Management Students Got Skills. You Better Recognize That Fact

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One of the things I hate most about attending conferences is that the sessions I want to see most seem to always be scheduled at the same time. One of the tough choices I made was between a session on Emerging Leaders and one on the career opportunities for Arts Management program graduates. I attended the latter hoping to purchase the audio of the other session only to discover it wasn’t recorded due to a mix up about what hotel it was occurring at.

The session on career opportunities for arts managers was lead by Andrew Taylor of the Bolz School, Irene Conley, Chair of Performing Arts Management at the Hartt School and a gentleman whose name I neglected to note.

The discussion wasn’t so much about the job market that will greet arts managers as it was about the skillsets arts managers will need to possess.

Conley mentioned the importance of problem solving, resourcefulness, critical thinking skills and good communication skills. One of the things she requires her students to do is make four new contacts each week as a networking exercise forcing them to do enough background research on people that they can answer questions about each person.

As part of the classroom experience, she emphasizes the process of group work as well as the end product. She has the students evaluate what they did as a member of the team since that is the dynamic they need to operate within in a job environment.

She works to make sure the internship opportunities her students avail themselves of are meaningful and not just providing advanced knowledge in copier machines.

Andrew Taylor took a slightly different approach in talking about what skills managers should have. His contention is that arts organizations look for a one to one correlation between a job description and the skillset a person has. He noted that corporate recruiters know what type of person they are looking for, the skills that will translate to their industry and assume the person can acquire the specific knowledge they need on the job.

Arts organizations don’t know what they want, write up an extensive wish list and then try to find someone who has those exact skills. If I understood Taylor’s explanation correctly, finding an exact fit is not only difficult, it also contributes to a view of the organization that is limiting. The idea that the activities of development are exclusive of marketing which are exclusive of sales is the type of thinking that stunts progress. A person needs skills and understanding that encompass all these areas regardless of which one they are being hired for.

As an illustration, Taylor mentions that an associate was looking for someone to run the box office of a large performing arts center. After some dissatisfaction with candidates from the arts field, he ended up hiring a person who had run a Sears phone order center because they had a better sense of how to manage offering service on that scale.

Taylor says he trains his students to essentially take control of interviews and use answers that create a bridge between what the organization is looking for and the skills the student possess to show how their experience translates.

I made the comment that I thought another skill set people needed was the ability to talk about and advocate for the arts. I mentioned the need to communicate the value of the arts at all ends of the spectrum– advocating to governments and grant makers, (noting that recent research shows that the arts may not be best served by citing economic value of the arts), all the way down to press releases and speaking to individuals.

The part of the session that got me thinking the most though was the idea that arts organizations don’t know what they are looking for when they hire. I currently have my hands tied in that regard since I work for a state institution that pretty much codifies how good a candidate for a position is based on number of years experience and education. I have clearly seen more effective people paid less because their experience and education were less than others.

I imagine there will come a day when I can’t hide behind the strictures of a bureaucracy when it comes to determining who is best suited for a job so I have already started pondering what the skills are that candidates for arts jobs should possess. How should a job description be written to attract people with these skills and knowledge? What appears in the descriptions today that don’t reflect what we really need/should be seeking?

What I think I need to do is ask Andrew Taylor if he has come across a situation where the description, interview and actual position all correspond appropriately. I fear his answer will be that such a situation doesn’t exist within the arts world.

Preserving The Moldy Old Arts

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There is an article on the National Endowment of the Arts in Commentary this month (via Arts and Letters Daily) with a suggestion about the role the organization should play that may not please everyone.

The author, Michael J. Lewis, an Art and Architecture professor at Williams College recounts the history of the organization from President Johnson’s declaration at the NEA’s founding that “There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. . . . The stakes may well be the survival of civilization” to the obscenity accusations of the 80s and the caution exhibited in the years that followed.

Lewis argues that NEA funding practices, rather than freeing artists to experiment actually promote mediocrity by funding the under served instead of quality artists and succumbing to political pressure from elected officials. (I should note that a number of his citations from two other Commentary articles on the NEA so the opinions are a little inbred.)

Having failed to cultivate new works on a wide scale, Lewis argues the NEA should re-purpose itself to preserve existing works.

“The audiences for music and dance have long been graying (perhaps whitening is now the better term), and there is much concern that they will vanish within a generation’s time. Here, the role of the NEA would not be to create but rather to preserve or, if it comes to that, to “cocoon” art by means of a holding action: for instance, subsidizing classical orchestras and ballet companies so as to maintain a cadre of professionals who will keep alive what would otherwise become a dead language. As it happens, this is precisely the area where the NEA record has historically been brightest.”

