. (My post on their report here)

Finding 3
Despite the profound challenges of the role, nonprofit executives remain energized and resolved.

The very encouraging news in the face of all this.

“Forty-five percent (45%) reported being very happy in their jobs, and another 46% reported that they have more good days than bad in the role. Levels of burnout, especially given the economic climate, were low; 67% of leaders reported little or no burnout at all. In fact, leaders distinguished between burnout, which they associated with disengagement and ultimately leaving the job, and the realities of fatigue and elusive boundaries between their work and personal lives that go with the job. Forty-seven percent (47%) of executives reported having the work-life balance that’s right for them, while a significant minority (39%) said they did not.”

One of the biggest challenges executive directors reported they faced was human resource management. Attracting people, retaining them once they were trained and had skills to find better work and motivating those that stick around toward a unified organizational goal comprise a tough task for these leaders. There seemed to be a loose process of delegation and sharing of responsibility that didn’t approach formal mentoring.

“And a large majority (81%) reported having someone on staff that they trusted to make important organizational decisions without consulting them. Explicit executive mentoring of other staff was a relatively infrequent practice, with 31% of executives reporting being in an explicit mentoring relationship.”

The leaders themselves eke out a rough system of acquiring leadership training/mentoring/coaching/peer networking to improve their own skills.

Few executive leaders spend significant time interacting with boards of directors. 55% responded as spending less than 10 hours a month on board related activities which is at best 6% of their time. According to the report, other studies have found that executive directors who spend 20% of their time on board related activities are most satisfied. Most of those responding to the Daring to Lead survey were dissatisfied with their board relations.

As succession planning has been one of my favorite topics, you know I am going to suggest people should read the results. It is only 20 pages long. They make suggestions at the end about how to improve the overall situation. The general thrust of their advice is clear before you reach it–basically boards need to do a better job of succession planning and find ways to support and engage with the executive director more frequently and effectively.

One area that isn’t really covered in the body of the report but that is mentioned in the calls to action at the end is for funders to recognize the role they play in perpetuating the current situation and how their initiatives can move things in a more constructive direction.

Solving Other People’s Problems

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Daniel Pink recently wrote a piece in The Telegraph about how people are more effective at solving problems if the problems are not their own. In a recent study, those who were told they were solving a problem for someone else found more effective and creative solutions than those who were told they were solving the same problem for themselves.

In another study, people were asked to choose a gift for themselves, for someone close to them and for someone they barely knew. The less familiar the person, the more innovative the gift that was chosen.

Over the years, social scientists have found that abstract thinking leads to greater creativity. That means that if we care about innovation we need to be more abstract and therefore more distant. But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. We draw closer rather than step back.

That’s a mistake, Polman and Emich suggest. “That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self… should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers and advertisers, among many others,” they write.

[…]

And while much of our business world is ill-configured to benefit from Polman and Emich’s insights, the rise of crowd sourcing and ventures such as Innocentive (which allows companies to post problems on a web site for people around the world to solve) suggests that the moment may be right for reconfiguring the broader architecture of problem-solving.

Pink offers five suggestions for either seeking the independent viewpoint of others or try to disassociate oneself from their business. A commenter, Lowell Nerenberg, talked about mentally calling on the spirit of his dead father to help him with his writing which I thought was an interesting approach.

What popped most prominently to mind, however, when I was reading the article was the question- If this is true, why aren’t non-profit boards more effective at leading and finding better approaches to doing business? While non-profit boards do essentially run and have ultimate ownership of an organization, most board members have a generally disassociated view of their relationship to the organization. This is essentially built into the basic design of non-profit boards. They generally don’t meet to discuss the business of the organization more frequently than once a month. According to the research, they should be fairly well positioned to generate creative solutions to the problems their organization faces.

And maybe they do come up with grand ideas. From what I gather from the research Pink references, no one looked into how often a solution generated by an outsider was actually compelling enough to be implemented. Good ideas may be generated, but perhaps there are impediments to actually putting them into effect. People may not feel confident enough in the idea to champion it. There may not be sufficient collective will to effect the necessary changes, especially if some sort of sacrifice was required. Or perhaps the board might feel it is the place of the senior staff to provide leadership in bringing about the change.

