Leading from Where You Are: When Theory Meets Application
Posted: April 20, 2020 Filed under: Leadership, Mentoring, Museum, museum career, Nonprofit Leadership, Professional Development, Self-Aware | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit, soft skills Leave a comment
By Andrea Crivello, Guest Blogger
There have been overwhelming and challenging day-to-day realities in my professional and personal life as I, like all of us, navigate the presence of COVID-19. As I also juggle being a soon-to-graduate graduate student, there is a ‘business as usual’ characteristic to my coursework that, to my surprise, is equal parts stress and stabilization in such an uncertain time. With the global pandemic attacking from all sides, I’ve observed that reactive is to management what proactive is to perseverance and leadership…and completing my degree with sanity intact.
There were two influencing factors that prompted me to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania: The first, its motto: Leges sine moribus vanae or, “Laws without morals are useless.” …I’ll let that be as it may. The second, its Non-Profit Leadership Program (NPL).
Why?
Maybe it’s a kudos to UPenn’s marketing team, for swapping “leadership” for “management,” but in all seriousness, I researched degree programs for three years before landing on one that aligned with my personal and professional values and career goals as an Associate Curator/aspiring ED in the museum field. The NPL program has all the makings of an MBA: courses in finance, law, statistics, entrepreneurship, marketing; but it also includes courses like social norms for social change, design thinking for social impact, ethics for social impact, and the difficult art of listening. **
There is a saturation of scholarly articles, thought pieces, and webinars that all aim to profile what good leadership looks like, and increasingly so in the museum sector. I had the good fortune to experience first hand what it is like embodying leadership characteristics at a non profit museum during the program’s Leadership Practicum. The Practicum is the culmination of rigorous study with intensive application before receiving the degree. More explicitly, the goal of the practicum is to engage in a professional learning process, while enhancing my understanding of how leadership happens in a social impact organization. The goal is to contribute to the practicum organization utilizing skills learned in the NPL program. This was an opportunity to witness leadership in action and benefit directly from individual mentoring and personal leadership development.
Weekly mentor meetings were to include definitions and requirements of leadership, guidance on management of an organization, in-depth status of organizational conversations, career planning and guidance, and conversations on the social impact landscape locally, nationally, and globally. After working with Anne Ackerson as my mentor while completing 500+ hours of practicum work over five months, I was asked to write a thought piece about the experience.
Here are the key takeaways:
Mentorship Matters
The need and commitment by current museum leaders to support emerging professionals cannot be overstated. Not only are their institutions the direct beneficiaries of activating innovation and cultivation, but they help transform next generation leaders.
Exposure to Museums at Every Level Matters
Museum professionals only wear one hat (said no one ever). Yet as a museum professional functioning as a curator-volunteer manager-archivist-registrar-collections manager, it was an entirely different experience to engage in a new strategic plan for an organization, partake in development project planning efforts, have a voice in a COVID-19 related marketing campaign, and join horticulturists researching a cultural landscape report to inform future public use of museum grounds. I think, due to the busy and intensive nature of museum work, it is easy to become siloed in our positions. Participating in these comprehensive projects and experiences not only made me stronger in my personal work, but made me a stronger colleague through leadership’s “soft-skills”: understanding and empathy.
Agility and Resilience in Leadership at Every Level Matters…Perhaps More Than Management Itself
Given my background, exhibition development was a large component of my practicum, during which there were many changes and additions to the number of pieces in the show due to hesitations on the part of private donors. Despite the consistent addition of manual labor as a department of one, and circling back with fine art and insurance companies, the importance of quickly shifting gears and rising to the occasion of timely completion for public benefit was clear. Similarly, resilience came into play when the irony of having never-before-seen works newly accessible to the public, now inaccessible due to COVID-19 stay at home orders, resulted in a quick pivot to a virtual exhibition opening.
While this may not be new information or experiences, I hope it sparks more critical thought and dialogue that everyone can and should embody leadership right from where they are.
