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Bad Habits of Bad Managers

November 6, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

There is a column on the Fast Company website, Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers that makes for an interesting read.

Some of the habits author Margaret Heffernan mentions are pretty common sense- afraid to make a mistake, keeping too many problems secret from employees, afraid confronting a problem will hurt people’s feelings, focus on picayune details to hide general incompetence, heavy use of consultants and problem with deadlines.

There was one habit that never occurred to me and another that I wasn’t sure could be true for the arts. The habit that never entered my mind was Inability to Hire Former Employees. “Every good manager has alumni, eager to join the team again; if they don’t, smell a rat.” Heffernan believes if a person has spent a long time in the industry but hasn’t mentored people who are interested in working for them when they move on, it might be time to be concerned.

There are some areas of the arts where following someone isn’t practical, of course. But this criteria can provide a metric for some positions.

The bad habit I am not sure could be applied to the arts is Long hours. Says Heffernan-

“In my experience, bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else.”

Managers in the arts work long hours because the hours are often long and there is a lot of work to be done and few people to do it. I will concede, however, that a lot of arts people see working long hours as heroic. I have conflicting thoughts about this. Since I have engaged in long hours in the name of art, I acknowledge that putting in the hours is a necessary part of the job.

I also feel that those who work long hours over an extended period of time, perhaps secretly thriving on their martyrdom, they are masking serious deficiencies in an organization. If it is not clear that the work load is beyond the organizational capacity, changes to procedures can not be effected, staffing needs aren’t addressed and additional programs are created in the belief there is a little wiggle room. It isn’t until people leave or collapse in exhaustion that the extent of the problem is realized.

Management Philosophy

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Creative Arts Solve Problems

November 5, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend we had some pretty heavy rains which revealed leaks in places we didn’t know we had them. And I am not using literary license when I say that. Two years ago we had 6 weeks of rain and there weren’t leaks anywhere near where it was cascading down the walls yesterday.

As a result, I spent the day repositioning fans to blow the carpet dry. However, before I left this evening I had to unplug many of them and return them backstage because they were being used for our production of the Odyssey opening this weekend. Not a few people remarked how fortuitous it was that the production design required us to buy fans to replicate the winds in the story.

One of the things I like about working in a creative setting is that one has requisite tools for said creation at one’s disposal for other purposes. You are able to respond better to problems when they tend to crop up. For example, we don’t need to put in work orders to replace light bulbs because we have ladders and genie lifts. We can rewire broken lighting fixtures, solder wires back together and test for circuit continuity. We can tighten what is loose and patch what is leaking.

Well, up to a point anyway. This weekend, all my staff could do was mop up what was leaking. Our theory is that a cast iron drain pipe has cracked in a place we can’t get to.

Of course, some times self sufficiency can be a curse as well. Since our facilities are used after normal work hours, we have the janitorial department provide us with extra stock for the restrooms in case we run out in the middle of a performance. Since the cast and crew often use the building directly behind us, we often end up restocking the restrooms there as well. Heck, about 8-10 years ago, I learned how to stop a urinals and toilets from constantly flushing and return them to service. I have been fixing the problem ever since saving lots of water. Some member of the custodial staff is getting off easy during our show runs!

Given that I have had to master a wide variety of financial, desktop publishing, database, image manipulation and word processing software in the course of my job, I figure I have picked up a goodly amount of skills in my life.

Last week I suggested that being in the arts hadn’t really helped out my math scores as much as the arts education advocacy ads suggest. I can’t deny that being involved with the arts has provided me with self confidence, self-reliance and the ability manipulate the world and address the challenges I encounter both physically and virtually.

Has participation in the creative arts prepared me for life in ways that other academic subjects, television, movies and video games never can?

You betcha.

Will it do the same for your kids? Like everything else, it depends on how long they are involved and how thoroughly they embrace it. The current stage craft class at my theatre has involved themselves with a gusto and in numbers I have never seen and the professor has rarely seen. If I knew what it was that was motivating this group, I would bottle it.

