Good Morning
“And the beat goes on……………………………..”
Truth in Advertising:
Has anybody else noticed that job descriptions for positions in the arts all read remarkably the same. Whether the organization is looking for an Executive Director, or someone to head Development or Marketing, or any other open slot, everybody is looking for the exact same (unrealistic) qualities in candidates. It’s as though there is one job description that is a universal application for an iphone. Everyone uses a variation of the same description, and, if we’re honest, these job descriptions are themselves somewhat dishonest at worst, and at the least very misleading – full of tired, repetitive language that has ceased to have any real world meaning anymore. Everyone is looking for an ideal that very likely doesn’t exist.
Here is a typical advertisement:
The successful candidate will be a strong leader with excellent management and interpersonal skills. S/he will have the proven ability to build productive relationships with a broad range of internal and external constituencies, and have the demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with the various segments of the community. S/he will be an experienced supervisor with the ability and willingness to mentor staff and encourage staff development. S/he will foster an atmosphere of teamwork and collaboration among staff and volunteers throughout the organization. S/he will have a strong working knowledge of programs, production, board relations and operations. S/he will have excellent financial management skills and a track record for achieving budget goals. The ideal candidate will be able to implement a strategic plan, and will have experience working as a senior manager. The successful candidate will bring new energy and ideas, and will have the ability to unite all stakeholders in embracing a shared vision for the future of the organization. The successful candidate will be knowledgeable and comfortable with using new technology to enhance presentations, communications, and operations whenever possible to help achieve the organization’s mission. Ten plus years of active leadership required. An advanced degree is preferable.
Blah, Blah, Blah - some go on and on. You get the idea.
Salary and benefits commensurate with experience.
Send resume and cover letter to:_________________
What all this mumbo jumbo babble speak says basically is this: We want a smart experienced person to run the organization (department) really well. The successful candidate will (hopefully) have a great resume. Without meaning to sound glib, we want someone who can boil the perfect three minute egg in two minutes.
How refreshing it would be to see a more honest solicitation. Something like this (tongue in cheek):
We prefer not to take a chance on somebody on the way up. We’re not really risk takers. So we want somebody who has done it all before and done it really well for some other organization that everybody looks at and marvels at its success against all odds. We'd like someone who shares our unrealistic expectations and can make us look good. Basically we’re looking for someone who knows everything and everybody; someone who has raised all kinds of money before and has a huge list of contacts they can hit up on our behalf (it's all pretty much about fundraising here); someone who can raise money in an environment where no one has any money to give; someone with really good foundation and rich people connections - someone who can help us stay afloat (our business model is, to put it charitably - challenged).
We want someone smart enough to help us figure out a cool vision for our future (that one is stumping us); someone who will attract great talent to the staff (though we can’t pay the staff very much) and whom the staff (despite working conditions that are hardly ideal) will love and follow anyway (someone who will hopefully get them to perform above their potential, because actually we're understaffed by all reasonable criteria). We want someone who can make various factions of the board (currently somewhat dysfunctional and at each other’s throats) work harmoniously together and take on an ever greater workload (or in the alternative someone who will assume the board’s workload for them because it’s highly unlikely they will do much more than they are doing right now – which isn’t that much). We try not to micromanage, but we still do. We're looking for someone who can get the best out of us, but someone enough like us so we are comfortable with them; someone who will push themselves, but not necessarily push us too hard. Did we mention that we want someone who can raise a lot of money?
We want someone who can create a workable and well thought out strategic plan (lord knows we have neither the time nor inclination to do that) and make everyone feel the main components were ‘their’ ideas. We want someone who can magically double our audience size over time (tomorrow would be good) and develop real stakeholder support (and hopefully explain to us exactly what "stakeholders" are - because we're still fuzzy on that concept). We want someone who understands all the new technologies (we don't) and can apply them for the benefit of the organization (read: make young people interested in us), fix their own computer when it dies, design and maintain a website (or get some smart nerd to do it for free) and it wouldn’t hurt if s/he could get a bunch of new computers donated. We want an effective advocate (but it's a given that we don't have the time or resources nor do we want to get involved in any of that political stuff).
We want someone who can speak publicly like Obama and write like Hemmingway. We want someone who is part Mayor Bloomberg, part Spielberg, part Bill Gates and part Oprah (or at least personally knows all those people). Did we mention that we want someone who can raise a lot of money? What we really want is a Saint who will do it all for us - without complaint. Oh, s/he should be willing to work long hours for non market competitive compensation with minimal real benefits – and love it. We want someone with passion after all.
