To pick up a little where I left off yesterday.

A good part of the rest of the first day was devoted to reading literature and discussing the difference between leadership and management and how you can exhibit leadership even if you aren’t an area or department head.

The second day we were a little bit more crunched for time because it had been requested that the ELI participants attend the plenary session and super sessions planned that day. (More on them in a later entry.) One of the exercises the institute leaders had us engage in was August Boal’s Forum Theatre practice. Members of the group were given a script and scenario and then the rest of us were encouraged to stop the action and replace one of the actors to move the situation in a more positive direction. I had heard about Forum Theatre before but never witnessed it in action. It was quite an interesting experience.

Another exercise we engaged in was Story Circle (explanation starts on pg 3). This activity is often to assist with conflict resolution. We used it to talk about people who have exhibited leadership in our lives and then examine the common elements.

There were a number of observations that came out of these activities. Some members of the group felt they would put their jobs in jeopardy if they attempted to shift the direction of meetings to make them more constructive. By which I don’t mean trying to use these activities in their organization, but rather recognizing where things were falling apart and trying to shift the tenor of the conversation. Other than working very gradually and subtly, we didn’t see any solution to this dilemma.

One of the biggest issues that came out of our discussions was succession planning. Many felt there wasn’t any effort being made to secure succession in arts organizations in general. A few felt like the discussion about it in their organizations was going something like this:

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! WHO WILL TAKE OVER WHEN I AM GONE? THE NEXT GENERATION HAS NO DEDICATION. WHO WILL TAKE THE REINS?

Emerging Leader: me! me! mentor me! i love all this. look over here. i am energetic and excited.

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR DOWN THE DRAIN…..

To some degree we wondered if the existing leadership might be holding out for a clone of themselves when changing times required different skill sets.

After discussing the plenary and super sessions we had attended, we met with alumni of the Emerging Leadership Institute. This was apparently something that had never been done before. The alumni had been meeting earlier to discuss plans for Institute graduates.

Many of the alumni still felt a strong bond to those with whom they had gone through the program and some kept in touch. Unfortunately, the graduates as a whole didn’t keep in touch. At one time there was a person who put a lot of work into keeping the members abreast of each others’ activities. Once she stopped, everything fell apart.

The alumni (including the most recent batch) have expressed an interest in not only staying active on the listserv/discussion forums but also increasing the visibility of program graduates at the conference. Among the ways the graduates would like to participate are moderating panels and introducing speakers so that the same people don’t have to hustle from session to session.

Also, since participants in the institute are early in their careers and rather poor, the plan is to request some sort of break in conference fees for 5 years in return for volunteer work on the conference. The alumni that attended this year is only a small portion of those who have gone through the institute. The thought is to make it easy for graduates to continue to stay involved with APAP and the conference allowing them to expand their network of contacts and improve their leadership skills.

One of the concerns the alumni had was that the Emerging Leadership Institute isn’t perceived as important or valuable to arts organizations. One graduate was in the position to encourage and approve the participation of a colleague from her organization. She said her decision to do so was second guessed by her superiors who questioned it as a waste of time and money.

This was one of the reasons why the alumni are so interested in keeping everyone communicating. The better a resource of advice and answers the group becomes for its graduates, the more valuable attendance at the institute may be seen. This is also the reason why we want to be more visible at conferences as well.

I just wanted to observe–Like social networking sites (Myspace.com) and technology sites like YouTube, this is an example of users essentially taking the initiative to promote something they value and asking the host company for assistance in doing so. This was a theme that came up a lot during the conference–but I will talk about it later.

I should mention that despite the poor image organizations might have about the ELI, the 22 or so accepted were culled from a much larger pool of applicants. The process is fairly competitive and hopefully will become more so with alumni input.

Okay, so obviously there was a lot I liked about my experience. There were also a few places I felt things fell short. I have already submitted a written evaluation and had a discussion about all this with the group leaders so I am not telling tales out of school.

First- The application to the institute required us talk about the strengths, weaknesses and threats to our organization. I went expecting part of the conversation to include that. It never was.

According to one of the ELI leaders, they had been trying to get rid of that application for quite some time now since it did not reflect the content of the program and hoped to revamp the form for next year.

I don’t know if any sort of discussion in that area was supplanted by the request that we attend the plenary and super sessions or if it never occurs. I do think a discussion of the threats to the industry could have been valuable. I wouldn’t have been interested in an open grousing session where people laid out a lot of blame on the K-12 education system, home entertainment systems and the internet. The second day would have been the right time to have it. By then the ground rules for thoughtful discussion would have been firmly established.

But really, you can engage in discussion about threats to the industry in a lot of locations. What I think would have been really essential was an opportunity to address weaknesses in ones own leadership and how to better take a leadership role in ones current position. The environment was specifically designed to preserve confidentiality and to create bonds between participants to serve as resources for each other.

The more I think about it, the more I believe this was what many attendees were looking for. There were a lot of clues throughout the two days. Early on people specifically admitted they weren’t good at dealing with conflict. As I noted earlier, others mentioned that they were in dysfunctional environments. I went up to a person and told them I empathized with their situation based on my own history. And of course, some felt they were being overlooked as potential inheritors.

We were given some good tools and activities for dealing with conflict and affecting change when we returned to our organizations. I strongly suspect, however, that many in the group would have welcomed the opportunity to essentially engaged in a group therapy session, air their concerns and fears with colleagues and receive some advice and guidance in return.

I imagine that would have run things into a third day and even at the conference rate, it was pretty dang expensive to stay in those hotels! The whole experience was absolutely worthwhile. I am going to put some effort into making it even more so for those who follow by providing feedback and encouraging increased alumni involvement.

