It’s All About Your Staff: Ending Workplace Bullying
Posted: January 4, 2021 Filed under: AAM, museum staff, Workplace Bullying 2 Comments
In the past, I’ve used the first post of the year to offer hopes for the coming 12 months, but I’m a little short on hope at the moment. It still feels as though we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. So this week I’m taking a different tack. When I reviewed Leadership Matters’ 2020 data and discovered that after three years Leadership and Workplace Bullying remained one of the most read posts, maybe bullying deserves some more air time.
2021 will be a different sort of year in the museum business. As more and more of us are vaccinated, large wealthy organizations will plod forward, bolstered by their endowments, while smaller, nimble museums may emerge completely changed. And, if we’re to believe AAM’s grim prediction, one out of three museums won’t survive at all. But for those who do make it, maybe this is the year to mentor, nurture and protect staff. That means recognizing bullying for what it is, and most importantly, doing something about it.
Ever had a nightmare where you feel as though you can’t wake up? Being bullied is a little like that. When you’re bullied, you are trapped in a pattern of behavior that’s foisted on you by a perpetrator. You may feel as though you’ve been drop kicked back to middle school, surely a nadir in human emotional development. Depending on who you believe, somewhere between 20 to 25-percent of Americans experience bullying at work at some point in their adult lives, and another 20-percent witness it. That’s almost half of the workforce so perhaps it is no wonder this topic attracts readers.
What is bullying? According to researchers at the Workplace Bullying Institute, it’s “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators that takes one or more of the following forms: verbal abuse, offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating; or work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done.” For all museum leaders out there, take careful note of the last phrase, that bullying keeps staff from doing their work.
Bullying differs from harassment in its repetitive nature. Harassment could happen just once and is often directed from a perpetrator toward a member of a protected group, for example, a younger white male toward an older BIPOC female. Bullying is not illegal unless the target can prove they are part of a protected group, but it is deeply embedded in gender and power. Seventy percent of bullies are male and 61-percent of bullies are leaders or supervisors. That doesn’t mean bullies can’t be women or your co-workers. They can. Bullying isn’t always visible, but its effects are.
If you are a bully’s target:
- Knowledge is power, so know the signs. Are you isolated at work? Do people stop talking when you walk into a room? Are you reprimanded or belittled in public in ways your colleagues aren’t? Are you given ridiculous and impossible assignments reminiscent of the fairy story where the princess has to empty the pond with a sieve? The list goes on, but if any of this sounds familiar, you are likely being bullied.
- Protect Yourself: Bullying isn’t something you can deal with alone so be certain you have support. If you have insurance, consider working with a counselor or psychologist to help process what’s going on. Make sure you you share with friends, colleagues and family as well, and that they understand the serious nature of what’s happening.
- Take Action: Keep a record of what’s happening to you. I know it’s 2021, but it’s better if you keep a record in pen, preferably in a spiral bound notebook. If your organization has an HR department, talk to them when you are ready. And speaking of ready, recognize that your workplace may choose not to discipline your bully, so understand you may need to look for another position if the situation becomes untenable. Your health is not worth your job.
If you’re a colleague and witness bullying:
- Support your co-workers: One of the hardest things for bullying targets to cope with is isolation. If you avoid the target like the bully wants and expects, if you join the bully in withholding information or by staying silent when they join a group, you’re part of the problem. Implicitly, you are bullying too. Be there for your colleagues.
- Listen to your colleagues, empathize and respect their story. Do your best to disrupt the perpetrator’s plans: Invite your targeted colleague to join conversations, and share information with them. Offer to go to HR with them. Sometimes multiple voices resonate in ways that a single voice doesn’t.
If you are a museum leader:
- Create a Museum Values Statement: Collaborate with representatives from the board, the staff, and volunteers, to write a Values Statement that spells out behavior your museum or heritage organization expects on its campus. And make sure your HR personnel policy is up-to-date.
- Check in with your staff: While you’re not a counselor or a psychologist, your staff’s well being directly affects the running of your organization. Stop and ask how they are. Bullying is toxic. Don’t let it run amok.
- Take Responsibility: Bullying is about power. It’s frequently directed by the less able towards the talented. The whole point of bullying is to control a situation. It won’t go away on its own. If your museum doesn’t have an HR department, work with your leadership team–including board members–to figure out a plan B for how to address bullying.
- Bullying isn’t exclusive to staff: In any museum or heritage organization, it can happen on the board, from board to staff, from donor to staff, and from staff to volunteer. Be aware. Be empathetic. Be supportive, but commit to taking action.
The museum field is a competitive one, made all the more so with the huge number of people who’ve seen their jobs eliminated or put on pause as the result of the pandemic, but as I’ve written before, your staff is your organizational lifeblood. Without them, you are a fancy house with fancy stuff, a grand building with important paintings, acres of green space with living collections, or a building where exhibits and experiments go untried. Commit to making 2021 the year when your staff, whether paid, volunteer or both, feels safe, seen and supported, so hopefully when I run Leadership Matters data for this year, the posts on bullying will no longer be in the top three.
Stay safe. Be well, and best wishes for a happy, creative, regenerative New Year.
Joan Baldwin
Workplace Bullying is a Work Problem: 9 Tips to Deal With It
Posted: February 3, 2020 Filed under: Leading Across Organizations, Museum, museum staff, Organizational Values, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Values | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit 1 Comment
This week a colleague of mine was lied to by a co-worker in an effort to coerce a change in plans. He also accused her of stealing, something so serious it’s a wonder she wasn’t rushed to HR by security. But she wasn’t. That’s because what was said to her was part of a pattern of bullying that goes back at least 24 months.