Operating under the assumption that non-profit boards of directors do possess the mental distance necessary to generate creative solutions, we get back to the oft mentioned discussion about training/creating a board which is knowledgeable and empowered about its role and responsibilities and is providing effective guidance and direction to the staff.

If the board finds it is too close to the problems of the organization to address them, then obviously the counsel of disinterested parties mentioned by Pink is likely to be necessary.

One implication of these studies I don’t even want to consider is that the nosy neighbor who is always butting into your business and giving unwanted free advice might actually be saying something of value. (Though likely they are too closely involved in monitoring our lives to enjoy the proper perspective of distance.)

Info You Can Use: Speak Passionately, Persuasively…and Briefly

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I love it when, in the course of a few minutes, I come across different web pages that seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese Peanut Butter cup.

In this instance one link was provided by Drew McManus who noted Harvard Business School’s “Elevator Pitch Generator.” Based on the old scenario that you might get lucky enough to gain access to a powerful decision maker in a place away from their gatekeeper staff like an elevator, enterprising people are encouraged to find a way to talk about their idea or business in a compelling way in under a minute. The pitch generator coaches you through the process of formulating that pitch.

After answering who you are, what you do to bring value, why you are unique in delivering value, what your immediate goals are and how the listener is involved in those goals, the generator analyzes the pitch. The generator tells you your word count, how long it might take to deliver it and notes how many times you repeated words. You have the opportunity to revise your pitch or email/print it off for use.

The second web page I came across (I apologize for not properly noting the source of the link) was on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. Katya Andresen references Charles Green’s Trust-Based Selling where he talks about the six toughest questions customers ask sales people.

Katya uses this to create the 5 Toughest Questions Donors Will Ask:

1. Why should we choose to donate to your organization?
2. What makes your organization different?
3. What experience do you have?
4. We aren’t interested, why should we pay attention to you?
5. Why is your overhead so high?

She provides suggested answers to each and acknowledges there may be more toughest questions to add by asking readers what tough questions they have been asked.

The response I liked the best was to the last one, probably because it was expounded up at length in a separate blog post of its own.

“This is not about salaries. This isn’t about overhead. It’s about your heroic staff, creating amazing arts programs that transform the people you touch. The end results of your efforts is the story you tell in your fundraising pitch. That’s not self-serving! Your CEO talking about the lives you change is not self-promotion—it’s the beating heart of your mission. Say it loud and proud.

If I were at your arts organization, I’d tell an incredible story about one child touched by a single performance. And I’d say what made it possible was my small, dedicated team. With a donor’s support, more of that magic can happen.

You raise money by talking about the impact of your work—not about budget line items. If a donor demands to see the numbers and asks about pay, tell a great story about one of your staff to illustrate my point: that nothing wonderful happens without a creative, committed team. (I assume your staff isn’t being paid $1 million a piece—that’s something I can’t spin.)

The bottom line: Don’t be afraid of talking about your people. They aren’t overhead – they are change agents. If they do great work, put them front and center in your stories of transformation. To use a theater term, they deserve center stage.”

There is so much focus on minimization of overhead as a measure of a non-profits success, mostly brought on by a very small number of charities paying executives a great deal of money, that it is helpful to have a little guidance on the subject. Mostly, she is reminding us that it is the work that really matters and that is what should be talked about. Saying we need to pay a liveable wage to retain talented people may sound too similar to the arguments banks make that they need to pay big bonuses to retain the top talent for people to make a distinction. It is probably better to focus on the fact you are employing people who bring both talent and passion to effect change and follow Katya’s advice not to focus on the money.

It seems to me that you can use the elevator pitch generator to hone how you talk about your organization, especially to donors. Talking about how people have been affected may need to take longer than a minute to be properly persuasive. But while you don’t want to gloss over a compelling anecdote in order to tell the story of your organization in under a minute, what is said still needs to be lean and to the point.