I know they are growing in knowledge and skill from the experience because they are coming in when there is no class and using what they have learned to create projects for other class—far in advance of deadlines! (Honestly, I think they are pod people or something, they are so atypical of the usual students in this class.)

So yes, working in the arts might be a thankless job with long hours, little pay and low prestige. It may not make the most convincing ad copy for the arts in education people, but I have always prized my experience in the arts for the self-reliance having such a wide variety of tools at ones disposal affords you.

General Musings

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I Know What You Said Last Summer!

October 31, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

There are those who feel Google has the potential of becoming Big Brother for all the information it collects and stores. However, Google will deliver some of its information horde to you without requiring you to create an account.

One of these services is Google Alerts. If you have any interest at all in what is being said about you or your organization on the Internet, this is the service to have. Every time one of their little indexing bots comes across a mention of the terms you specify, you receive an email with a link to that instance.

I do suggest encapsulating your search terms in quotes to keep your results as specific to your organization as possible. You can enter a number of different term groupings at once. For example, I have seen my blog referred to as Butts In Seats so I have specified those words along with Butts in the Seats for my search.

As an experiment, back in August I entered a request for alerts on search terms for my theatre. Some of the initial results that came back were for our webpages and old newspaper articles on past shows. In recent weeks I have been beginning to get links for newspaper stories on our current season.

The interesting thing I have learned is that the major newspapers have been printing up stories about my events in the neighborhood specific inserts that come out about 10 days before the performances. The listings are only appearing in the inserts specific to the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of my building so I don’t actually see the listings in the paper I get at home.

I had an inkling that this had been happening because we occasionally get calls from people who say they have seen something in the newspaper a week before our ads or the feature stories appear. There have been times we have chalked it up to people saving the Fall/Spring Arts pull outs, but now we know that could be an erroneous assumption.

This knowledge does help me make decisions about the timing of my ad placement and underscores the need to get good pictures out early. It has also shown me the value of learning to write well since my press release appeared verbatim in the neighborhood editions this week. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me so I have become a big believer in making it easy for the papers to cover your event by providing an interesting release ready to be dropped in.

Possibly the greater value of Google Alerts is that they trawl through blog entries as well. If a newspaper doesn’t like your work, their bad review will by and large be civil. Not so with blogs. The alerts help you keep an eye on conversations occurring away from the mainstream media.

If someone is saying nice stuff about you, you may decide to cultivate them and link to their work to show you are friendly with bloggers. If people are complaining about their experience, you can look into addressing the problem. If they are eviscerating you out of pure malice, you can at least monitor what is being said. (Unless you can figure out how to address the situation without exacerbating it.)

“People Gonna Talk” as the song says. You might as well know what they are saying.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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So Would I Be Buttsintheseats.ArenaStage.org?

October 30, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

Chad Baumann, new Director of Marketing and Communications at Arena Stage has an interesting situation. In his blog, he notes that the Arena Stage will be closing down for the next two and a half years to construct a new $125 million theatre complex.

During that time, the organization will perform at two separate spaces in Virgina! Chad’s problem is that for the last 50 years, people have been attending performances in Washington, DC and are now faced with crossing the Potomac, a much bigger psychic obstacle than physical one.

Chad understands that if he doesn’t make the river crossing as painless as possible for the quarter million people who attend every year, he may lose a significant portion of them. He is working on getting signs erected along the route but is also creating personalized webpages for all subscribers and ticket buyers. Chad describes them as an electronic direct mail piece and says the ones they will create will contain “step by step directions from their house to the new theatre, a seating diagram showing them the location of their new seats, promotional offers from local restaurants, and an opportunity to sign up for our e-newsletter.”

Reading about Personalized URLs, it doesn’t seem to be as difficult to pull off as it first sounds. It does involve an investment of money and staff time, as one might imagine.

It will be interesting to see how successful the campaign is. I am reminded of the Museum of Modern Art’s move to Queens when they renovating and how important public relations and image were to that transition.

I would also be interested to see if Arena Stage picks up more people than they lose from Virginians who didn’t attend because they didn’t want to cross the Potomac.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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