Sadly, bullying doesn’t just happen in our feral middle school years when everyone seems to behave badly. For many, it continues into adulthood, flourishing in offices, meetings and break rooms. The Workplace Bullying Institute defines bullying as threatening, intimidating, unwelcome behavior that occurs over a period of time and is meant to harm and control individuals who feel powerless to respond. The fact that there is a Workplace Bullying Institute indicates how badly we treat one another.
Nationally, some 75-percent of American workers witness bullying, with 47-percent reporting as victims. In the museum world–which is still waiting for a serious workplace behavior survey–we know from our 2018 Gender Discrimination Survey that 66-percent of museum workers responding experienced being talked over and having their opinions and ideas go unrecognized; however, there’s a lot more to bullying than those two topics.
Like its cousin, sexual harassment, workplace bullying blossoms in a work environment that chooses not to stand for anything, meaning it has no workplace values which it asks staff to follow. As hideous as workplace sexual harassment is, it’s prohibited by law. That’s not the case with bullying, particularly if your bully is clever enough to divorce bullying from gendered stereotypes, meaning your bully isn’t only targeting young women, but is instead an equal-opportunity jerk.
But enough background, what I really meant to write about was how I admire my colleague. She held herself together–fortunately there was a third party present–and displayed neither her anger nor her pain in front of her bully. Nor did she cave and concede to what the bully wanted. She’s a strong person, not a frightened, wilting flower, and contrary to the memes and metaphors in films and novels, it’s strong staff members who are frequently bullied. So…. if there’s a bully in your museum workplace, what should you do?
If you’re a leader:
- Recognize what bullying does to your workplace culture: It creates a toxicity that’s quick to take over. And if you don’t stop it, you’re part and parcel of that toxic culture. Maybe you got into museum leadership with loftier aspirations than arbitrating personnel disputes, but understand your inaction costs your museum money. Why? Because bullying victims quit. And before they leave, they take sick days and time off for therapists, because coming to work fills them with dread. That costs your organization money too. Bottom line: happy staff are productive and creative; bullied staff are fearful and angry. You choose.
- Acknowledge how important trust is: If, as a leader, you let a staff member come to work every day vulnerable and unprotected, they will cease to trust you about everything because they see your museum or heritage organization through a scrim of injustice.
- Remember this isn’t about you: Do not impose your own narrative and biases on your staff’s experiences. If you’re a 50-year old white woman, you have no idea what it’s like to be a 24-year old woman of color or a Latinx gay man. Respect what your staff tells you. It’s likely you haven’t walked in their shoes.
- Acknowledge bullying as a work problem: Talk about it with your whole staff. If you and your HR department don’t feel comfortable discussing workplace bullying, find someone in your community–a counselor or therapist–who specializes in bullying in group settings and have them talk to staff.
- Work with your staff, board personnel committee, and HR to create a museum values statement: Discuss what norms your ENTIRE staff want to live with and draft your values statement. Are you eye-rolling? Well, imagine how much easier it would be to speak with the staff bully if you had a values statement. Your workplace is a community. And a collectively agreed-upon set of norms that’s in the employee handbook, there for all to see, defines acceptable community behavior.
If you’re a staff member:
- If you’re witnessing behavior, but not reporting it, you’re enabling it. Talk to the victim, tell them how uncomfortable and distressed you are for them, and that you hope they’ll report it, but if they won’t, you will.
- If you’re a victim, marshal your personal resources: Do you have access to a therapist or counselor? Do you have friends and family who are good listeners? Make sure you know how your workplace expects you to report bullying.
- Know the rules: Understand the policies and procedures that govern your museum or heritage organization. Know where they are written and how to access them. Is there any mention of bullying? If yes, how are those situations supposed to be resolved? If there are no instructions, and you’re charting unknown territory, use the Workplace Bullying Institute Resources to help make your case in the strongest manner possible.
- Does your organization have a values statement? If yes, has your bully violated any part of it? Every state has a different take on bullying. Know the law (if there is one) where you live.
Bullies are everywhere. Sadly, working in a fancy museum with a huge endowment doesn’t guarantee anything except you likely have access to an HR department, and working in a small one only guarantees you know the whole staff well, not that there isn’t a bully among them. Preventing bullying, like so much else about creating humane museum workplaces, depends on all of us. We need to be kind, empathetic, to support one another, to look out for one another. You’re not just a curator, an educator, a media specialist, an exhibit designer, you’re also a colleague. When one of the team hurts, you all do.
Joan Baldwin
Image: johnhain / Pixabay
In Post Image Credit: WilliamCho / Pixabay
https://www.dandalaw.com/personal-injury-of-workplace-bullying/
Leadership and Workplace Bullying
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: Communication, Leadership, Leading Across Organizations, Museum, museum career, museum staff, Nonprofit Leadership, Workplace Bias, Workplace Bullying | Tags: Leadership, Leadership Matters, museums, nonprofit, workplace culture 8 Comments
First, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge Nexus LAB’s work on leadership released this week. Leadership Matters’ own Anne Ackerson was part of the team that worked for four years, talking, writing, designing better paths to leadership for museums, libraries, and archives. If you haven’t taken a look at the Layers of Leadership, print it, stick it up over your desk, and see where you and your colleagues are.
