Leadership

Grouse: What You Do When Your Salary Is Too Meager To Afford It

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It looks like it was a weekend for griping about performing arts. Ken Davenport at Producer’s Perspective opened the floor on an atypical Saturday post asking people to share their gripes. He promised to make it a monthly ritual if he got more than 10 responses and he easily passed that mark. A summary of the comments in one sentence would be – “How can they charge such high prices for tickets, yet pay me so little if I can shoehorn my way into a position at all.” There are a few complaints about audiences thrown in for good measure. The general source of the comments seem to be people living in and around New York City with a few people coming form other places. The tenor of most of the comments will be familiar to you if you work in the arts at all and are familiar with the New York City scene. Those aspiring to careers are following the same path those before them followed. This includes tales of people both inside and outside the business wanting them to work for fun or for experience.

My initial thought was that Broadway won’t change because it doesn’t have to and that people need to look elsewhere for their experience. While a similar situation is just about as institutionalized outside of New York City, those organizations are at least marginally aware that they need to find a better way to run their business and interact with their employees.

Which brings us to the second post I came across. Barry Hessenius posted an entry on his blog noting that essentially every job description for an executive director and senior management of an arts organization seems to be taken from the same template without any effort to acknowledge the actual specific needs of their organization.

He provides a tongue in cheek translation of this:

“The successful candidate will be a strong leader with excellent management and interpersonal skills. S/he will have the proven ability to build productive relationships with a broad range of internal and external constituencies, and have the demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with the various segments of the community. S/he will be an experienced supervisor with the ability and willingness to mentor staff and encourage staff development. S/he will foster an atmosphere of teamwork and collaboration among staff and volunteers throughout the organization. S/he will have a strong working knowledge of programs, production, board relations and operations. S/he will have excellent financial management skills and a track record for achieving budget goals…”

Into this:

“We want someone smart enough to help us figure out a cool vision for our future (that one is stumping us); someone who will attract great talent to the staff (though we can’t pay the staff very much) and whom the staff (despite working conditions that are hardly ideal) will love and follow anyway (someone who will hopefully get them to perform above their potential, because actually we’re understaffed by all reasonable criteria). We want someone who can make various factions of the board (currently somewhat dysfunctional and at each other’s throats) work harmoniously together and take on an ever greater workload (or in the alternative someone who will assume the board’s workload for them because it’s highly unlikely they will do much more than they are doing right now – which isn’t that much). We try not to micromanage, but we still do. We’re looking for someone who can get the best out of us, but someone enough like us so we are comfortable with them; someone who will push themselves, but not necessarily push us too hard. Did we mention that we want someone who can raise a lot of money? “

I have only excerpted a small portion of his translation so you will want to visit the entry to read the whole thing. I have also excerpted a portion of his sample job description. Trust me when I say you don’t need to go to the entry to read that. You have seen it many times before. I did a verbatim Google search on a couple phrases from Barry’s sample and found a number of job listings using them. I understand a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but if you are looking for the same person as everyone else, most organizations are bound to be disappointed. There are only so many of those paradigms to go around. The truth is, most organizations are indeed looking for someone a little different from the rest.

New Year’s Not To Do List

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So I am back and raring to go. This is the first Christmas holiday season I have been away from my bed in about 10 years. I went back to visit places I used to work and gained some insights and ideas. I bookmarked things to write about when I returned, but it will take a little bit for me to sort and process some of these things in my brain. One bit of wisdom to start off the new year I came across was linked to by Daniel Pink. It was an entry on the Drucker Exchange, a blog maintained by the late management guru Peter Drucker’s Drucker Institute.

The entry titled, Your Not-To-Do-List, essentially advises organizations and individuals to examine themselves and decide what efforts they are no longer going to pursue. It sort of follows the idea that if you bring something new into your house, you get rid of something old. In this case, you are encouraged to get rid of something old to leave room for the arrival of future innovations. The Drucker Exchange cites a 2004 interview in Forbes where Drucker says:

“A critical question for leaders is, “When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?” The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.”

The only hitch I think arts organizations might have with this is that waning audiences can make many programs look like they should be put on the not-to-do-list when some just need the attention being spent elsewhere to succeed. I think it is telling that Drucker focuses on the almost successes and achieved goals for elimination rather than targeting poor performers. While the latter should certainly be examined for elimination, Drucker reminds us not to become too invested in the moderate successes just because they provide a degree of satisfaction.

I just read the article this morning and spent most of the day catching up with a backlog of emails so I haven’t really had time to ponder what I might want to eliminate both personally and organizationally. However, over the holidays I had been thinking of discussing with the staff a new approach to one of our events with an eye to more closely connect with the local arts community. The old approach to the event might be the perfect thing to put on the top of our not-to-do-list.

Innovation In Practice

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A colleague recommended a piece on innovation that appeared in the Fall issue of Grantmakers in the Arts by Richard Evans called, Entering upon Novelty. Evans starts by talking about how the current state of things is based on the expectations created by the Ford Foundation when it was the preeminent arts granter starting in the later 1950s. He quickly moves to his vision of an alternative approach that he feels is more appropriate to the new environment within which arts organizations must operate. He presents a chart comparing the two which I have recreated here- Old Structure on the Left,  Emerging Structure on the Right

His commentary on the chart had some resonance with me.