Ford’s Fresh Angle On The Arts

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One of the activities the Ford Foundation is engaging in as part of their celebration of 75 years is a series of forums focused on issues of social justice. The first of these, held on May 4 had an arts focus. I have been watching the videos of the sessions on the site and still have a few more to go but I wanted to reflect on what I have seen. The event utilized Cover It Live to aggregate the observations of the social media people who were present so you can review their record of the proceedings as well.

In the lunch time discussion between NEA chair Rocco Landesman and former NY Times journalist, Frank Rich, called “Roccing Out: A Lunch Conversation” (sorry, no direct link you will have to scroll down the page), they went over a number of issues, including Landesman’s now famous comments about supply of arts exceeding demand. What I found most interesting was Landesman’s discussion of his efforts to create a private-public partnership between the NEA and private foundations to better serve the arts constituencies.

I found myself wondering if the association would constrict private foundations’ vision toward that of the U.S. government since they are obviously an influential player or if the NEA’s vision would broaden to more encompass the myriad aims of the private funders. I could see the NEA funding possibly expanding as its chair goes before Congress to mention that influential foundation X was bringing Y amount to their partnership. Or it could backfire and Congress could decide it only proved there was plenty of private money out there. Though if GE and oil companies can make billions, not pay taxes and still receive subsidies, there has to be a way to successfully frame the argument.

Landesmann also discussed how he is trying to work with other departments of the federal government to get them to emphasize and use the arts in their programs. He described his efforts as being the coo-coo bird who lays his eggs in other bird’s nests for them to raise since they have more resources than he does. Two examples he used were aligning the arts with transportation projects and housing and urban development.

The other session I watched was “Sharing the Stage: Globalization and Cultural Might.” The thing that grabbed me was the discussion of how construction of arts and cultural centers were seen by countries as a symbol of having made it. Having such buildings were seen as conferring credibility as an accomplished, modern culture and society upon the country. The problem is that some countries haven’t thought about actually inhabiting the buildings with art.

Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center talks about traveling to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and walking around a magnificent art center located far from the population that has never really had any performances in its 15 years of existence. He mentioned another large facility being constructed in the same country where they have projected no operating costs because it will be run entirely by volunteers. Vishakha N. Desai, President of the Asia Society, mentioned that China has plans for building hundreds of museums, but when she asked the mayor of Shanghai what would be put in them, she was told they would figure that out.

The point they were making was that there was something of a misunderstanding in governments in whether the value in art resided in the buildings or the artists. There was some discussion, especially when they opened up the floor for questions and comments, about the importance of having places to exhibit and perform work as well as to train managers to properly empower and enable the work of artists.

My first reaction to this talk about the building bringing prestige was the thought that this is what comes of promoting the economic value of the arts. This came mostly as a result of thinking about all the money and resources that went into the construction. I soon realized though that what the governments really sought was not the tangible value, but to trumpet the intangible value of their country’s culture. They have world class facilities in which to feature world class artists, heavily represented by artists of their own country.

In the US we have been arguing that arts and culture are one of the things about our country that make it great and strengthen the national character. It is difficult to criticize a government who agrees with that and wants to invest huge amounts of money to draw world wide attention to that fact.

Except, of course, that the Field of Dream expectation that if you build it, the artists will come to inhabit the facility and bring life to it is somewhat erroneous. It takes some significant effort and planning to cultivate an artistic life for a facility. My strong suspicion is that the construction of these facilities didn’t involve a lot of input from artists who represented the type envisioned to perform/use the building and the facilities may not be suitable to their needs at all necessitating some immediate renovations.

Mutant Business Models Are Coming! (Embrace Them Before They Embrace You)

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Apropos to yesterday’s post about non-profit business models is a piece by Saul Kaplan on the Harvard Business Review discussing how every organization that offers some sort of service needs a business model regardless of whether you are a non-profit, NGO, government entity or for profit business.

If you have never thought about your organization’s business model but figure it is about time you did, you may found Kaplan’s comments about the mutability of business models a little disheartening.

“If you ask any ten people in your organization how it creates, delivers, and captures, will the answers even be close?