**No, I am not a paid advertiser for UPenn.
10 Ways to Create Your Own Urgency
Posted: November 25, 2019 Filed under: museum career, Professional Development, Work Habits, Work/life balance | Tags: career, museums, nonprofit Leave a comment
Prompted by another lively discussion with our JHU students, I have been thinking about urgency. Not the fakey-wakey-I’m-so-stressed kind, but the this-really-matters-kind. I come from a long line of list-making people. People who perpetually arrive early, and for whom planning a complicated family event is as exciting as being with relatives. Urgency is in my DNA, but it has taken me decades to realize not everyone functions that way, and that life without lists or Google calendar isn’t everybody’s idea of hell.
Urgency is in fact a two lane road, one for your museum, and one for you. In the organizational lane are the billboards strategically placed by museum leadership that tell you where the organization’s going. They might say things like: “Collaborative Community Engagement” or “2020 is the Year of Women of Color.” In the personal lane urgency is sometimes a little mushier. The directional signs leaders post to help staff get from idea to reality aren’t available when it’s you by yourself with tasks that are sometimes boring, repetitive, or unclear. Sometimes you have to post your own signs: “Beware the swamp of never-ending cataloging” or “Gallery talks ahead.” And then there’s your own career. What role does urgency play when you know you’re in a mid-career slump? When you’ve actually outgrown your work, but the only person who knows it is you, and you’re avoiding thinking about it, and yet every day on the way to work the signs could read “Another Day at the Job that Bores You,” or “Have Fun Being Unappreciated.”
Urgency is what tells us something matters. And knowing something matters, and we’re part of it, is a key ingredient in what gets us up in the morning. If you go to work every day bored, sad or angry, those feelings have their own destructive kind of power. Here are 10 ways to put that urgency to work:
- Reflect on why you’re not happy at work. Is it the work itself? Is it the team you work with, the organization as a whole or is it something separate from work, that were you to land in museum nirvana, would still be with you?
- Try only thinking about yourself. When there’s actually a job on the table that’s more than a pipe dream, you can worry about finding an affordable rental, your aging parents, good school systems or the new intriguing human you just met.
- Give yourself a deadline to tweak your resume. Make sure it actually sounds like the person you are now. Make sure it reflects new skills and experiences along with your career wants and desires. And offer yourself a reward for a task completed.
- Ditto your LinkedIn page. (I know, really? But it is one of the ways 21st century people study one another.)
- Pull out your current job description and re-write it, not for your boss, for you. Make it read like the job you really want. Ponder how it’s different from the job you currently have.
- Talk about career moves with your kitchen cabinet, your posse, your group of colleagues dedicated to supporting one another while telling each other the truth. Once you share your game plan and enlist their support, the fact that you’re “looking” is in essence public. For some, having a group hold you accountable makes for progress.
- If sharing with a group puts you off, try working with a career buddy. Collaborate on resume writing and reading, for example, or share job descriptions. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes helps us see what we’re avoiding.
- When you’re commuting or waiting in the doctor’s office, scan the job lists. Look for language that makes you comfortable.
- Apply, apply, apply. What’s the worst that can happen? That you won’t hear anything? And that really is the worst because it’s a kind of neglect and unprofessionalism that in the age of algorithms and email is unforgivable.
- And don’t apply to anything that doesn’t at least list a salary range. There’s too much on your plate to worry about going down a rabbit hole to discover they can only pay minimum wage.
One of our 2019 Leadership Matters interviewees is Karen Carter. Carter is smart, dynamic, and co-founder of Canada’s Black Artists Networks Dialog. She told me, “I try to do a job interview every two years or so because it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised.” That’s Carter creating her own urgency. How will you create yours?
********
In the United States, this week is Thanksgiving. Many of us will gather with family and friends to eat, touch base, reflect and simply say thanks. In that spirit, thank you to all our readers in 153 countries around the world who share in this endeavor of being good leaders for museums and heritage organizations.