Though we won’t say so, we will settle for someone who is willing to take us on, has done it before with some success, has a pretty good reputation, and who everybody here likes personally (and that last one might just be the most important). Before we hire someone, we will likely make them jump through some unnecessary hoops, and we will probably make this process last longer than it need to. Don’t call. If you don’t hear back from us, we’re chasing somebody else. (If we have enough money we have hired a Search Firm to do all this for us. It's a crap shoot we know, but at least we can hope some "pro" can beat the odds for us - and, more importantly, we won't have to deal with it ourselves.)
Now this is, of course, a gross exaggeration on all levels, but there is truth in the contention that our job descriptions as often as not have become meaningless. We can probably all save some time if we just post the opening announcement. Wanted: Executive Director for the XYZ organization. We all know what they are looking for in their 'ideal' candidate.
Have a great week.
Don’t Quit
Barry
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Artists and Administrators and Never the Twain Shall Meet
Good Morning
“And the beat goes on……………………………..”
Note: You can always go to the site and enter a comment at the end of the blog. www.blog.westaf.org/
Bridging the Great Divide:
We’re arts administrators. We run the nation’s arts organizations and the organizations and programs that serve the nation’s artists and arts organizations. Our job is principally twofold – to nurture, support and facilitate the creation of art – hopefully at the highest level of excellence, and to support and facilitate access to that art.
We are intimately involved with the artists who create. Many of them do double duty as administrators too. Some of our organizations have as their charge to directly support the needs of these artists themselves.
Yet there remains a huge divide between us as administrators and working artists. Even within a single arts organization there is artificial distance between the artistic and administrative sides of the organization; very often there is almost no communication or interaction at all between the artists and most of the staff or board. In a sense we purposefully do not involve artists in much of our daily efforts to meet the challenges we face. Perhaps that’s because we see their role as creators and our role as administrators and we don’t want to blur that line for some reason. Maybe we think it’s our job to shield the artists from some of the more pedestrian aspects of pushing the “business” of art. Maybe we think involving them in our decision making would unfairly steal some of the time artists ought to have to devote to their art. Maybe they intimidate us and we intimidate them. Maybe we think that it is our job, not theirs, to run the businesses, set the policies and be the advocates. Maybe we think they just don’t understand the things we have to deal with to enable them to do what they do. Maybe we perceive that they don’t want us in their world and so we don’t want them in ours. Maybe we don’t want them to interfere. Maybe we fear that they have no interest in our problems and would resent our trying to include them in the solutions to those problems. Maybe we fear they might have too much interest in what we do.
Whatever the reason, we have vivisected our workloads and separated artists and administrators into isolated silos and created a somewhat, I think, false barrier to our relationship with each other. We always include artistic performances at our conferences, but it often seems an obligatory token gesture - not much more really than a reminder, I suppose, of why we do what we do. While artists are sometimes keynoters, there is little attempt to integrate artists onto our panels and in our discussions – no real attempt to insure their perspective is at the table. We include them on our peer panel reviews, but fail to involve them in addressing major policy issues. At times it seems we almost regard them as errant children; at other times humanity's future. There is wide divergence of opinion on whether artists are our colleagues or clients or constituents – all of those designations, or none of them. We remain, in effect, citizens of separate camps. And we are the poorer for not having their input and ideas.
I hope 2011 might be the year we intentionally and consciously try to break down that separation and divide, and that we start by trying to involve artists more in our world of running arts organizations and setting policy. I suggest we might begin that process with an effort to involve artists more in the advocacy arena – and in our efforts to tell our stories, make the case for our value, organize the public to support us, garner media attention and lobby decision makers to rally to our cause. There are, of course, many situations and programs that do integrate artists with adminstators successfully - even if they are not the norm. We need to identify those and replicate them. I suggest we begin that process by staging, locally first, then regionally and nationally, opportunities for artists and administrators to interface and talk about what artists might bring to the table for these efforts and how we might integrate these two camps – a conscious effort to begin a real conversation.
I think we need – at the very least - the artist’s perspective, new directional thought, and their energy and numbers to help us jumpstart the telling of our stories, making of our case, designing our policies, advocating and lobbying and to spur further involvement of the public, and I think the artificial and false separation of artists and administrators is hurting both groups. It’s like we’re trying to fight the common enemy with one hand tied behind our backs. If you want to design a car, it seems logical to somehow involve drivers in the process. Let’s mobilize and integrate one of our greatest assets – the working artist community - and stop trying to do everything on our own. My own experience suggests artists are more than willing to get involved. Nobody ever asks them.