If not, it’s probably because, in the industrial era when business models seldom changed and everyone played the game by the same set of well-understood industry and sector rules, it wasn’t as important to be explicit about business models. Business models were safely assumed and taken for granted.

That won’t work in the 21st century when all bets are off. Business models don’t last as long as they used to. New players are rapidly emerging, enabled by disruptive technology, refusing to play by industrial era rules. Business model innovators aren’t constrained by existing business models. Business model innovation is becoming the new strategic imperative for all organization leaders.”

He goes on to talk about the need for new, hybrid business models that blur the existing lines. I take some comfort in the fact that business models are currently a hot topic of discussion among various arts administration blogs. It means we are staying current with trends rather than following far behind.

One thing in particular I took away from Kaplan’s post was the importance of keeping involved in the conversation about business models given that existing lines of separation between profit and non profit are likely to become less distinct.

“Perhaps the most important reason for developing common business model language across public, private, non-profit, and for-profit sectors is that transforming our important social systems (including education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship) will require networked business models that cut across sectors. We need new hybrid models that don’t fit cleanly into today’s convenient sector buckets. We already see for-profit social enterprises, non-profits with for-profit divisions, and for-profit companies with social missions. Traditional sector lines are blurring. We’re going to see every imaginable permutation and will have to get comfortable with more experimentation and ambiguity.”

The Farmer and the Cowman (and Restaurateur) Can Be Friends

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Last week we hosted a food sustainability conference sponsored by our culinary program. Sustainability and local food sources is a big deal in Hawaii because between 85%-90% of all our food is imported. If there was a cataclysmic event which prevented food from reaching the ports, there is only about 10 days of food available to feed the population.

I have seen a number of arts bloggers draw a connection between the slow food movement and the arts so I listened closely to what was said hoping to gain a little insight from the practices of other industries.

Since the conference was organized by a culinary program, they approached the subject from the view of how restaurants can source more of their food locally and sustainably. The panels consisted of farmers, ranchers and restaurant owners talking about some of their practices.

Culinary Convening
Farmers, Ranchers and Restaurateurs Convene

There were some inspiring examples of some farmers operating almost completely off the grid with a high degree of recycling. They farm tilapia, circulate the water through lettuce and other plants which help filter the water and send it back through to the fish. Because of a rain catchment system, they haven’t had to draw from the public water supply in many months. Some of the effluvia gets diverted to a nursery which includes fruit trees to provide fertilization. One of the chefs at the gathering said he managed to put a dinner together for a party thrown by the governor where all the ingredients were grown within 100 feet of each other by sourcing them at the farm.

What struck me as applicable to arts and cultural organizations is the stories of some of the mutually beneficial relationships restaurants have created with farmers and ranchers. Chef Roy Yamaguchi of the Roy’s restaurant group convinced a farmer who was just weeks away from closing down his farm to grow a mesclun mix and required all his restaurants to use it. This allowed the farmer to stay in business.

Another chef, Peter Merriman, said that early on he made the conscious choice not to try to guard his food sources. While it undermines his ability to lay exclusive claim to offering high quality ingredients, he recognizes he is helping to keep his suppliers in business by telling people where he gets his ingredients.

Chef Alan Wong, who was in attendance at the convening, has been a long time proponent of using local ingredients. He spoke about how he held a beef tasting at one of his restaurants as part of an effort to convince restaurateurs to support ranchers by buying local beef.

The tasting ended up solving a big problem the ranchers had. The high end restaurants would buy the prime cuts of beef and leave the ranchers with the rest on their hands. A person from a local restaurant chain at the tasting had the presence of mind to ask what was happening with the rest of the cow. Now that chain consumes 250,000 lbs of local beef a year. Because the ranchers can sell the whole cow, the price is lower for everyone and there is incentive to the ranchers expand their operations.

Every arts organization has a different operating environment so I hope people can find something analogous to their own situation in these examples. The most obvious one to me is the oft mentioned fact that the regional theatre movement was intended to employ artists locally and still can if people commit to creating an climate in which this can happen.