As I noted earlier, I was at the Arts Presenters Conference over the last week. I will be writing about the experience over the next couple days and maybe even longer. I took a lot of notes and picked up some literature I still need to digest.

On the whole, it was really a great experience. I took the opportunity to see a lot of artists and to talk to many colleagues. I debated my theories about press release writing and marketing.

I also spoke at some length to one of the APAP board members about creating discussion forums as I recently vowed to do. Of course, she challenged me to step up to my convictions and join the communications committee.

What I wanted to talk about in today’s entry was my participation in the Emerging Leadership Institute. The Institute is one of many conference leadership training efforts associated with a conference. I listed many of them in an earlier entry. In that same entry, I cited Andrew Taylor’s frustration that there are so many of these programs and none of them talk to each other.

At one point during the institute I spoke to the aforementioned board member, (who was helping to lead the institute), suggesting that if APAP was pondering conducting leadership activities regionally, they should first look to tap into the existing leadership seminar infrastructures like the National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) rather than reinventing the wheel. I then sought out Philip Horn who is associated with NALI, asked him how things were going with the organization and told him what I had suggested.

Anyway, there were about 22 people attending the institute. Everyone was in the first 5-10 years of their career in presenting. Almost everyone was a presenter with a couple artist agents, a couple of service organizations but no artists. Apparently, this year was unusual in that there were no artists participating.

I also noticed and commented that nearly everyone was from either a university, city or state associated institution. There were few people from “independent” presenting organizations. I was told this was reflective of the general membership–it started 50 years as a university presenters organization and remains generally so. I noted this as another reason I think APAP should host open bulletin board forums. If the website is viewed as a resource for many, perhaps the conferences will be as well and attendance will diversify.

One thing I was surprised at was that the institute sessions were lead by an artist agent and a presenter rather than a professional leadership consultant. In my mind this was a strength because the leaders had a practical understanding of the environment in which the attendees were operating. Consultants tend to live in a more theoretical place. This type of objectivity is certainly useful in many cases.

In this particular instance I think the arrangement helped the group develop a trust bond with each other and the leaders much faster than if it had been lead by consultants. And lord knows, we had little enough time to waste.

One of the first major activities we engaged in was splitting into groups based on our major leadership style. One group was comprised of those who look at the big picture and storm full speed ahead toward it pulling everyone else along. Another group was the process oriented people who make sure everything is well organized and accounted for. The third group were people who took the feelings and concerns of others into account. The last group were those who celebrate every little victory and act as cheerleaders. Only two people identified themselves in this last group so they merged with the third group.

Each group was then assigned to go off and list what they felt were the hallmarks of that particular leadership style. I was in the third group and had joined it semi-reluctantly because it sounded a little too touchy-feelie, but suited me better than the descriptions of the other areas. Come to find out, most people in the group didn’t feel the category wholly defined them and that they had strong elements from the other areas. Many, like me, were very much lovers of spreadsheets and databases as decision making tools. The institute leaders are going to transcribe our notes and email them to us so I can touch on the specific elements of each style at a later date.

Briefly, my group decided our style was focussed on generating consensus and buy-in from people. It was felt that involving people in this way was important because the pay in the industry was so unrewarding. Many of us said that we knew we needed to be decisive at the end of the day even knowing that some people disagreed. A few admitted that they shied away from confrontation and these type of decisions. We felt it was important to have people like us around in a presenting environment because often artists visit us as the 35th stop on a 50 city tour and people like us work hard to make them feel safe and comfortable.

When the groups came together to discuss the hallmarks of our style, we had a little bit of a surprise. While we compared and contrasted ourselves against the other groups privately, we realized we were an amalgam with the other styles. One of the other groups, (I won’t say which) essentially dismissed our leadership style publicly generally characterizing us as touchie-feelie and really only good for organizing receptions, parties and soothing hurt feelings.

Now to be honest, a couple people in my group did admit that their boss was the yeller and their role was to motivate and organize the traumatized staff when meetings were over. That wasn’t what we saw as our primary function. For many of us, throwing parties and making people comfortable wasn’t even something we did directly but rather delegated and enjoined others to do.

After this stage of the exercise, we were asked to go back in our groups and create a definition of leadership. This information too will be emailed to me so I will address it more directly at a later time. When we got back in our group, we discussed the comments directed at our style during the session we just left. Then a number of us wryly observed we were probably the only group actually doing so. One member confirmed that before he left the other room he overheard one group launching into a discussion before all the members had assembled.

Despite the differences in our leadership styles, each group created remarkably similar definitions of what leadership was. Even though we used varying tactics to demonstrate leadership, we agreed what the ultimate product of those actions should be.

At this point my entry is getting pretty long so I will continue with my ELI experiences tomorrow.

One thing I want to say before I end is that the attendees of the institute really developed strong bonds with each other fairly quickly. I can’t speak for everyone in my leadership style group, I will say that while I can remember which leadership style group made the unflattering comments, I can’t remember who was actually a member of that group. In speaking with others from my particular sub-group at other times during the week that followed, no one ever said anything critical about any other institute attendee, much less commented that they were going to keep an eye on X because he/she was a member of “that” group.

I won’t be posting for a couple days because I am at the Arts Presenters Conference in NYC. I hadn’t posted earlier because I was using the opportunity to surprise my sister who works there and she occassionally reads the blog.

I have been participating in the Emerging Leadership Institute and been talking and listening to a whole bunch of interesting folks so I will have much to post when I return.

I have also met, albeit briefly, Andrew Taylor and Neill Archer Roan. Watch their blogs as well. This is a big conference and their experiences will undoubtably be wholly different from my own.