Next, we’d like to talk about an issue common to many workplaces not just museums. In the past month we’ve observed two organizations where staff were essentially hounded out of their positions. Neither organization is unsophisticated nor underfunded. Each has layers of leadership, and yet at the critical assistant or associate layer there was and is ongoing failure to lead. The “why” is not something we will ever know. The “how” speaks to executive directors who may believe their leadership teams function well, and not realize what’s going on. That in itself is a bit scary. As an ED, shouldn’t you be aware of everything that’s going on particularly when it comes to HR? And how well do you know your leadership team if, at the end of the day, they’ve forced someone to leave? What message does that send to remaining staff?
In a nutshell, both individuals, at very different organizations, were made aware that their performance wasn’t up to snuff. No, this wasn’t done in an annual performance review, nor was it done in a series of calm meetings with advance notice provided, where expectations were laid out and timelines set. Instead, associate/assistant directors criticized, berated, and belittled. The end game seemed to be to make the employee leave of his or her own accord. Whoa, you say, does that really happen? Yup. Probably more than anyone acknowledges.
There is no law against being Cruella Deville in the workplace. In fact, it’s one of the few places left where as long as you don’t cross the Title VII lines, you are allowed to be a bully. Should you be? Heck no. But can you be? Sure. These situations rarely happen once. They are often a series of incidents, that accrete over time; where, for example, responsibilities are subtly increased while authority is diminished. Or where an employee is constantly the victim of understated remarks about performance, ability, and organizational loyalty, often in public. Just to underscore how bullying this behavior is, it’s sometimes coupled with comments about the employee’s emotional state—“You seem angry;” or “You seem upset;” What can we do to work on that?” or “You know you need to keep your emotions in check at the workplace.” The latter is one frequently aimed at women. Public displays of emotion, particularly in the workplace, are hugely gendered. Studies show that men demonstrating anger makes them seem competent and may lead to promotion. Not so for women where anger–especially if it is coupled with tears– is perceived as the exact opposite–a lack of capability.
So, if you’re an executive director of an organization large enough to have a leadership team supervising staff, what should you do?
- Make sure you are apprised of all ongoing HR issues. Ask questions. Ask for transparency. If things are going as they should be, you’ll receive all the evidence you need. If they’re not, push back. Don’t assume.
- If you don’t have an HR office, seek advice from a professional particularly when an employee appears to be struggling. Does he or she have a job description? Has she had an annual performance review? Have her abilities changed overnight or has her supervisor changed? Who’s new on the team, and how was that transition handled?
- Make sure you have an equitable HR policy coupled with job descriptions for all staff.
- Know workplace bullying when you see it. Don’t tolerate it.
Joan Baldwin
The Leader’s Role in Facing Workplace Bullying
Posted: September 12, 2016 Filed under: History Museums, Leadership, Museum, museum staff, Nonprofit Leadership, Workplace Bullying | Tags: Leadership, museum, workplace culture 7 Comments
There are many reasons to become a museum leader. You have a platform for the ideas that percolate in your brain. You can take a stand when necessary rather than mutter behind your coffee cup. Salaries and perquisites are often better. Above all, you can make a difference. But if you’re going to be a leader, you also need to care about your staff. By caring, we don’t mean giving them bottles of wine on their birthdays, although that is nice too. We mean watching out for them. Keeping their best interests at heart, encouraging professional growth, and helping them be the best people they can be a work. And that means stepping up and dealing with workplace conflict when it happens.
This week we received a heartbreaking email from a curator, who works at a mid-sized museum with no HR department. The writer emailed to ask our advice about office bullying. Think about that. It’s 2016 and a museum curator goes to work everyday to face bullying. In case you think that’s something that only happens on elementary school playgrounds, think again. According to the 2014 Workplace Bullying Institute survey 27-percent of us experience bullying at work while 72-percent of employers discount, deny or defend it. Just to add to the mix, a recent Gallup survey says American companies choose unqualified managers 82-percent of the time. Is it any wonder then that employers fail to stop office bullying when so many of them shouldn’t be leaders in the first place? And do you really doubt that the museum world is immune to these issues?
I wish that the email we received was an anomaly, but we know from our research for Women|Museums: Lessons from the Workplace (Routledge 2017) that bullying is alive and well. Just to be clear, here’s how bullying is defined by the Workplace Bullying Institute: It is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is : threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or involves work sabotage, preventing work from getting done, or verbal abuse. Our emailer is called names, is badmouthed to both the public and fellow employees on a regular basis, and has been isolated by the bullies (there are two) who withhold information necessary to move projects forward. And, like many museums, this one has no HR department so naturally the emailer approached the director who responded that he couldn’t take action because he hadn’t witnessed the bullying himself. And no, bullying is not against the law. Only when it becomes harassment, meaning an employee is targeted because of race, gender or sexual orientation is it actionable.
Before I respond to that, I should say that I too was bullied at work. However, I work for a large, fairly sophisticated organization with a multi-person HR department. I only approached them because I truly couldn’t stand it any more. I know now I had all the classic signs of a bullied person: I didn’t want to go to work even though I love what I do; I obsessed about work at home; I exhibited a boatload of stress-releated health issues; and worst of all I was ashamed I couldn’t manage this problem. Eventually my issue was resolved, at least to the point where the gossip, rumor and innuendo stopped. Only the bully’s resignation brought it to an end.