“The emerging features are clearly those of a very different kind of organization, built on different assumptions. For example, in the third comparison, there is an underlying shift in assumptions about the nature of the artistic experience. From ”The quality of the artistic experience we can offer is dependent upon high levels of technical execution that are otherwise rarely experienced” to “The quality of the artistic experience we can offer is dependent upon the connection we make between our own and our participants’ creative aspirations.”

And, in the last comparison, there is a shift in assumptions about financial management. From “Permanent capital funds and buildings will stabilize our organization and protect us from annual upsets” to “Liquidity and fungible assets will support our ability to adapt rapidly to meet new conditions.”

Evans goes on to talk about how the arts have hobbled themselves by not engaging in a “genuine integration of artists into our organizations — not to represent a programmatic perspective, but as full members of the team, divergent thinkers and creative strategists.” It occurred to me that this approach helped to institutionalize the idea that artists must focus on their Art and can’t be distracted with the picayune details of business. Now we are engaged in attempt to get artists to think about the practical details of their careers and perhaps it is time to examine if the businesses have the artist’s creativity to be nimble and innovative in their operations.

Evans discusses how changes might manifest and the need for business models to change–and foundations’ funding criteria to make a corresponding shift in acknowledgment. What really interested me was his assertion that innovation could be institutionalized. He mentions a year long process that EmcArts, of which he is president, conducts to facilitate the move toward an institutional practice of innovation.

“The work is structured in three facilitated phases. The first phase concentrates on building an innovation team (not from the usual suspects!), researching possible new strategies, and focusing the team’s efforts on its most promising discoveries. The second phase is a midproject intensive retreat — five solid days locked away in the woods that telescope months of meetings and increase project momentum — serving as an Innovation Accelerator as decisions begin to be made. The third phase focuses on trying out the innovation through repeated prototyping and evaluation, in relatively low-stakes environments, as each organization decides whether, and how, to move forward with fuller implementation.”

It is the last stage that interested me most because as Evans says, arts organizations don’t have the resources in time/money/personnel, etc to test out new things. According to Evans, those who have participated in learning the process find that failure of an implemented plan has been productive for them and they are eager to try again.

As you know, we here at Butts in the Seats are interested in practical solutions.The desire to try again was the part that convinced me this approach might be worth serious consideration. There are a plethora of management and leadership techniques and theories that emerge all the time, many of which get discarded after a short time or when the next fad emerges. Just as when a business is recommended by a friend who says they will patronize it again, the fact someone is eager to employ an approach again says a lot for it.

Consortium Merger Update

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This week the state booking consortium of which I am a member met to start planning our upcoming seasons and also move forward toward our plan to merge with our sister organization. The governance committee upon which I sit had met about three weeks ago to discuss the steps we would have to take to accomplish the merger and work on rewriting our bylaws to come into compliance with practice. The committee spent about an hour discussing the relevant rules and laws the state attorney general’s office has for dissolutions and asset transfers of non-profit organizations and physically rewriting the bylaws.

Another three hours were devoted to discussing the implications of the changes we were proposing. Our consortium had already agreed we should shift from a membership to a board organization. What we ended up proposing this week was to shift from having organizations as board members to having individuals as board members. This was a rather significant move so discussing how it might manifest and what the impacts might be required some serious conversation. We felt this would provide much more flexibility and open up possibilities. For example, instead of focusing on writing grants to support the tours member organizations had arranged, the consortium would seek funding for touring or educational outreach and then decide how to apply it. The difference may be hard to discern, but it is possibly a significant change in the way the consortium operates and has the potential to position us as a partner to some granting organizations and foundations.

The biggest advantage is that the board would be free to choose its members rather than depend on specific organizations to send a representative. This would provide opportunities to bring people on based on their knowledge rather than affiliation. It could also allow the consortium to decide as an entity that it wanted to initiate a statewide arts in healthcare program where artists could barter their services working with hospitals, hospices, retirement homes, etc in return for low to no cost health coverage. The consortium’s direct involvement might be arranging outreach activities to these institutions by touring artists, but the benefit would be to all artists across the state, some of which may not be members of the consortium. Yet some of the board members may represent arts organizations that frequently employ these artists and find it in their best interest that the artists not have to worry about health care as they practice their craft. In this case, the board might seek to add a member from the healthcare field to advise and perhaps rally industry support for grants.

As the governance committee meeting was drawing to a close a few weeks ago, I mentioned that what we were proposing might cause a lot of debate at the full meeting because it was such a departure from the way business had been conducted. I noted that a shift in thinking away from the way we currently did business would be required. In fact, there was a lot of discussion about the proposal. There were a lot of “what ifs” asked based on the way we engaged in our activities. Some of the questions we had already considered and had responses to, but others illuminated the need for the creation of policy and procedures. Ultimately, I was happy to hear a board member who had not been part of the governance committee pointed out that we couldn’t think about the changes in bylaws completely in the context of how we currently operated and that it would require shifting our thinking.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the bylaws and one of the members of my committee uncovered more regulations governing dissolution and mergers with which we need to comply. I feel very optimistic about the work being done and the potential of the reorganization. Of course, it helps that the local community foundation received a large amount of money from the founder of eBay and they are directing some of it toward encouraging innovation in non-profits. It makes what we are doing seem relevant and timely.