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So You Think You Are An Emerging Leader…

September 17, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

…or maybe there is someone you think is.

Arts Presenters is soliciting applications for participants at the next Emerging Leader Institute being held at conference January 2008.

Deadline is next Monday though. I am sorry I didn’t see the announcement on the website sooner. The application may be found here and the guidelines here. There are some nice benefits like free APAP membership for a year and free conference admission if you are a first time attendee. You do have to be affiliated with a member entity- presenter, artist, agency, etc.

I attended last year (which you can read about here and here), and found the experience enjoyable and valuable.

In fact, I had a conference call today with some other alumni of the program to discuss steps we would like to take to improve the experience for both new attendees and alumni both at the conference and after they return home. This is an effort that had its impetus with the alumni of the program who wish to have the emerging issues facing arts leaders addressed and planned for. And to develop a network of support.

Frankly, if I have my druthers, I’d want whatever network of support is developed opened to all arts people be they members of the organization or not.

But that could be many years down the road. In the meantime, if you are interested in the program, apply!

Management Philosophy

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Creativity A Euphemism for Extreme Thrift?

September 12, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

Apologies to regular readers of the blog. I started using a new ticketing system and started training a new staff person in the same week which has not be conducive to blog entries. But things have evened out a bit and here I am.

I read a report over the weekend on the perceived lack of qualified workers in non-profit settings. A study done by people at Johns Hopkins of all non-profit sectors, including performing arts, found that, in general, it wasn’t as difficult to find qualified people to fill positions as some recent newspaper articles have made it out to be. Most organizations were also mostly pleased by the quality of the people they did hire.

There were some areas that were harder to recruit for than others. Organizations that served the elderly had a slightly harder time than most finding people. Fundraisers and information technology staff were among the toughest positions to fill. Trying to achieve greater minority representation was also quite difficult. The report did note that few organizations made special efforts to attract minorities, though.

For the arts in particular, there were some details that boded well and others not so well. On the positive side, “…turnover and hiring activity was somewhat lower…among theaters. On the negative side, both theatres and museums were the group most dissatisfied with the diversity of their applicants and with their ability to meet the salary requirements of their applicants.

I had mixed feelings about the results the survey found regarding staff turnover. Eighty percent of those surveyed had turn over in the year prior.

“Surprisingly, however, the proportions claiming negative effects from this turnover were less pronounced than might have been expected, and were often offset by roughly similar proportions claiming positive effects.”

In the accompanying chart on page 5, the only categories in which the positive responses outstrip the negative are in organizational budget and staff creativity. The negatives were much higher than the positives in productivity, morale and burnout.

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.

The areas where the negatives and positives were close were ability to fulfill mission, quality of programming and quantity of programming. I would be interested to know if there was a correlation between those who felt the staff became more creative and those who cut programming and reported the quality of the programming increased. I know I sound cynical, but again I suspect that people soothed their concerns about cutting back on programming by convincing themselves that they had succeeded in providing higher quality with fewer resources.

I have had the same conversation internally and among staff at a number of places. So yes, you can accuse me of projecting my biases, but I can’t imagine those dialogs are anywhere near atypical.

When I read in the report about how resilient these nonprofits are, I think about the fact that it is actually individual people who provide the resiliency by redoubling their efforts out of dedication to a cause. I am pleased that many organizations are able to satisfy their personnel needs. But the situation still bears watching because the individual’s determination to soldier on may be masking a problem that will suddenly emerge with mass burnout or retirements.

State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Ushering — Destroyer of Souls!

September 5, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

I was listening to the latest entry from the Cool As Hell Theatre podcast while reviewing the financials from last month when both the host and the interviewee began talking about how ushering in return for admission was demeaning and soul killing (around 13:00). I actually backed the audio up and listened and then did so again when I got home.

I am not quite sure what Nick Olivero objection to the practice is, especially since the show his company is producing apparently is all about the whole labor for money for goods exchange.