But back to our email. In a perfect world, what should a museum leader do when she discovers workplace bullying? First, listen to the alleged victim. Take notes. There are two sides to everything, and believing you know what’s going on isn’t helpful. The next step will be to hear the bullies’ story. If you feel ill-prepared for that conversation, reach out to folks who might help: a board personnel committee; a nearby non-profit that has an HR department; your local chamber of commerce or museum or other non-profit directors. (All of those sources might also help if you are the victim of bullying.) Further, if you are a museum director–even if your organization is too small for an HR department–do you have an employee handbook? Does it spell out how grievances should be handled? If not, put that on your to-do list going forward.
Last, don’t under any circumstances label this as workplace conflict and leave it to employees to “work it out.” Bullying isn’t a tiff over who failed to replace the milk at the coffee station. Bullying is verbal violence. Your employees need your care; demonstrating that this is important and not the type of behavior your museum condones is important. Still not convinced? Think of it this way: You are paying one or more people who apparently have the time to belittle, mock, and gossip about another employee. Can your organization waste that kind of time and money? Studies show that victims of bullying are often more talented, altruistic and empathetic than staff bullies. Forty-percent of the victims leave their jobs because leadership won’t deal with bullying. Can you afford to be left with the meanest staff members with the poorest work ethic?
As always, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’re experiencing bullying at work, here are some links that may help: Workplace Bullying; Is Workplace Bullying Illegal; Gallup and Why Great Managers Are So Rare; and Washington State’s PDF on Bullying.
Joan Baldwin
Knowing When to Get Off Stage
Posted: January 9, 2023 Filed under: AAM, AAMD, AASLH, gender equity, Human Resources, Leadership, Nina Simon, pay equity, Uncategorized, Workplace Bullying 9 Comments
Happy New Year! This is my 402 post and it is my last. Leadership Matters is closing up shop. I’ve been thinking about ending this blog for a while. After all, it’s been a decade, nine years of writing weekly, and a year of monthly posts. When I started I was almost alone in writing about the museum workplace, particularly issues around museum leadership.
Today, so much has changed. Social media has exploded, Twitter has bloomed and faded, while TikTok and Snapchat are ascendant, along with ever-present podcasts. And the blog, a simple essay of sorts, has become a sort of antique. But changes in social media aren’t the reason I’m closing this down. In my most optimistic moments, I’d like to think the museum field caught up, that it’s ready to talk about the fact that working in a museum may not be the Nirvana it sometimes appears from outside, but more importantly, I know there are folks out there whose experience and thoughts are more relevant than mine. Hopefully you will find them or maybe you are ready to become one of the field’s thought leaders.
When Nina Simon packed up and took herself off stage in 2019, I was startled, but also in awe. It was a shock, but not a surprise, a totally Nina thing to do, combining courage, adventure and self care in one swift set of key strokes. If you’re a regular reader, you know I feel strongly about museum folk sticking around past their sell date. It’s not about age, it’s about knowing when you’re not contributing, and I’m pretty sure, that here on these pages, I’ve said everything I need to say.
I have friends and colleagues who “have” blogs, but they write rarely if at all. If Leadership Matters can claim anything, it can claim consistency. So for all of you who’ve enjoyed reading, thank you. Knowing you’re out there somewhere nodding in agreement at my thoughts, rants, and whining, means a lot.
Before I go, here’s a wrap-up of what happened here in 2022: Despite my optimism, things can’t have improved that much because guess what post stubbornly maintained its top spot for the sixth year in a row? Oh, that would be Leadership and Workplace Bullying. It was followed closely by How Not to Write a Job Description, Raising the Wellness Flag, and Trying to Plan in the Unsettling of Covid. Rounding out the top five were Putting the Dipstick Down on the Museum Workforce, and finally, The Silent Treatment and What to Do About It, which talks about bullying’s passive aggressive twin, not speaking to each other. Like I said, if you’re measuring the museum workforce’s health based on Leadership Matters’ readership, there’s clearly some work to be done.
So to end, as always, here in a list of bullet points, my hopes for museum staff and their leaders in 2023 and beyond.
- That leaders recognize the gender pay gap, recognize how racist it is, and act swiftly to close it. Or as Anne Helen Peterson puts it, “We are trying to make our partnerships more equitable, because enduring gender inequity (apart from being bullshit) monopolizes energy better sent elsewhere. ” Maybe you can’t fix the world, but you can fix your own organization.
- That leaders–indeed everyone–practice empathy, kindness and respect–rather than a kind of Gotcha Leadership where everything is fine until you cross a line you didn’t know was there. Remember what the inimitable Lisa Lee said, ““At the museum we pretend we’re not grappling with other issues, but we’re human beings all day.”
- That museums and heritage sites, however small, develop HR policies, helping staff, paid and volunteers navigate workplace issues from happy things–like pregnancy and adoption–to moments of grief, to bullying and harassment.
- That boards take their responsibilities, particularly in terms of their own biases–unconscious and not, as seriously as today’s museum leaders do, supporting brave, courageous organizations that help us understand the world’s issues and complexities.
- That boards and leaders recognize that failing to pay a living wage diminishes us all.
- That museums and heritage organizations partner, collaborate and listen to their communities, who not only know what they like, but know their own stories.
- That AAM, AASLH, AAMD, and AAMG recognize they are what they are because museum workers, hourly, salaried, unionized and not, support them, attend their meetings and trainings, and serve on their boards. Those people matter. Not just because they care for things, but because they are humans who work, and talking about the world of museum work, with all its foibles, makes it easier to understand, and in the end, maybe raises the bar on a better workplace.
Leadership Matters–all 400+ posts–will be available until June so if you want to read, print, cite or quote, have at it. After that it will close. Thank you again for reading, for commenting, and most of all, for the work you do. Flawed, courageous, human, and endlessly creative, you’re the best.
