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The Few Times The Audience Is Too Demonstrative

May 10, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Around 9 years ago I wrote about a response someone had gotten from the head of a dance program while trying to revive an annual dance festival.

The head of the program said he didn’t want to expose his students to our audience whom he compared to the crowd at a football game. I had followed up to see if there had been miscommunication or misunderstanding. As I wrote at the time:

He felt the audience, which is generally comprised of family and friends of the dancers, needed to be educated about how to behave. He admitted he didn’t know how that might be accomplished as lecturing folks before a performance on decorum would probably make people resentful.

Reading that, I got to wondering if that type of attitude might have changed in the nearly decade since. Given all the conversations about changing the general environment in performance halls to allow audiences to feel more actively involved and less passive, has anything changed?

This is one of those rare occasions when new audiences aren’t intimidated by the thought of disapproving looks from those more experienced and knowledgeable than themselves.

Since I am not longer working at an arts organization with a dance program or a reputation for presenting dance, I need to throw this question out to the readership. Have there been any changes?

In the situation 9 years ago, the person objecting lead a university based training program conferring graduate and undergraduate degrees. The approach such a program might take to dance is likely to be different from that of a dance company that was started by someone who received their training at Urban Dance Camp.

If you want to respond to this, give us a little context about your practice or the expectations you recently experienced.

There is also the issue that an overly boisterous environment can create an unnerving experience for people who are participating in their first public performance after having just started learning dance. Often the cheering is a much about the audience member calling attention to themselves and their connection to the performer as it is about supporting the performer.

The other question is, how do you communicate the need to keep it dialed back without offending people who are making a rare visit to a performing arts venue whom you want to see more frequently?

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Creativity Shouldn’t Be Euphemism For Doing More With Less

May 9, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Continuing on the theme of employee turnover that I wrote about last week, I wanted to harken back again to an early post I made about Johns Hopkins study saying that the non-profit sector wasn’t having as big an issue with turnover and recruitment as had been widely reported.

I checked and they haven’t seem to have done a follow up report specifically on this issue since then.

At the time I took a pretty skeptical view of some of the responses collected. I don’t doubt that those were the responses, they received, it was just that the responses themselves seemed a little dishonest.

In particular, I questioned the responses reported in figure 6 on page 5 where those surveyed claimed the largest benefits to employee turn over were to the budget and creativity.

In my post I wrote,

The positives about the budget are obvious. Not having to pay someone helps save money. I am uneasy about the staff creativity result because I think the go to position for so many non-profits when they face staff shortages of any sort is to smile and determine to work harder and smarter.

I suspect creativity claim is actually a ploy to cope with the increased workload and is a facade for the damage to morale and feeling of burnout. Having been in similar situations, I imagine that the creativity manifests itself in penny pinching steps akin to my grandmother washing aluminum foil and hanging it on the line to dry so it can be reused.

Everyone stands around and congratulates each other on how clever they are to be so thrifty. Then go back to their offices and skip lunch so they can get all their work done, their hunger pangs temporary dulled by the recently shared optimism over how creative the staff has become.

Cynical as you may think this is, the same chart seems to provide some support to this idea given the largest negative impacts are to staff productivity, burnout and morale, in that order.

State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Why People Leave Jobs, It Isn’t What You May Think

May 4, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

I am going to be on vacation for the next couple weeks. As is my practice, I will be featuring some of the more interesting/thought providing posts from my archives while I am away.

At the risk of making my employer worry that I am not coming back, I wanted to draw attention to an entry I wrote nearly a decade ago about why people leave their jobs.

In that entry I quoted an article by Matthew Kelly where he noted,

“The #1 reason people leave a job is not because they have a dysfunctional relationship with their manager or because they don’t feel appreciated. They leave because they cannot see the connection between the work they are doing today and the future they imagine for themselves.

When employees believe that what they are doing is helping them to accomplish their personal dreams they can tolerate quite a bit. I am not saying that they should, but they can. Without some understanding of the connection between their daily work and their future, employees will leave for the most trivial reasons”

This sentiment is more commonly acknowledged as motivator now than it was back then. In addition to talking about what motivates people to stay or leave, Kelly also lists the costs of employee turnover which include recruitment, training, lost business and productivity.

Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Values Don’t Come Cheap

May 3, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Creativity Post had a good piece last week about simple business rules that complements Vu Le’s recent Nonprofit With Balls post on developing organizational values. Both pieces caution against making facile declarations and assumptions about how you will operate.

For example, Vu relates how he and his staff took months

“…developing a list of five core values and the team agreements associated with each one. Many of these behaviors came at great costs to the organizations, results of lessons learned from terrible experiences, some of which were due to my own leadership failures for not institutionalizing our values.”

He goes on to relate the deliberate process they used to create these values, encouraging others to use it as a model.

On Creativity Post, Greg Satell, address how meaningless it is to declare you are making an effort to “win the war for talent,” “focus on your core competencies” and “enhance shareholder value.”

But by relying on those simple rules and slogans, we often fail to think things through. If we merely say, “we have to win the war for talent,” we are less likely to think about what kind of talent we want to develop. Reducing decisions to “focusing on the core” negates serious analysis of threats and opportunities. Shareholder value is basically a license to do anything.

The truth is that the real world is a confusing place. We have little choice but to walk the earth, pick things up along the way and make the best judgments we can. The decisions we make are highly situational and defy hard and fast rules. There is no algorithm for life. You actually have to live it, see what happens and learn from your mistakes.

Given that last line, it may not be a great coincidence that the “operating rules” that Vu Le and his team created were born of lessons learned from mistakes and mistypes.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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