Management Philosophy

The most attention demanding thing on my desk these days is a College Strategic Plan form I have to fill out. Essentially what it means is that I have to figure out how what the theatre is doing and what it wants to do fits in with the goals and objectives of the college as a whole.

As reluctant as I am to admit it, this is a good thing. The common wisdom is that most arts organizations write up their mission statement and then put it away in a closet only bringing it out to copy it down for grant proposals. This whole project forces me to look at the mission statement and think about how it can manifest itself in the context of the college mission.

This is not to say I want to do it. I pretty much spent 3 hours today skirting around the edges of it, allowing myself to be distracted from it to deal with other concerns.

Eventually I got down to business and to my surprise, found that I actually had a lot of ambitions that fit into the goals and objectives.

Now my problem is writing justifications for what I want to do. The vogue these days is student learning outcomes and since I am a non-instructional unit falling under a non-credit division. One of the unrealized goals of the last strategic plan was to upgrade the position of the theatre clerk to a classification that reflected the job she actually does.

This time around however, I have to fill in a box that describes how student learning will benefit. I just don’t think it would be wise to note that paying for the job she is actually doing will prevent her from venting her frustrations with a shotgun thereby securing the safety of the students.

Speaking of unrealized goals, looking over the old strategic plan and discussing it with the clerk and my predecessor, I came to realize there were a lot of goals in there that other divisions are probably only vaguely aware they were supposed to be accomplishing in conjunction with us.

My predecessor decided to respond to the politics of the college by finding every opportunity she could think of to propose programs and projects, many of which included other divisions and departments. Her strategy was to get the theatre mentioned in as many places a possible so that the 99.5% of the faculty, staff and administration that never attended performances would at least gain the impression that a lot was moving and shaking over there.

So I am reading over the old document and am getting really impressed by the ambitious plans people had. I am on my way out the door to talk to our once and future partners about revisiting these goals for the future when the office manager stops me and sort of sheepishly informs me that she and the old theatre made the goal up with minimal consultation with these other people.

Now I am sitting here thinking what a good idea some of these things are (which is probably why they were among those that made the cut to be included in the last plan) and wondering if I will have the staffing to pull it off and should I maybe go and consult with these other folks in earnest.

Andrew Taylor touched on a topic today that was close to my mind. He discusses a new trend in search processes that is more akin to roleplay than interviewing.

The topic of interviewing processes has been in my mind recently because it appears I might finally have an assistant. (Joining in time for the last two performances now that I have finally gotten half the hecticness under control!)

However, despite my happiness at having found an assistant, I have begun to question the search process. To begin with, despite all the paperwork that had to be filled out, the question of whether she was allowed to work in the US was never asked until after the offer had been tendered. Now I am in the process of filling out visa paperwork because she was still a fairly strong candidate. Whether we can get it approved and in time remains to be seen.

There were also a couple other little things that have happened that have been nagging in the back of my mind about the process that has had me wondering if other elements should be altered. Nothing major, just a few little tweaks that we might be able to effect to provide us as interviewers with a clearer picture of the abilities of the person before us beyond how adept they might be at interviewing.

The way the director of human resources told us to frame our interview questions was as “what if” situations where we could assess the answers rather than as yes/no questions like–“Do you enjoy doing X” The answer may be no, but the person may be very good at doing it. They just truthfully don’t enjoy it. Ask a parent if they like changing diapers–then witness the love with which they do it.

What Andrew Taylor points out extends that a bit further–make them perform in the “What if” situation. The only weakness of this approach is that you can only use it in person. If you don’t have a lot of travel funds available for recruitment, it may be difficult to give all promising applicants an opportunity to strut their stuff.

A short entry today since a new nephew joined the family a few hours ago.

It occurred to me today that while there are articles, classes or at least textbook chapters on pretty much every aspect of arts management from company to fiscial management, I have never really read any good information on donor relations, specifically wooing them. I was having lunch today for the first time with one of the bigger donors to my theatre. It was essentially just an opportunity for him to meet me as the new theatre manager, etc.

I was taking a fairly low key approach, letting him talk about his trips to Southeast Asia, etc and his 18 years of experience as the grandfather in a production of Nutcracker. The development person who was with us apparently thought the conversation was moving too slow and about 5 minutes into the meal says “So, Joe, tell us about your plans for the theatre.” and later “So X, what do you think the theatre should be doing?” And when he got up to go to the salad bar, she started to tell me what to ask him when he returned. (Which I didn’t)

I actually had to keep from laughing because it really felt to me like a sitcom where people are on a blind double date with friends and the friend that did the setting up tries to find common ground by commenting on the interests of those who were set up.