Be well and be kind.
Joan Baldwin
What Does PMA’s Victory Means for the Rest of Us?
Posted: November 13, 2022 Filed under: Human Resources, Leadership, Leading Across Organizations, Museum, Museum Boards, museum salaries, museum staff, Museum wages, pay equity, Race Leave a comment
Joe Piette – https://www.flickr.com/photos/1097
Unless you buried your phone, you’re likely aware that for 19 days this fall staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were on strike. Two years ago PMA workers unionized. What followed wasn’t workplace Nirvana, but rather protracted negotiations between their union and PMA leadership. Around the beginning of October when negotiations stalled, museum workers walked out.
From the sidewalks the striking workers watched, wondered and worried as PMA hung its Matisse show, while waiting for Sasha Suda, PMA’s new director, to acknowledge what was going on. Other museums and museum staff used social media to advocate for a sector-wide shunning of the Museum until the strike was settled, which it eventually was. Here are some of the Union’s contractual victories: cheaper healthcare; a month of paid parental leave (Previously, it was nothing); additional bereavement leave; a pay equity committee; limits on the Museum’s use of temporary staff and subcontractors.
It’s a David and Goliath story, and even without knowing much about museumland politics, it’s hard not to root for the underdog. But what about everyone else? What does PMA’s Union victory mean for the other 34,999 museums and heritage sites in the country, not to mention their 160,700 employees? In the long run, does a union victory in Philadelphia matter to the rest of us? Well, it should. The optimistic part of me hopes that slowly, very slowly, museum organizations, museum boards and leadership are waking up to the resource their staffs represent. While cynical board members may not care their organization’s staff are smart and dedicated, they surely understand that constant staff churn represents a ginormous investment as remaining staff cover positions while the organization advertises, interviews, hires and onboards, again.
And while this might be too Pollyanna of me, does the PMA settlement demonstrate museum staff have a voice, that their absence from work is meaningful, and negotiation is possible? Hopefully, yes. Here are seven other reasons why PMA’s union victory might be meaningful for museums and their leaders everywhere.
- If you didn’t know already, staff matter. I say that here often because it’s true. Our sites, whether they are about creative expression, heritage and culture or exploration and discovery are NOTHING without their staffs. Staff care, and museum leadership needs to care back. Whether it’s helping visitors find their way around a complex site, collaborating with communities to deepen understanding, hanging pieces correctly or making sure visitors and objects are safe, museum staff make it happen. Imagine Wilkening Consulting’s “Museum-Goers When Asked to Imagine No Museums” if instead it read, “Museum Boards When Asked to Imagine No Museum Staff….”
- Museums are workplaces not just community containers of beauty, history or science. Over the last quarter century, museums have neglected their workplaces, acting as though talking about staff, leadership and money was somehow in bad taste. From a failure to value leadership, failures to talk about leadership and the workplace, museums and museum organizations have acted as if their loftier goals meant museum magic had to happen regardless of poor pay, a gender pay gap, racial and class bias, workplace bullying, the ongoing imprint of patrimony, and on and on. Why do museum board members accept bad behavior on the part of leadership that they wouldn’t tolerate in the for-profit world?
- Scarcity: Striking is a huge risk. People don’t do it for fun. “We can’t” and “we don’t” are not phrases that move conversation between workers and museum leadership forward. They aren’t “Yes, and.“Whether your endowment is in the millions or barely anything at all, staff need leadership to be transparent. What would have happened if PMA’s leadership had acknowledged its HR issues from the get-go, beginning conversations with “There’s a problem, let’s fix it, acknowledging the need for dependable healthcare, the loss of loved ones, or the addition of a new human being in a family are moments PMA should provide for and support? Compromise is best begun from a positive place. If you, your board and leadership believe staff matters you will find a way to shake off scarcity’s shackles. Everyone wants a happy, engaged staff, but if the barista across the street from the museum makes more per hour than your front-line staff, can you blame them if they don’t want to stay?
- Staff–all staff–need to feel safe, seen and supported which is why your HR Policy matters: Do you differentiate between your staff–the full time, degreed folks–and the “workers”–the part-time, hourly folks? When was the last time you looked at your HR policy? When was it written? Is it time for an update? Is it easily accessible? Does everyone, from your housekeepers to leadership, know how to find it?
- Equity matters: What if the salary genie descended tomorrow and enabled you to raise everyone’s pay? Would you do it? Would you have equitable salaries? Maybe, but maybe not. You might be perpetuating a system that for generations paid women and people of color less. Don’t take blame, take action: do an equity audit so you know for sure.
- Grow up: There’s a lot about adulting that’s ridiculously annoying: taxes, bills, being responsible, but like individuals, organizations need to grow up as well. PMA staff couldn’t grieve, and apparently, unless they had outside income, weren’t supposed to have children. Hiding behind the but-we’re-a-non-profit myth or that’s-the-way-it’s-always-been, doesn’t help anyone, least of all staff. Surviving in the museum world shouldn’t be a form of hazing–I suffered, therefore the next generation should suffer. Adult organizations recognize they’re hiring people, people with lives, loved ones and families. Their boards need to do the work so that staff can be their best selves.
- Directors aren’t just leadership’s boss: Museum directors or presidents are responsible for the entire staff, not just the leadership team. Your leadership team may be the folks you see frequently, but if harassment happens, if 40-percent of your front-line staff has to get second jobs to make ends meet, you should know. And hopefully work to make change. What would have happened if Sasha Suda had started her first week by greeting the strikers? What would that have looked like?