One of the ways might be to duplicate Alan Wong’s tasting and actively invite colleagues to see different artists, not with the intent of “selling” them as so many showcase performances do, but with the approach of highlighting and celebrating local resources in an attempt to keep and cultivate them. There is an entirely different ambiance present in the latter scenario versus the former and I suspect one would be far more receptive to the idea of employing someone because of it.

I have to imagine given current trends that there is some mileage to be gotten out of boasting that the casting of a show produced a smaller carbon footprint because no one flew/drove a long distance to New York or Chicago to hire a person and the person didn’t have to travel far to appear locally. Arts organizations can celebrate their fiscal prudence by noting that they don’t have to pay for housing and per diem as they do with “imported” artists because the person already lives nearby. Therefore, much of the ticket revenue is going back into the community as artists buy goods and pay their mortgage and taxes. Perhaps the artists can make a statement about how they appreciate how the deliberate cooperation between a handful of organizations has created an environment that provides enough opportunities to live locally and raise a family rather than hustle for jobs in the big city.

Another idea would be to grow a network in which to share productions. Some theatres already invest in productions together, sharing the development costs and planning to have the show appear in both places. However, some of the members of my consortium produce shows for their own audiences while suggesting the other members might be interested as well. In most cases, each producing organization is partnering with a local performance group to develop the show already and a cost sharing agreement is already in place. Acquiring additional bookings in other parts of the state is just an added benefit for both. Having other venues willing to present the show can also assist with grant writing to support the development of  the production and support touring. I have had two shows I produced go on tour and I have hosted three that originated with consortium partners.

This sort of arrangement is easier when there is a longstanding relationship between organizations in place and they know they can trust that a quality product will be created when they commit themselves  in the conceptual stage. I think that is the sort of relationship that has been developed between the restaurants and the farmers and ranchers. The restaurants know what they are going to get from the suppliers and the suppliers know they have dependable buyers for their products.

One of the other challenges restaurants said they faced with local beef is that grass fed beef tastes different than corn fed beef. A representative from Roy’s Restaurants talked about how she has had to deal with indignant customers who demand to know what the restaurant is trying to pull when they first eat the meat. She spoke about how Roy Yamaguchi decided to not only note that the beef was grass fed in the dish description, but also put a section in the menu that explained about the beef and what it was the restaurant was trying to accomplish.

This immediately sounded like the challenge arts organizations face when trying to introduce audiences to anything outside their experience. The advantage the beef has over the arts is that while both steak and certain segments of the arts have an elitist aura about them, there is a perception that being adventurous with food is a mark of distinction while sampling a new arts experience is either intimidating or the mark of a snob. Do the arts need their own version of Anthony Bourdain to incite exploration?

(By the way, the title of this entry is a nod to the musical Oklahoma!)

Domain Knowledge And Arts Management

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I was watching the illustrated lecture seen below on the Drucker Exchange website. William Hopper gives the lecture on domain knowledge which is what a young college graduate would get 50 years ago when he went to work for a large company. Over time, the person would work their way up the ladder of promotion learning the craft of management under the supervision of a more experienced person and you would learn the business of your company.

Hopper says that business schools undermined this system starting in the 70s when they began to spread the idea that getting an MBA would allow you to manage anything. Instead of starting at the bottom, you could go right to the top and need not worry that you didn’t know much about the business of the company because everything operated more or less the same.

It got me wondering if the arts might be heading in the same direction or not with more people getting management degrees and the general itinerant nature of the profession. A good number of the executive leadership of arts organizations are getting ready to retire. Many of them started as artists before moving on to management and then they stayed at their organizations for many years.

There has been discussion about how emerging leaders are having a hard time getting experience because the existing leaders aren’t ready to move on yet. Many of the younger leaders move around a lot trying to find better opportunities. This may be beneficial in giving leaders a wide variety of experiences to draw upon, but doesn’t provide a depth of knowledge about any one organization. Then there is the dearth of good mentors who have the time to act as such for a younger generation.