Have a good week.
Sé4A 2012
Don’t Quit.
Barry
“And the beat goes on……………………………..”
Note: You can always go to the site and enter a comment at the end of the blog. www.blog.westaf.org/
Bridging the Great Divide:
We’re arts administrators. We run the nation’s arts organizations and the organizations and programs that serve the nation’s artists and arts organizations. Our job is principally twofold – to nurture, support and facilitate the creation of art – hopefully at the highest level of excellence, and to support and facilitate access to that art.
We are intimately involved with the artists who create. Many of them do double duty as administrators too. Some of our organizations have as their charge to directly support the needs of these artists themselves.
Yet there remains a huge divide between us as administrators and working artists. Even within a single arts organization there is artificial distance between the artistic and administrative sides of the organization; very often there is almost no communication or interaction at all between the artists and most of the staff or board. In a sense we purposefully do not involve artists in much of our daily efforts to meet the challenges we face. Perhaps that’s because we see their role as creators and our role as administrators and we don’t want to blur that line for some reason. Maybe we think it’s our job to shield the artists from some of the more pedestrian aspects of pushing the “business” of art. Maybe we think involving them in our decision making would unfairly steal some of the time artists ought to have to devote to their art. Maybe they intimidate us and we intimidate them. Maybe we think that it is our job, not theirs, to run the businesses, set the policies and be the advocates. Maybe we think they just don’t understand the things we have to deal with to enable them to do what they do. Maybe we perceive that they don’t want us in their world and so we don’t want them in ours. Maybe we don’t want them to interfere. Maybe we fear that they have no interest in our problems and would resent our trying to include them in the solutions to those problems. Maybe we fear they might have too much interest in what we do.
Whatever the reason, we have vivisected our workloads and separated artists and administrators into isolated silos and created a somewhat, I think, false barrier to our relationship with each other. We always include artistic performances at our conferences, but it often seems an obligatory token gesture - not much more really than a reminder, I suppose, of why we do what we do. While artists are sometimes keynoters, there is little attempt to integrate artists onto our panels and in our discussions – no real attempt to insure their perspective is at the table. We include them on our peer panel reviews, but fail to involve them in addressing major policy issues. At times it seems we almost regard them as errant children; at other times humanity's future. There is wide divergence of opinion on whether artists are our colleagues or clients or constituents – all of those designations, or none of them. We remain, in effect, citizens of separate camps. And we are the poorer for not having their input and ideas.
I hope 2011 might be the year we intentionally and consciously try to break down that separation and divide, and that we start by trying to involve artists more in our world of running arts organizations and setting policy. I suggest we might begin that process with an effort to involve artists more in the advocacy arena – and in our efforts to tell our stories, make the case for our value, organize the public to support us, garner media attention and lobby decision makers to rally to our cause. There are, of course, many situations and programs that do integrate artists with adminstators successfully - even if they are not the norm. We need to identify those and replicate them. I suggest we begin that process by staging, locally first, then regionally and nationally, opportunities for artists and administrators to interface and talk about what artists might bring to the table for these efforts and how we might integrate these two camps – a conscious effort to begin a real conversation.
I think we need – at the very least - the artist’s perspective, new directional thought, and their energy and numbers to help us jumpstart the telling of our stories, making of our case, designing our policies, advocating and lobbying and to spur further involvement of the public, and I think the artificial and false separation of artists and administrators is hurting both groups. It’s like we’re trying to fight the common enemy with one hand tied behind our backs. If you want to design a car, it seems logical to somehow involve drivers in the process. Let’s mobilize and integrate one of our greatest assets – the working artist community - and stop trying to do everything on our own. My own experience suggests artists are more than willing to get involved. Nobody ever asks them.
Have a good week.
Sé4A 2012
Don’t Quit.
Barry
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Happy New Year
Good Morning
“And the beat goes on……………………………..”
Note: For a really excellent summary of last year’s Top Ten Arts Policy stories see Ian Moss’ Createquity entry (scroll down once you get to his site).
Brain Pickings Year in Review. One of the most creative sites anywhere.
New Year’s Advice - Barry’s Baker’s Dozen:
1. Delete your email inbox. If there are some emails you will need, don’t worry they will still be in the trash. But start fresh.