I’ve been writing this blog for a decade, and railing, whining, and preaching for Museumland to take staff as seriously as it takes its audience. And yet, here we are 10 years later, and the needle hasn’t moved much. Workplace Bullying is still one of my most popular posts. What does that tell you besides the field is littered with leaders who equate power with being mean? And yet, our field is full of talented, smart people. How hard is it to treasure them? What is the living wage in your region, town, city? Does your board know what percentage of your organization’s positions fall below the living wage? In September I participated in an AASLH panel titled Approaching the Museum Worker Crisis through Systems Thinking. We used the hashtag #workingonmuseumwork. Forget the hash tag. Twitter may be on the respirator by then, but what if we–and by we I mean museum service organizations, museum leaders and museum staff–dedicate 2023 to museum workers? What could the museum world look like then?
Be well. Be kind. See you in December.
Joan Baldwin
AASLH 2022: After the Words, Action?
Posted: October 3, 2022 Filed under: AASLH, Gender, gender equity, History Museums, Leadership, Leadership and Gender, Leading Across Organizations, museum staff, Workplace Bullying Leave a comment
Two weeks ago I went to AASLH’s annual conference in Buffalo, NY. I’ve gone to AASLH meetings for years, but this one was different. Maybe because for many of us it was our first public meeting since the Pandemic, and, after navigating a sea of Zooms, masks, vaccinations, uncertainty, and illness, suddenly we were loose on the world again, able to talk to one another face-to-face. But I think there was something else. Maybe I’m imagining it, but did politics and culture ripple through the conference in a way it never has before, a feeling of I’m not backing down?
My own meeting started with a panel discussion on the “Museum Worker Crisis.” My role was to provide some historical context, unraveling the past to help participants understand how the world of museum work got to where it is. It’s something I’ve done more than a few times on these pages, and I touched on issues of pay, the gender pay gap, overwork and the Red Queen effect, gender and sexual harassment, bullying, and the high cost of entering the field. I also brought up Quiet Quitting, which seems to be the Great Resignation for people who can’t resign.
My introduction laid a foundation for Dina Bailey, Michelle Moon, Sarah Jencks, and Kate Hayley Goldman to use systems thinking to untangle the problem of why museum workers are in such a pit of despair, and most importantly, what to do about it. Each table worked to define the problem, while keeping their Guiding star (a desired future state) in mind. In systems thinking the Guiding Stars are the leverage points where it’s possible to intervene in a system. For example, participants asked whether public consciousness regarding work in history and heritage sites could be changed so it’s seen as a profession with high value? If that happened, would salaries change?
As they worked, networks of Post-It notes grew across their tables. Ultimately, those were lifted and applied to the walls as each group reported out, raising still more questions like how individuals enter the field, whether an apprenticeship is more appropriate than requiring a master’s degree, and how to change a culture that tends to look backward toward a system that’s no longer viable. There were also some whopper questions like this one: Is it unethical to hire in such a poorly paid field.
Two other highlights for me at least were Rick Hill’s keynote address. Former Assistant Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, writer, father, and member of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Hill’s gentle tone belied a career that took him far from home and then back again. He struck an opening note while reminding us that place matters: That we are all born into a place, and it’s ours to use, but most of all to care for, and we must “be careful where we plant our feet.” Forty minutes later, he reminded his audience that the best land acknowledgement is to ask local indigenous people to do acknowledge place in their own language. Failing that, acknowledging a place was important to a people might be better than getting into ownership which flies in the face of the Indigenous idea that we are steward’s for the next generation, not owners.
Day one ended with the General Session titled Historical Thinking Under Fire. And holy smokes, if you needed any evidence that we’ve emerged from the Pandemic to a world that’s ever more Orwellian, this was it. In a panel discussion led by Sarah Jencks, here are some quotes I took down: Critical Race Theory is not a theory, it’s history supported by primary sources; Discomfort doesn’t mean students are scared, it means they are processing; Don’t cede the ground of patriotism, patriotism involves a good honest look at the past; and last, “Nobody cared that I lived with the trauma of enslavement as a school child.”
Unlike other conferences the comments at the panel’s close weren’t a graduate school class in one-upmanship, but a rallying cry. Individuals got up to testify about keeping books on shelves, about standing up to local government, about making John Lewis’ “good trouble.” It was awesome. Can we–and by we I mean history and heritage museums and sites–turn those individual actions and feelings into something collective? Can AASLH help us? (Actually, I think AASLH already has. See its statement on what’s happening in Memphis, not to mention its ongoing work on gender harassment with NCPH.)
As we move forward in a world decimated by climate change, beset with right-wing ideologies and wracked with political divisiveness, my hope is that history museums and heritage sites become a force. As individuals we can’t afford to enable racist, rude, misogynistic behavior. We can’t be silent. As organizations, we need to do the same thing, supporting our fellow non-profits when they are on strike or under attack. And as leaders, we must become employers where staff is safe, seen and supported, and where pay is fair and equitable. So collectively we become places where old patriarchal narratives are pushed aside, and history is told as the complex story it is, not for political gain, but because that’s how we learn—and we’re all learning, if not, pack it in NOW. That we move into the future, listening, empathizing, understanding, and working for change. That’s a history field we can be proud of.
Be well, fight the good fight, and I’ll see you in a few weeks.