Joan Baldwin
Museum Leadership: Your Observation is Your Obligation
Posted: September 3, 2019 Filed under: AASLH, gender equity, History Museums, Leadership and Gender, museum staff, Organizational Values, Professional Development, Workplace Bias | Tags: empathy, Leadership, museums, women Leave a comment
If leaders were cartoon characters, they’d have heads topped with arrows instead of hair. Why? Because whether they mean to or not, leaders exude direction. They are points on the organizational compass. And when direction isn’t clear there are plenty of folks in the hallway, around the coffeemaker or after meetings to interpret what has or hasn’t been said. That’s a preface to what follows, meaning I may not be correct. After all, I’m only an observer.
If you couldn’t attend last week’s meeting of the American Association of State and Local History in Philadelphia, it was a good one. Anchored by the indomitable Eastern State Penitentiary, and the city’s other national historic sites, not to mention its many museums, the conference drew a large crowd. The theme was “What Are We Waiting For?” but the subtext was certainly history’s importance in understanding the present. It was there in the keynote, moderated by Sean Kelly, Director of Interpretation at Eastern State Penitentiary, and featuring Susan Burton, a Los Angeles-based writer and prison reform activist whose memoir details a 20-year cycle of addiction, pain, sadness and prison, and Dr. Talitha LeFlouria, a University of Virginia associate professor, and author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, where the arrow pointed directly from centuries of enslavement to decades of mass incarceration. And it was also there in Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s myth-toppling speech about George Washington’s obsessive search for his runaway slave Ona Judge. And, I’m sure it was there in the many panels, tours, and countless conversations as conference attendees struggled, argued, and supported one another in connecting past and present. If you want to interpret those directional signals, what you might say is the complacent, white, male narrative of the past is disappearing, replaced by a host of other black and brown voices, from individuals who’ve been here months, and those whose past stretches back to enslavement or others whose land was stolen, and they lived out their days on reservations.
For me though there was another signal: The four panels and one workshop that addressed women in the history museum workplace. Anne Ackerson and I have written and spoken about this topic for almost seven years, and in that time there were more than a few moments when getting one panel on women’s issues for AASLH or AAM seemed like an achievement. So maybe I’m reading too much into this, but finding AASLH President John Dichtl in a panel titled “#MeToo: AASLH, NCPH and the Field” was a sea change. Perhaps it’s AASLH’s size and more cohesive membership, but its leadership is clearly listening to women’s issues in the field. When asked to post salary ranges in their job announcements, AASLH did. And their willingness to open the annual meeting to discussions about women’s leadership, sexual harassment in the field, and pay equity tells me they’re acknowledging that while the heritage organization/history museum workplace might not be Nirvana, they want to make it better.
So, here’s a thank you: Thank you for a great conference. Thank you to AASLH’s leaders and planners for changing the narrative; thank you for publicly acknowledging the consequences of workplace harassment, and gender pay inequity. Thank you to the male leaders who showed up to represent at four of the five sessions. Kudos to all the women who spoke, especially those brave enough to reveal personal stories.
One final plea though: Do something with what you learned. Commit to personal change. Be kind. Support one another. Don’t do it because someone’s different than you. Do it because you are colleagues. If you are a leader, and haven’t addressed the gender pay gap in your organization, do an equity audit. See how bad things are. If you don’t have a values statement or a statement about the kind of behavior you expect in your museum or heritage site, write one. Don’t wait ’til next year to hear it another time and realize 12 months went by and you didn’t move the needle at all.
Make change now. Do it as individuals, do it as organizations. To quote Enimini Ekong, Superintendent of Nicodemus National Historic Site and Chief of Education and Interpretation at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, “Your observation is your obligation.” So for goodness sakes look and then act.