I was also wondering if aspiring leaders were bringing extensive knowledge of an arts discipline with them these days. Now that there are expanded opportunities to enter cultural management degree programs, these leaders may not have a lot of experience in the means of production for that art. Before I entered my graduate program, I had some acting experience in school and took classes outside of school as well; I worked as an electrician and carpenter in school and for three different summer theatres (plus one where the box office staff was on the electrics crew during strike).

These experiences have ensured that I talk to my tech staff before signing any contract for a performance or rental event.

I am not sure if these sort of activities are part of an arts manager’s career path any more. Be pleased if anyone wants to relate their story.

I do take consolation in the fact that people have to wear so many hats in the arts there is a pretty good chance that even if someone isn’t really familiar with the other aspects of their discipline before they get their degree, they will be fairly well acquainted with the means of production during their first job. Though the lack of resources that create this situation is not really something to celebrate.

I am not entirely sure how to portray this education vs. experience situation. We are in a place where the first generation of people with arts management degrees will be assuming control soon and I think they can probably do so with more confidence than some of their predecessors because they will possess technical knowledge about laws and regulations their predecessors had to learn about as the subject came up.

What they will lack is the experience of working with boards, government entities, unions, foundations and donors over the course of many years in situations where relationships and institutional memory are important. But this is going to be true for any new leader unless they have been promoted to leadership from within, a situation which is becoming ever rarer.

Does Screaming and Demeaning Treatment Make the Show Better?

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The big discussion on the LinkedIn Performing Arts Manager forum right now is about the design of a Masters Program in Cultural Leadership. The conversation was slow in starting but sort of took off in the last couple weeks. I mention this just in passing in case anyone else wants to join the discussion and note the source of my post topic.

Anne Marie Quigg recently mentioned in the discussion that she was going to be delivering a conference presentation on her book about bullying in the arts. Bullying is a hot topic in general these days, mostly in schools. But we really don’t discuss it that much in the arts. Or rather, we grouse when we experience it, but we don’t really talk about needing to address it as a matter that undermines the health of the industry, organizations and individuals.

The description of the book notes that really awful people and situations are tolerated because they produce exceptional artistic products and that there is no really concerted effort to change that environment.

“Anne-Marie Quigg researched whether the behaviour represented isolated, rare occurrences in specific creative environments or if it was indicative of a more widespread problem in the arts and cultural sector. She discovered the highest level of bullying recorded in any single employment sector in the UK.

Bullying in the Arts reveals Dr Quigg’s findings, including the personal, organisational, legal and economic consequences of bullying behaviour. Looking at the experiences of countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, and the United States, this book challenges the notion that the arts are beyond the limitations of the ordinary milieu, exempt from the rules and regulations governing the treatment of employees. “

There have already been mentions in other articles that young leaders reject the premise that one must give their lives to the organization and pay their dues like their predecessors did and prefer a work-life balance. For this reason, many young leaders entering the field don’t aspire to the executive director role.

If this is indeed the trend, (heck, even if it isn’t) it indicates the necessity to address the negative pressures across all areas of the arts and not just administration. It is difficult to believe that only those with ambitions in administration are reticent to embrace the current lifestyle of arts managers and the performers and designers are just fine with the way things are.

Being an artist doesn’t convey a special grace that absolves one of behavior that would get people in most professions fired. Restaurant kitchens are notoriously rough places to work (and they have knives!) and there is a similar debate over the supremacy of the head chef (the way it has always been) vs. the idea that the food doesn’t taste any better for all the screaming.

Given that my experience is mostly in theatrical production and presenting, I am not entirely familiar with the world of dance, opera, classical music and visual art. Are there attempts to address this problem in other areas? What sort of behaviors and practices need to be changed?

Advocate For The Real Artistic You

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Many people I follow on Twitter made note of the flashmob activity that happened on Capitol Hill as part of Arts Advocacy Day. I clicked the link to see what interesting thing the arts people converging on the Capitol to talk to their representatives had done.

I have to say, I was pretty disappointed. I am generally not very critical here and rarely directly critical of a specific effort so I think this is saying something.