Of course, this is the show the company is doing free of charge so their whole point about the labor-cash exchange might go in a different direction. However, since they praise Starbucks for giving everyone benefits and talk about how their company is paying performers more and more each year, I can’t think that they damn the process too much.

The lead in to the criticism of ushering is that Nick, being dirt poor, feels it is important to offer performances for free because the only way he has been able to see shows otherwise has been to usher. Then he and host, Michael Rice, start talking about how demeaning and soul killing it is.

I acknowledge that the situation of being so poor that you can’t afford a ticket to a show can be demeaning. So the fact that you have to split your attention between the show and seating patron, scowling at cell phone users and tracking down video tapers when you could be focusing entirely on the performance can be depressing. But the forces which shape this reality are external to the theatre’s see the show for free policy.

The alternatives are to ask people to usher and not see the show or pay people to usher in which case the management may have greater expectations of the ushers which would preclude the opportunity to see the show. One of my paid staff or I watch the lobby so our volunteer ushers can see the show. If I were paying them, I would expect them to be in the lobby far longer in order to serve late comers.

But in the interests of understanding this point of view, if anyone can offer some insight into where they are coming from, I would appreciate knowing.

Thinking about this issue got me reminiscing about a time early in my career when I learned that some of our core volunteers were actually working the arts organization circuit. I was crushed since we obviously offered a superior artistic product to the other guys and went to a lot of effort to treat our volunteers well. I felt the cuckold.

This was back in the days when I believed that all one had to do was produce good work and the public, as enthusiastic about the arts as I was, would flock to the door. Frankly, I think there may have been more truth to that sentiment then than now.

But those volunteers were having a wonderful time in their retirement being involved with a number of arts organizations and seeing lots of good stuff. I have a good group of those type of people volunteering for me right now as well as those who want to do the least they can for the greatest opportunity to see a show.

Except for a couple high school students, I don’t really have any passionate young artistic types who can’t afford to buy tickets to the performances. Perhaps I am still possessed of naivety, but sincerity counts a lot for me. In many respects, I would rather have an entranced student letting things fall through the cracks as the weakest member of the volunteer team than a person completing tasks with the least effort required to gain admittance.

Management Philosophy

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Arts, More Than Just Test Scores

September 4, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

By way of Arts and Letters Daily, The Boston Globe has a column by Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland that addresses the apparent misapprehension that arts classes improve test scores for students. Their research found the absence of a causal relationship between arts classes and a rise in test scores.

They did, however, find “that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.” They feel arts advocates do their cause an injustice by focusing on the weak relationship with improved test scores.

Where the other classes emphasize and reward memorization and recall of facts, their year long study showed that arts classes cultivated “visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes.” The authors note that these skills, along with thinking processes like “observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation,” are valuable life long and among those needed for careers. The authors expand upon the value of each though process in the article.

One of the statements that struck me was “many people don’t think of art class as a place where reflection is central, but instead as a place where students take a break from thinking.” That was certainly my perception when I was in school. In fact, I eschewed visual art classes when I was in high school in favor of more serious subjects. (Though I was a member of the after school drama club.) Reading the study observations I realize I was learning more than I thought when I was younger.

The authors note that there are many possibilities for running classes in other subjects so that they cultivate the same thinking processes–and that many teachers already do so.

The big caveat I have for the article is essentially the one common to the entire education system these days. The schools which they studied to show how well the approach works are the type of schools where parents, students, teachers and administrators all contribute to a learning environment where the complex interactions necessary to implement this sort of curriculum can occur.

In a situation where there are antagonistic teacher-student and student-student relationships, great need for remediation and a host of negative external influences, it can be easier to look to standardized test scores as a of measure success.

Most likely the only way to prove that this view of arts education can be valid across the board is to sustain its presence right from the first grade when the fundamental relationships and expectations about what the educational process entails can be established with the students.

Easy to say and easy to start since all kids are pretty much sweeties in first grade. Much tougher to maintain 5th/6th grade onward when new realizations about Venus de Milo and Michaelangelo’s David and life in general begin to develop.

Terms and Ideas

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