2. Write a personal note to your 20 biggest donors. Invite them to lunch or an event. Make them feel special. Do not take them for granted. You need them – and other groups will covet them. If you can only focus on a few, pick the best candidates for moving up from one level to the next.
3. Bear in mind two concepts for 2011: Austerity and Authenticity. These might be the watchwords for the whole decade.
4. Call and make an appointment with someone on your city council, board of supervisors, state assembly or your congress man or woman and go see them. Just pick one. Begin or cement the relationship. Think 2012 and where you might be then.
5. Put someone under the age of 30 on your board of directors before the end of the first quarter. Just do it already. (The time is coming when organizations that do not have under 30 board representation will simply be ineligible for grant consideration – first from government agencies and then from foundations and corporations. At least I hope that will be the case.)
6. And while on the subject of generational representation, ask your staff for their advice on what to change in your organization in 2011. Give everyone a real voice.
7. Cut at least one expense line in your budget by 15% or more. Not possible? Are you sure?
8. Be careful using your laptop in airports – that is the number one hacker site – using false wifi connection scams. Be very, very careful of your identity – it is more vulnerable than ever.
9. Identify one person in your local community that could, if they wanted to, immeasurably help your organization to thrive in 2011 (it might be because of a big check, it might be because of something else). Talk to your senior board people and come up with a strategy to get to that person. Make it a campaign. (variation of Michael Kaiser’s advice).
10. Learn more about arts organizations in other disciplines or other sub-segments within your community. Make it a point to figure out how to interface with some of them. You may have more in common with other arts organizations in your community than you do with those in your discipline.
11. Use a sponge in your kitchen? Microwave it on high for one minute every morning. Kills 99.90% of the germs.
12. Make time at least once a week to stop to THINK about the bigger picture. Get out of your box. Yes, your organization is, and should be, your primary focus – but you and the organization are part of bigger worlds that impact what you do. Don’t forsake that.
13. Laugh every day (and if you can’t, then it’s time to consider another career).
May 2011 be a great year for you.
Sé4A 2012
Don’t Quit.
Barry
“And the beat goes on……………………………..”
Note: For a really excellent summary of last year’s Top Ten Arts Policy stories see Ian Moss’ Createquity entry (scroll down once you get to his site).
Brain Pickings Year in Review. One of the most creative sites anywhere.
New Year’s Advice - Barry’s Baker’s Dozen:
1. Delete your email inbox. If there are some emails you will need, don’t worry they will still be in the trash. But start fresh.
2. Write a personal note to your 20 biggest donors. Invite them to lunch or an event. Make them feel special. Do not take them for granted. You need them – and other groups will covet them. If you can only focus on a few, pick the best candidates for moving up from one level to the next.
3. Bear in mind two concepts for 2011: Austerity and Authenticity. These might be the watchwords for the whole decade.
4. Call and make an appointment with someone on your city council, board of supervisors, state assembly or your congress man or woman and go see them. Just pick one. Begin or cement the relationship. Think 2012 and where you might be then.
5. Put someone under the age of 30 on your board of directors before the end of the first quarter. Just do it already. (The time is coming when organizations that do not have under 30 board representation will simply be ineligible for grant consideration – first from government agencies and then from foundations and corporations. At least I hope that will be the case.)
6. And while on the subject of generational representation, ask your staff for their advice on what to change in your organization in 2011. Give everyone a real voice.
7. Cut at least one expense line in your budget by 15% or more. Not possible? Are you sure?
8. Be careful using your laptop in airports – that is the number one hacker site – using false wifi connection scams. Be very, very careful of your identity – it is more vulnerable than ever.
9. Identify one person in your local community that could, if they wanted to, immeasurably help your organization to thrive in 2011 (it might be because of a big check, it might be because of something else). Talk to your senior board people and come up with a strategy to get to that person. Make it a campaign. (variation of Michael Kaiser’s advice).
10. Learn more about arts organizations in other disciplines or other sub-segments within your community. Make it a point to figure out how to interface with some of them. You may have more in common with other arts organizations in your community than you do with those in your discipline.
11. Use a sponge in your kitchen? Microwave it on high for one minute every morning. Kills 99.90% of the germs.
12. Make time at least once a week to stop to THINK about the bigger picture. Get out of your box. Yes, your organization is, and should be, your primary focus – but you and the organization are part of bigger worlds that impact what you do. Don’t forsake that.
13. Laugh every day (and if you can’t, then it’s time to consider another career).
May 2011 be a great year for you.
Sé4A 2012
Don’t Quit.
Barry
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