The whole idea, the thing that is exciting, about arts flash mobs is that they occur in places you don’t expect them providing an arts experience out of the context of the space. Singing a patriotic song like “America, The Beautiful” on Capitol Hill doesn’t really push that boundary and give the thrill of experience that makes you think about the value and place of the arts in your lives the way the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture program does.

It might not be entirely appropriate, but the first song that entered my mind as an alternative was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” The title has the sense of converging on Capitol Hill and the lyrics talk about a man and woman switching places to gain an empathy for the other. That sort of understanding being a desired outcome for the day’s efforts.

Yeah, it is easy for me to criticize sitting at my computer 5,000 miles away rather than participating in the advocacy efforts. I just think something so safe does a disservice to all those artists who are walking into the offices of representatives who are hostile or indifferent to their cause. A flash mob of arts people should make a statement about all those things we say the arts do–bring change, push boundaries, make people think, excite, etc. At the very least, it should be a statement that the arts people are in Washington and be a source of morale and courage for those who have the face the steely gazes, dismissive smiles and condescending tones of various politicians.

It should be be manifestation of Amy Scheidegger’s Artistic Rebuttal Book which made the trip to D.C. There are a lot of disruptive pokes and prods in that book. But an artist walking into a representative’s office is a more disruptive presence than this flash mob was.

Perhaps the decision to do a flash mob thing was an actual flash effort organized at the last minute and wasn’t really thought out or organized. And granted, you can’t make a lot of sudden unexpected moves in the Capitol without making security very nervous. In the future maybe something more engaging can be planned and executed in another forum. To me it just kinda came off as an attempt to assure legislators that arts people are good patriotic Americans rather than subversive socialists as is widely believed and that they won’t do anything upsetting during their visits.

Arts people shouldn’t have to make any statements about their loyalty. While a legislative office visit isn’t the time to exhibit your “Musings on an Abattoir,” there is nothing to be lost by making people nervous that the work might appear. That is just an illustration of the power of the artist in society.

Wish They Had Given Me These Skills In High School

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Before I get into today’s post, I wanted to direct readers to an interview on an education related topic. Tim Mikulski, the arts education person at Americans for the Arts spoke to Wolf Trap Foundation Senior Director of Education Mimi Flaherty Willis about their program which brings the arts to STEM education in early childhood education. Might be of interest to those seeking to create a program to turn STEM to STEAM.

Last Tuesday I participated in a mock interview day a local high school was conducting. (Actually, it ran two days. The assistant theatre manager did the second day.) I think it was the high school’s ninth year doing this and it was very well organized. I received the resumes of the students I would be interviewing and some supporting information about two weeks prior to the day. The room had 30 tables with two interviewers scheduled at each so it was no small undertaking. (And remember, this was a two day affair!) We were given 25 minutes to interview the students, evaluate them and then call them back to provide feedback. In all we had five students to interview in these 25 minute blocks.

Let me tell you, these kids were better prepared than most of the interviewers. We were told that we didn’t have to research the companies to which the students were applying, but in a proper interview setting you ask “Do you have any questions for us?” This means that you need to know a little something in case the students ask what you like about the company or what expectations the company has for their employees. Of course, with my background in theatre, I was able to improvise inspired answers! Well…mostly, I was generally reinforcing the need for ambition, responsibility, education and good customer service.

When I say the students were better prepared than us, I am not as much diminishing the abilities of the industry people at interviewing as emphasizing just how impressive these 15 year olds were. Of the five, only one was clearly unprepared, a fact she admitted herself. The other four were very well prepared and reasonably poised. Of those, the two who most convinced us of their potential as an employee told us they shopped at our stores (an international surf chain and music store, respectively) and what they liked about it. I got up at the group debrief at the end and told the students that research and a personal connection created a strong case for employment. Most employment guides will tell you to do your research, of course, but few tend to do it.

The experience reminded me that I infrequently have someone come into my office looking for a job who says they have attended shows and really want to work here or have done much in the way of research about our programming. Most of those with arts backgrounds who come in want to act rather do administrative or technical work, alas.