Joan Baldwin
The Last Post (for 2021) & Three Words for 2022
Posted: December 20, 2021 Filed under: Human Resources, Leadership, Leading in Crisis, Nina Simon, Self-care, Work/life balance 3 Comments
In 10 days 2021 will be in the history books and we will be living 2022. At the moment though, with Omicron duplicating, it feels like a meaner, angrier version of 2020 where every choice demands serious thought. Should I go? Should I stay? Are they vaccinated AND boostered? How much do those home tests cost? What was my life like the last time prices were this high? And on and on.
Today, I went back and read my final post from 2020. In it, I laid out five ways I hoped to make change in the coming year. They were:
- Be the point person for a director search that starts by recognizing implicit bias, conducts an equitable search, resulting in a diverse, creative candidate who challenges us in new ways.
- Continue to diversify our collections, art, photography and rare books, through acquisition and in cataloguing language.
- Continue to shift our organizational lens so white privilege isn’t always center stage.
- Grow empathy.
- Nurture creativity.
Although I don’t feel hugely successful, I did, weirdly, succeed in at least three out of five. We hired a new leader, someone who’s smart, kind, empathetic and supportive. Having worked for someone who was none of those things, I can tell you it makes a huge difference. I continue to work at acknowledging and then shifting my own white privilege so the lens is more inclusive and empathetic. I try daily to nurture my own and other’s creativity while also being empathetic. Creativity needs time, however, and some days it feels as though it is trapped on a container ship off the coast. The area of change that’s proved hardest is diversifying our collections mostly because turning that wheel means money. Our donors are often older, white and male, making them not always enthusiastic about building collections that are non-white and female. Nevertheless, it remains a written goal, and one that’s easy to point to when we’re offered a gift.
Over this year, I’ve written about workplace bullying and crying at work specifically for women because I believe they are sometimes caught in COVID’s crosshairs in ways men are not. I wrote about taking grief to work because this has been, and remains, a deeply sad year for me. I also wrote about creativity and trust, and I wrote about Nina Simon, who remains a she-ro for me mostly because she has the courage to walk away from all this museum stuff and write a novel. At least I think that’s what she’s doing because periodically I answer her probing questions on Twitter about one of her characters who seems to be about my age.
It’s time to say something about the coming year so here is my hope: My hope is that every museum leader, whether they lead a program or an organization, whether they lead 1.5 people or the equivalent of a small town, can, when they’re alone, say honestly and truthfully, “My staff is safe, seen and supported.” If that’s not true, if there are tiny things that need to be changed or great gaping holes, my hope is they make that sentence a truth in 2022. If your staff is safe, they are not harassed and bullied. Should they be, because you can’t control everything, you will have implemented processes to support and help them. If they are seen, they know you believe in them, in the person they really are, not some artificial version of themselves. And if they are supported, they are mentored, encouraged, and given space to be creative, no matter their assigned tasks.
If you–because you are important too–and your staff are safe, seen and supported, the constant gnawing need for self care will also lessen. It won’t be perfect. Life rarely is, but it will be a long way toward better. So think about what you need to do to move the needle toward those three simple words: safe, seen, supported.
I’ll close this end-of-year post with a poem. Given the space we’re currently in, we probably should read more poetry, and the title is fitting. In the meantime, be well, take care of those you love, and I’ll be back here in 2022.
Joan Baldwin
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón – 1976-
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
An Anniversary, But Also a Question: Can Each of Us Do Something to Make the Workplace Better?
Posted: December 13, 2021 Filed under: Gender, Leadership, Organizational Values, pay equity, Race Leave a comment
This coming week Leadership Matters celebrates its ninth birthday. That’s roughly 450 posts written since December 13, 2012. Phew. I started this blog to promote the first version of Leadership Matters, a book Anne Ackerson and I wrote in 2012, and then revised in 2019 as Leadership Matters: Leading Museums in an Age of Discord. In addition to the blog’s birthday, it’s also the time of year when we look back at the year past. 2021 remains a strange and confounding time. In December last year, those of us who hadn’t been relieved of our positions, found ourselves working largely from home, visiting our collections and sites when allowed.
Without a vaccine, it was a lonely, isolating time. And yet, as I’ve written so many times on these pages, the pandemic lifted the rock off a lot of problems. It didn’t fix anything, but for the museum world, it spotlighted a host of workplace issues around race, gender, pay, leadership and on and on. And now, a year later those issues are still here, made more acute by a new forthrightness. Some–myself included– think we need a do-over or at the very least, a series of conversations about where the world of museum work took a wrong turn, leaving so many underpaid, under-appreciated and angry.
I suggested such a conversation last week, posing a mythical group of people I’d like to see around the table. Whether that can or will actually happen is another story, but in the meantime, I want to underscore that change isn’t something that can be solved only from the top down. “They,” whoever “they” are in your world, aren’t going to sweep in and make things magically better. If you make this a board problem or a director’s problem, you shift responsibility from “ours” to “theirs,” as if this were only an issue of leadership. It is a leadership problem, but it’s also a systemic problem, meaning we all own a piece of it. If you’re enraged even reading that sentence, you, who feels powerless in your hourly job where you’re over-educated, under-compensated, and have far more responsibility than authority, remember how systemic issues concern the whole rather than its parts, meaning you play a part as well. What can you do? Perhaps only small things, but small things are still important. Be the kind colleague. Stand up for your fellow workers. Join the union if your museum has one. Attend staff meetings. Know what your personnel policy says. Don’t have one? Lobby for one. Lobby with your fellow workers. Ask them to lobby for you. Don’t be neutral. Speak up. Remember that even at the most enlightened organizations, women, and especially women of color, are paid less so when you hear complaints about pay, don’t discredit them. There is a pay gap. And it is meaningful. In a very bad way.