Some friends of his told me he was of the mind that he would give when he wanted to give so I didn’t feel pressured to really sell him, especially at our first meeting.

Despite the fact that I thought the development person was a little more pushy than was warranted, I was sitting there weighing all my options. Was I being too quiet by letting him talk about himself? Since he has been associated with the theatre longer than I have, I am really in a place to tell him about the theatre and not come off as condescending by telling him things that are patently obvious to him? Should I be talking more about my vision, or now that I have sketched a basic outline of my goals, just allow him to ask if he wants additional information?

In some regard, it is actually easier to be in a situation where you want to make donation request. In such a case, you know the goal of the meeting and you know what the successful outcome will look like. I have been on those meetings and meetings that were precursors to them.

What happened today was more like a meet and greet reception or a party where you mingle and make contacts. Only in this case, you don’t have the option of moving on to speak with another person when the conversation lulls. Yet with a development person sitting there, the situation isn’t entirely casual either. His/her presence introduces an element of expectation into the mix.

I don’t know if there are any correct set of guidelines for meeting with potential and existing donors like “If the goal of the meeting isn’t to make an ask of money or aid in recruitment of other donors, then you should be this aggressive, if it is, then do this.” I am sure it has as much to do with the local culture and the person as anything else. Some people don’t appreciate a run around and appreciate directness, others want to have a relationship developed with them as a person.

If I do find a good bit of text on donor relations, I will let you folks know! (Likewise, let me know if you already found one!)

So I didn’t post often last week because I was engaged in a time consuming, sensitive decision making process–Christmas shopping!

However, today I met with my compatriots in the Performing Arts Presenters of Hawaii to continue our block booking process. When last we left our heroes, we choose a slate of performers we felt we wanted to present. At the time, we had sketchy information about how much the artist fees might be and how many people we might end up transporting to the islands. Since we more or less knew who we wanted to present, different members went off to gather more information which bring us to today…

Today we met to discuss our selected slate and try to fit them in to a rough schedule. Some highly desired artists could only come at certain times, others had more open schedules or were not as desired. There was a lot wrangling of schedules to find a series of dates to proposed to each performance group.

Among some of the impediments were the fact that three of us were college presenters with student productions of our own to work around. Some of the other presenters had already contracted other performers that they knew would not be appealing to the whole group and set dates with them. There were also considerations of Hawaiian holidays or community events that entire islands geared up for during which times the public wouldn’t be interested in attending shows.

Also, since snowbirds (people who lived in Hawaii during cold winter months on the mainland) comprised larger audiences on some islands than others, it was tough to schedule some performers in the early fall when there would be a smaller potential audience base.

And of course, we worked against ourselves thinking we had found the perfect date only to have someone pipe up, but that is the weekend we already agreed to host Group X.

In the end though, we hammered out what will translate into 80% of my season. There were still some performers that members had to talk to either by phone or at the annual APAP convention next month (which was also one of those scheduling impediments for 05-06 seasons) and more perfomers may be added for future consideration. However, I can now look at perhaps putting a slate of people with smaller financial requirements together myself to flesh out my schedule too.

A couple interesting observations I made:

1) The person I was asked to research came in with a higher rate than other members expected, even with a reduction for block booking and one person had wanted to defer them in for 06-07 any way.

2) On the whole, the slate of acts we were putting together this year had much smaller fees than the current year which is somewhat reflective of the fact that we aren’t getting the size audiences we want despite the good economic climate on the islands.

3) With all the research and discussion we have done about some of the acts, there was a little bit of competition amongst people on the same island to be the one to present some of the perfomers. However, when I showed the list of those we would probably be presenting next year to the office staff, they were underwhelmed. It just goes to show the job I must do to communicate what is exciting about some of these performers to my audience.

When I mention the idea of “what is exciting” I don’t mean in some esoteric sense like the work communicates the mythical archetypes common to all cultures through music. (Which, as a fan of Joseph Campbell could be interesting to me). Some of these groups are not my cup o’ tea at all, but by doing research on them, I found I would be interested to see more of what it was all about.

Now considering most audience members don’t engage in the depth of research I did, how to communicate all of this in a radio or newspaper ad is another thing altogether.