Joan Baldwin
Leadership Lessons from Our New Book
Posted: August 26, 2019 Filed under: History Museums, Leadership, Museum, Nonprofit Leadership, Professional Development | Tags: Leadership, Leadership Matters, nonprofit Leave a comment
It’s been six years since we published Leadership Matters. When we wrote the original version, Anne Ackerson and I were concerned about the lack of attention paid to leadership in the museum field, particularly in history and cultural heritage organizations. There was a notion that through some office magic or, simply, inertia, individuals became leaders, and if they didn’t, mediocrity was fine; in fact, mediocrity was better than change. Little, if any, investment was made in human capital. You became a director and the rest was up to you. The motto was sink or swim, and not everybody looked graceful in the pool. What we learned, however, was leadership wasn’t some in-born trait, miraculously recognized by search committees. Instead, it was a commitment to self-awareness, authenticity, courage and vision, with an ongoing undercurrent of reflection and experimentation.
Now it’s 2019 and we’ve just published a new edition of Leadership Matters: Leading Museums in an Age of Discord. It’s curious, exciting, and remarkable how much things have changed in such a short time. In 2013, our concerns were internal: a field that was at best negligent about training and developing its leaders, failing to acknowledge that a content-driven education did not necessarily prepare an individual for coping with the foibles of a board and a staff or the public. Today, those concerns remain, but there are huge external pressures as well: rapid-fire communication, communities — from staff to stakeholders — who require a voice, especially those traditionally underserved or ignored, and need to see themselves somewhere inside a museum. Otherwise the work doesn’t matter because without community connection museums are just warehouses of things.
Today’s leaders still possess the four characteristics we identified in 2013: self-awareness, authenticity, courage and vision. That hasn’t changed, but the world has, and our nine new interviewees, LaTanya Autry, Cheryl Blackman, Karen Carter, Sean Kelly, Lisa Lee, Azuka MuMin, Franklin Vagnone, Hallie Winter, and Jorge Zamanillo, all approach their jobs from a different space. Gone are the days of sage-on-a-stage leadership. These leaders are collaborators, relationship builders, empathizers.
Both versions of Leadership Matters end with “10 Simple Truths,” common sense practices from all 36 interviewees about leadership:
- Get invested: As interviewee Christy Coleman wrote, “Museums are not neutral space. We may not be activists, but we’re not neutral. If your community is in crisis and you’re an institution that has the resources to add to that conversation to bring it out of crisis, you are failing if you’re not actively involved in the needs of your community.”
- Be a trust builder: Museums succeed on the relationships they build in their communities, on their staffs, on their boards. It’s that simple. Relationships matter. So do words. And deeds.
- Embrace the greater good: Leaders are the moral compass for their institutions. Don’t check your values at the door, bring them to work. Every day.
- Create a candid culture: Honesty underpins trust.
- Up your frequency: Listen, listen, listen, and remember to get out of your office and know who you serve. As interviewee Azuka MuMin puts it: “Leadership has taught me who I am as a person, vulnerable and exposed, and the better I know myself, the better I am able to lead.”
- Learn and grow together: Leadership is a process. It’s learning. Invest in your people whether they are board members, volunteers or staff, leaders or followers.
- Get integrated: Read widely, think across spectrums. Who or what adds to your institutional narrative?
- Tap your entire network: It’s not all about you. Growing a museum is about being open to possibility.
- Commit to leadership: Leadership matters. Invest in your staff, give them the tools to become leaders. Good leaders are problem solvers and collaborators. They’re also good followers.
- Be accountable: Take the heat. Move forward. Don’t play the blame game. You’re a leader for a reason.
For those of you who will be at the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) annual meeting this week in Philadelphia, we will see you there. And if you’d like a copy of Leadership Matters: Leading Museums in an Age of Discord, we’d be happy to sign it for you, Thursday, August 29, from 3:00-4:00 pm at the Rowman & Littlefield booth in the Exhibit Hall. In the meantime, lead well, with courage, empathy, and vision. And if you see any of our interviewees in Philadelphia this week, be sure to stop and thank them.