I wanted to post about this experience to recommend taking the opportunity to participate in mock interview sessions like this if you have the chance. It gets your face out in the community as a representative of your organization and can help hone your interviewing skills. All the pressure is really on the interviewees. Since you don’t have to evaluate if the person would work out well in your organization, you can relax and use the experience as an opportunity to shift your perspective about how you hire and run your business a little. You can also see, as I did, what excites people about the companies to which they have chosen to apply. There might be a way to bring that same element to your organization or emphasize it more to the general public as a way to attract employees and interns.

In my situation, I was also able to listen in on the interviewing techniques of people at adjacent tables. The guy behind me didn’t have a partner and had a style that would have intimidated me a little even today. I don’t know what I would have felt like when I was 15. I spoke to him afterward and discovered he does high level interviews and gets job candidates in his office after 5 other people have vetted them. What he looks for from an interview is very different than what a 15 year old might encounter in one of their first jobs. He wasn’t mean by any account, but he was thorough and at the end told each student what his impression was when they sat down versus how they changed that when they started speaking. He pointed out the value of each of the activities and experiences listed on their resumes, which tend to be sparse at this time in their lives, and how they could turn those things to their benefit in an interview. I think it was more information than some of the students expected to receive because a few looked a little stricken as they departed. I was a little awed by the quality of his technique and took some mental notes. If I had thought otherwise, he reminded me that it was important for the students that I be serious and treat them like adults during this process.

Certainly, you may not always have a group that had been as well prepared as I encountered. If we had more than just the one unprepared student, it might have been a dismal experience. Even in cases like that, while you are making suggestions for improvements, you can always advocate for the arts and suggest the students might get involved in some performance classes to raise their confidence level, poise and speaking skills. (I was happy to see two of our students were involved in the performance classes.)

The Importance of Asking Why

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Daniel Pink had a piece in The Telegraph last week discussing the importance of everyone in your organization being on the same page about why you are in business. He cites a study performed by a professor from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School where telemarketers were split into three groups, one that was given reading materials before making calls that discussed personal benefits to working as a telemarketer, another group read stories from those who have benefited from the funds raised by the telemarketing and the third group who were given no reading materials at all. After a month those who read the articles extolling the benefits to the telemarketer were no more productive in their fund raising than those who received no reading materials at all.

“People in the second group – who took a moment to consider the significance of their work and its effect on others’ lives – raised more than twice as much money, in twice as many pledges, as they had in previous weeks and significantly more than their counterparts in the other two groups…

Grant and some colleagues uncovered similar results in another call centre study. There, when employees spent just five minutes talking to the recipients of the funds they were raising, those employees spent twice as much time on the phone with prospective donors and raised nearly three times as much money as they had in the past. And Grant found the same phenomenon in a study of lifeguards at a community aquatics centre. A group of lifeguards read stories from previous lifeguards about rescuing swimmers. Then, a month later, those lifeguards worked more hours, and received higher ratings from their bosses, than a similar group that wasn’t reminded of its purpose. “

People in the arts tend to be so passionate about what they do, they probably don’t have as far to go as those in other industries when it comes to knowing why itis what they do. But is everyone in the company basically united behind the same purpose? We are often told that everyone in an organization should be able to recite the mission statement. But failing that, they should at least all be able to voice the same basic organizational purpose. There is a tendency to groan and perhaps roll ones eyes at the thought of being tested on the mission statement. In many cases, it can be indicative of a poorly written mission statement that it doesn’t roll easily off the tongue. Reading how effective people who are mindful of the organization’s purpose can be, spending a little more time committing the mission statement to memory doesn’t seem like such an onerous task.

Granted, it doesn’t have to be the mission statement that has to serve as the purpose. It could be something on a more granular level like the front of house staff and volunteers deciding that over the next year they are going to help reduce any intimidating elements in the attendance experience and get people excited about the shows.

As Pink’s article draws to the end, he offers an activity to put into practice. “Once a week, at that staff meeting, spend a few minutes revisiting the question. Talk about the purpose of the week’s activities. Discuss your efforts’ effect on other people’s lives. Remind each other why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place. “

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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