This week Fast Company surveyed 6,000 employees about the future of work. Fast Company is devoted to the business world, but it’s likely what their employees say they want has some crossover with the museum world. And what do they want? Flexibility. They’re happy working from home, and they don’t necessarily want to change. Apparently 78-percent of their respondents named flexibility as a top priority. Second on the list? Almost half (49%) want to share values with company leadership. I’ve written a lot about workplace values on these pages. Museum jobs are hard to come by, and precisely because the process is so fraught, I’m not sure applicants ask about organizational values, when they should. Fast Company also commented on how for some companies who hired during the pandemic, many employees have never worked on site, never had a hallway conversation, never been to a face-to-face meeting, and no surprise, it’s hard to hold a team together without human interaction. With many museums open again, staffers are back in the building, but the article underscores once again, the need for imaginative, humane onboarding.
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This is also the time of year when I look back at the top posts for 2021. If popularity indicates readership, the most-read posts confirm the dark place we’re stuck in. For the third year running, Leadership and Workplace Bullying tops the most-read list, a sad testament to the climate and concerns in museum and heritage organization offices. In the second spot is last week’s post Can We Talk Together About Museum Work? Soon? followed by, Is the Chicago Firing So Different from the COVID Firings? and On Labor Day, Taking the Museum World’s Work Temperature.
Leadership Matters last post for 2021 will appear next week. Then I will be on hiatus until the week of January 10.
Be well, be kind, and do good work.
Joan Baldwin
How Not to Be That Person
Posted: October 11, 2021 Filed under: Idea flow, Leading Across Organizations 3 Comments
Here’s something I struggle with: When you’ve worked at an organization for a while, if you’re at all alert, you’ve seen a lot. Sometimes it isn’t even meaningful in the moment, and it’s only later you piece together what happened with some sort of a critical eye. So…when you’re in a staff meeting and someone with a shorter tenure than yours, comes up with an idea they are truly excited about, what do you do? How do you NOT be the person that everyone complains about who blathers about a) the way we’ve always done it is probably safest, most efficient, best (pick an adjective) or b) who explains why something won’t work because they tried it.
Maybe some of you have seen Progressive’s commercials on how not to be your parents. They are amusing, at least the first several times you see them. One of the reasons they work is that there is a truth to them. Everyone learns, mimics and imitates the people they know best, and they are often parents. I only bring this up, because when you’re a certain age, have been in your job more than a decade, you find yourself suddenly becoming, not your parents, but the people everyone hates, the Debby downers, the negative Nellies, or perhaps most cutting of all, the Boomers.
So what did I do in our recent staff meeting? I regret to say that in the moment, I did nothing. I decided that silence was safer than challenging ideas in front of my colleagues and my new leader. Was that the right thing to do? Probably not. In retrospect, I wished the folks brimming with ideas had turned to the long-tenured staff and said, “Did you ever do any of these things back in the day?” But that’s probably not their job. So, after some thinking, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say, “You know, we did a project like that, and with hindsight, here’s what I wish we’d done differently.” Perhaps I could have portrayed our past experiences less as something personal we need to guard, and more as something that happened within the particular culture of our organization at a particular time, and what we learned.
Years ago, I worked in the newsroom of a weekly paper. No, it was not The New York Times, not even close, but what it shared with every other paper at the time, was that there weren’t any stars. Everyone’s work was challenged, edited to death, and contributed to a whole. We won when the paper won. You lose your ego in that kind of situation. When your writing, which you always thought was pretty good, comes back line-edited in the extreme, you develop a level of detachment. Maybe it’s that detachment that is missing in content and program discussions in nonprofits and museums. If you enter a discussion with a sense of ownership–this is my idea and I’m going to push it forward or else– collaboration becomes challenging. You may have trouble even listening to colleagues as your first priority is protecting your precious idea.
So even though I’m the first to admit, I have trouble putting this in practice, here are some thoughts to help curb the dreaded WADITW (We’ve always done it that way.)
If you’re the newbie:
- Be prepared for resistance.
- Don’t just rant about what you don’t like about the old way. Maybe do a little research and demonstrate what your idea brings to the table that’s new and improved.
- Give people time to process your idea. Let it gestate.
- Be willing to collaborate. Few ideas are born perfect. Collaborate with your colleagues and let their ideas make yours even better.
If you’re long-tenured:
- Listen.
- Consider not how this idea is different from what happened five or ten years ago, but instead, what you learned from that experience.
- Look for ways your knowledge of the organization and its culture can make your colleague’s idea fly.
- Offer yourself as a resource.
- Recenter yourself to be a collaborator not a dissenter. That earlier project wasn’t yours, it was the museum’s or heritage organization’s. Support your colleagues in creating something new.
Easier said than done, I know, but museum staffs that collaborate are the healthy ones.
I want to close this week with an announcement about workplace bullying. I started writing about bullying in 2016 in part because I was a victim myself, and in part because the more Anne Ackerson and I interviewed women for Women in the Museum, the more endemic this problem seemed. Sadly, it’s still a problem so I want to urge you to attend Gender Equity in Museums Movement’s Circle on Bullying October 21, 2021. The speaker is Tamsin Russell from the UK’s Museum Association. She’s a force and I know this will be a lively discussion so I hope to see you there.
Be kind. Do good work. Stay safe.
Joan Baldwin
Leadership Matters 