Joan Baldwin & Anne Ackerson
When Large-Scale Professional Development Can’t Keep Up
Posted: June 3, 2019 Filed under: AAM, Diversity, Leadership, Museum, museum career, Professional Development | Tags: career, Leadership, museums 6 Comments
Image: Courtesy of the American Alliance of Museums
By Guest Blogger Jackie Peterson
(See Jackie’s bio below)
Prior to launching the independent consultant phase of my career, I coveted the experience my museum-employed colleagues had going to AAM’s annual meeting. I used to think how wonderful it must be to learn what’s happening across our field, to meet new colleagues, to explore museums in a new or favorite city. But since striking out on my own, it has become clear this experience is no longer for me. Here’s why:
COST: Having to cover all of my costs to attend a conference now directly impacts my revenue. I’m only a few years into building my independent practice, so I’m not raking in 6-figure projects (yet). So I’ve had to be incredibly strategic about how I devote my resources to professional development. Like many others, I can no longer justify the cost. For all AAM talks about equity and inclusion, the cost of attendance continues to rise without addressing how it affects attendance. I am no longer a member of AAM, so even registering early would have cost me $695. Add the flight and lodging, and that’s a minimum total of $1850 – this doesn’t include meals or other networking and evening events. The response is always “We’re doing what we can to offset costs by offering scholarships.” The reality is that AAM estimates that 5,000* people attended the conference this year, and yet less than 1 percent** of attendees received a scholarship. That’s not equitable. I’m not saying every attendee needs a scholarship, but there are barriers inherent in the general pricing and pricing structure of this conference that prevent so many from being able to attend.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES: The Museum Expo is supposedly the largest generator of conference revenue, yet AAM continues to miss opportunities to be more equitable within this space. Rarely – if ever – have I seen AAM highlight vendors that are women-owned, LGBTQ+ – owned or POC-owned or any intersection therein. Like the overall conference, it seems like whoever can foot the bill gets to come. Yes, bringing in revenue is necessary, but surely there are ways to allow smaller businesses, especially local or regional vendors, to participate. To add to that, rarely does AAM advocate for local businesses (beyond museums) in the host city by providing attendees with that information and encouraging people to patronize them. This is information that is easily available from local chambers of commerce and other business organizations, and even easier for AAM to distribute. Every year, I continue to be disappointed by who appears in the Expo space, and who does not.
MEDIOCRE, STATUS QUO SESSION CONTENT: Very often I attend a session based on the program’s description (as many do) and find the content presented is much different than the description or the presenters just rattle off their latest professional achievements to a captive audience. On top of that, the same names and faces keep showing up. I spent some time combing through the presenters on the first full day of the conference (Monday, May 20). After some unscientific analysis, I found that of the 65 or so sessions that day (exclusive of those that took place in the Museum Expo), roughly nine had panelists that were 50-percent or more people of color. And a majority of the panelists (almost 75-percent) were managers, senior managers, department heads, directors or chief officers. Again, for all the talk of equity and inclusion, the conversations that happened that first day were led or facilitated by an overwhelmingly white group of people in senior positions. With some exceptions, this means the perspective on content being presented is very limited. And I am no longer interested in these kinds of conversations. It reinforces the idea that “leadership” is a position rather than a skillset that can be embodied and enacted at every level of an organization. More importantly, it limits opportunities for more junior staff and staff from underrepresented departments (security, facilities, maintenance, front-line visitor services staff) to engage more formally in field-wide conversations.
While I recognize that some of these issues are deeply systemic, many of them don’t require upending AAM as an organization to fix. Organizations like the National Council on Public History (NCPH), the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), and regional museum associations have already been making strides and taking measures to actively include people and keep conference content relevant, rather than simply posture. As a large organization, AAM is in a unique position to be the change, so to speak. But the more I witness personally and hear anecdotally from other colleagues, the more AAM seems to lack credibility and relevance to museum work.
*https://twitter.com/AAMers/status/1131660345838329856
** https://twitter.com/AAMers/status/1132670274648891393
Jackie Peterson is an independent exhibit developer, curator and writer based in Seattle, WA. She loves nothing more than working with museums to unearth and share their most meaningful – and more importantly, untold – stories.