I am not sure if I appreciate his reference to orchestras and ballet companies as working in a dead language (or soon to be so.) But maybe that is a truth that needs to be faced. At the same time, I am also not terribly comfortable with the idea that the NEA should enable ballets and orchestras to avoid innovating their practices. Though I am sure if this philosophy was embraced, the nation’s flagship ballets and orchestras would be the ones receiving the funding leaving the smaller organizations to innovate or disappear.

Arts Leaders Ain’t Learnin’ Too Good

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I have just returned from the Arts Presenters Conference. I must have tried to do too much in too little time because I am fighting off a cold right now. I did want to make a post on one of the sessions I attended because some of the information communicated was simply fascinating.

In the Learning to Lead session The Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor’s graduate students presented the results of their research about what resources arts managers used to learn and solve problems. When they finished, I got up and asked a question about the results of their survey. They found that 90% of people read reports, books, etc at least once a year. I asked what end of the spectrum the majority of responses fell since last year Neill Archer Roan had presented findings at the APAP conference that said that learning was not valued in the presenting field.

Since Neill’s research was based on interviews and were anecdotal, I wasn’t sure if his results were any more scientifically based than the grad student’s results which was based on a self-selected group that filled out an online survey. I also stated some curiosity about whether people who were more comfortable with online surveys might be reading more reports via that medium. The students who responded said the reading that was taking place were skewed toward the less frequent.

I hadn’t known that Neill was sitting a couple rows behind me and soon he got up to address the issue of learning not being valued. I was so amazed by what he had to say, I bought the MP3 file of the session so that I could quote him accurately.

Speaking of the work the Roan Group does, he said,

“We believe there is a cultural bias against learning in this field and in the non-profit field as a whole. We believe that that exists for several reasons. One is cultural another is really biological. There are a lot of studies about satisfaction and how we are actually wired…Someone who is rationally satisfied behaves no differently than someone who is rationally dissatisfied. People behave differently when they are emotionally satisfied…the pathways back to learning are different where there is emotional satisfaction…I think in our field and in the performing arts, there is so much emotional satisfaction…that is actually a barrier to our need to understand and respond. (my emphasis)

The idea that emotional satisfaction, which is probably what allows people in the arts to tolerate low pay and long hours, is actually inhibiting progress just sort of blew my mind.

He goes on to say that in the arts there isn’t a practice of looking back and evaluating a situation for what works and didn’t work and then documenting the findings. Without the documentation, the arts rely on tacit knowledge carried in individuals. While tacit knowledge is superior to documented knowledge, if you have high turnover, your organization doesn’t learn.

The session was about two hours long so I imagine there will be other insights I will derive from them as I review the file.

Spinning the Hottest Shostakovich East of the Spree!

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I am packing and repacking for my trip to the APAP conference, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity point out a great story that appeared on Artsjournal.com about a rotating club show in Berlin that has people packing techno clubs on Monday nights despite the lack of advertising to listen to chamber orchestras.

Every first Monday a club night called Yellow Lounge rotates among the hottest clubs in the city. According to the article, one club turned over 100 people away. The live performance is sandwiched between DJs playing classical recordings. Part of the appeal to attendees seems to be the approach to classical music the DJs and performers bring.

“What is particularly enjoyable about the Yellow Lounge is that it is not at all intimidating. You don’t need to know anything about classical music to feel at home. There is none of the snobbery associated with the genre; Canisius never gives you a “Duh! It’s Mozart, dummy” look if you ask what he has just played, and the musicians tend to introduce each track with a non-patronising explanation of its importance. He welcomes requests, too, but only plays them “if the mood is right”.

Admission is only five euros ($7.33). Universal Music, seeing an opportunity to change perceptions about classical music, underwrites the cost of the event. The organizers are apparently free to book who they like, but many of the artists are on a Universal label.

I am not going to suggest that a similar program could be successful in the U.S. because I suspect that classical music has a more prominent place in the collective consciousness of Germans than U.S. citizens. Even if younger Germans are turning away from classical music, I imagine that the concept of what type of person listens to the music isn’t as narrowly defined as it is in the U.S.

But perhaps there is some sort of program that might have success that doesn’t necessarily involve plugging instruments into amps.