Prior to establishing her independent practice, Jackie spent six years learning the museum trade at Ralph Appelbaum Associates in NYC. There, she served as a content coordinator and developer for a wide variety of projects from the NASCAR Hall of Fame to the S.E.A Aquarium at Resorts World Sentosa to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She has always loved the intersection of public service, cultural institutions and education, and has landed in the exhibit design world in order to pursue this work.
Jackie currently serves on the steering committee for the Museums & Race initiative and on the Northwest Regional Council for the National Parks Conservation Association.
How Do You Track Accomplishments and Make Meaning from Them?
Posted: March 4, 2019 Filed under: Creativity, Happiness, Idea flow, Leadership, Museum, museum career, Professional Development | Tags: career, Leadership, museums, nonprofit 4 Comments
When someone asks what you do, what do you say? If you’re a curator, an education curator, a digital curator or museum director how do you explain your job to your great aunt or that family friend whose children are surgeons and investment bankers? And having explained your work life in two sentences and gotten a look of pure puzzlement, do you know what you actually do? By that I mean, do you have any sense of what you accomplish in a given day, week or month?
My colleague Anne Ackerson does. She has an accomplishment jar on her desk. Every time she completes a project or does something worthwhile, she drops a piece of paper in the jar with a note about the accomplishment. On New Year’s day, she re-reads her year through the lens of jobs well done. I am not so organized, but I work for a large organization that requires weekly reports, bi-annual check-ins, and annual performance reviews. But even with all that reporting take it from me: It’s possible to think about your job only in generalities or worse–and this is very, very gendered–to see it only in terms of what you haven’t accomplished. The result? It’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve achieved.
Why is this important? First, seeing progress is a morale boost. At the end of a bad week, it can seem as though the needle never moved, and you accomplished nothing. And that same week can feel so long that activities completed Monday may have disappeared in a fog of what went wrong by Friday. Plus, how often have we talked about leadership and self-awareness in these posts? A lot. And what is an accomplishment review except an acknowledgement of your strengths?
In 2011 two Harvard Business Review researchers, Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, looked at how the for-profit world drives innovation. Focused on individuals on the creative side of things, they asked 238 individuals at 26 different companies to answer a daily email about their workday ups and downs. Data from 12,000 emails yielded some important conclusions. First, workers are more creative when they’re happy, and that happiness spills over to colleagues and to the organization itself. Second, they discovered that many of their subjects’ “best days” directly correlated with days when there was perceptible progress on a given project by them or their team.
It’s tempting to conclude that happiness comes with the conclusion of a project–the moment when Anne drops the paper in her Accomplishment Jar–but that’s not what Amabile and Kramer’s work showed. In their study, it was the small wins, the daily movement of the needle that brought happiness. Understanding and charting those small wins over time is important in understanding our own sense of accomplishment.
What can you as an individual do?
- Make a chart: Divide your work life into its major headings–collections care, team management, professional development, and list the things you’ve done each week, month or year. Or just use a jar. But be sure to remember to empty it and read the contents.
- Progress and a sense of accomplishment are intimately linked to creativity. Do you have a job where you check your brain at the door? Then look for ways to raise the creativity quotient. Chart your accomplishments in your off hours–miles run, words written, volunteer hours logged.
And if you’re a leader?
- Check-in on your employees, don’t check-up. Look for what’s holding them back, and see how you can help. Remember that leaders remove barriers. Be a resource not a sheriff.
- See work as iterative. We learn, we accomplish, we get better at what we do. Don’t make one-on-one meetings a laundry list of work yet to be done.
- Use the progress checklist from Amabile and Kramer @ HBR:
Remember this equation: meaningful work+clear and reasonable goals=workplace happiness=creativity= meaningful work.
Yours for accomplishment,
Joan Baldwin
Museum Staff Matter: Let Them Know It
Posted: January 21, 2019 Filed under: Leadership, Leading Across Organizations, Museum, Museum Boards, museum staff, Nonprofit Boards, Nonprofit Leadership, Organizational Values, pay equity, Professional Development, Volunteers, Workplace Values | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit, transparency 1 Comment
We can’t begin this week without mentioning museum staff who are among the many U.S. Government workers furloughed for a month. Words aren’t worth much, but we feel for you. We often whine on these pages about low pay, but you’re in the land of no pay, and we wish the shutdown would end. It’s likely cold comfort, but we’re proud AAMD offers a list of museums across the country offering government workers free admission. If you are among the federal workers currently out of work, check this out: a state by state list of free admission.
Based on last week’s post–a back-and-forth between Frank Vagnone and me –I thought maybe we should talk about governing boards. If you’re a leader they’re the people you probably see a lot of–some weeks maybe too much. They are the deciders. They may exercise that obligation too frequently or not often enough. They may fret about capital expenses, about decaying infrastructure, about risk, but–if you’re a leader, here’s a question for you–does your board worry about staff? Or is the staff your problem? You and your leadership team hire them, nurture them, and, if need be, fire them. What does your board know about them?
Here are some questions for you and your board:
For you, the museum leader:
- Do you know what it costs to live in your county, city or town? Not what it costs you, what it costs your lowest paid full-time employee.
- Do you know what the living wage is for your locale?
- Do you know the ratio between your salary and your lowest paid FTE?
- What benchmarks do you use to set salaries?
- Do you know whether your organization’s salaries are equitable or not? Does your museum or heritage organization have a race/gender pay gap?
- What is the racial and ethnic makeup of your board? Is it among the 46-percent of museum boards that are all white?
For your board members:
- Do they know what it costs to live in your county, city or town?
- Do they understand what a living wage is and why it matters?
- Does your board understand there’s a national gender pay gap and how it affects your organization?
- What is the racial and ethnic makeup of your board? How does it affect the board’s decision making? How does it affect the community’s view of your organization? Is that something your board has discussed?
- Have the words “implicit bias” ever been mentioned at a board meeting? If so, what happened?
Have you and your board tried any of the following:
- Have you talked about wage equity as a serious and ongoing problem in the museum world?
- Have you addressed the costs of hiring, replacing and retraining staff?
- Do you and your board know what it’s like to live in your community on the lowest hourly wage your organization offers?
- Do you pay men more than women? Do you pay white staff more than staff of color? And that’s not a question about your personal beliefs, it’s about what actually happens.
- Has your board and your organization come to consensus on a values statement?
These are complex problems. Board and staff have to believe in change to make it happen.
- Board and staff are co-dependent. Make sure you have the right people on the staff and on the board. Acknowledge the importance of each team, board and staff.
- Make your meetings about doing rather than reviewing. Plan, reflect, strategize.
- There are museums without walls, without collections, but there are almost none without staff. Paid or volunteer, staff carry out mission and reflect the museum’s values every day. Boards and leaders who don’t invest in staff and volunteers equitably, preside over a a work and volunteer force that’s disaffected, dissatisfied and discouraged.
- Find hope and optimism. If staff feels victimized, the solution isn’t to hire new staff, it’s to find the source of their victimization, and correct it.
- Don’t let yourself fall into the scarcity mindset: the pie is as big as you choose to make it.
- Staff matter. Let them know it.
Joan Baldwin
Image: Field Museum staff at the Speak Up for Science March, 2017
Job Offer? Use the Moment.
Posted: November 12, 2018 Filed under: Museum, museum career, museum salaries, Professional Development, Salary | Tags: career, museums, nonprofit Leave a comment
This week, along with five colleagues, I helped run a discussion about pay at the New England Museum Association’s 100th anniversary meeting in Stamford, CT. The meeting opened at the same time as newly-unionized hotel workers staged a picket line as part of their ongoing wage negotiations. As a result, our session was one of many that left the Hilton in solidarity with the hotel workers, holding our discussion across the drive in a small park.
It was the first day that felt like fall, but bright and beautiful. Attendees gathered in groups to discuss issues around unpaid internships, emerging professional pay, gender and pay, diversity and pay, and salary negotiations. Towards the end, groups reported out on their top thoughts. Ultimately those will make their way to NEMA in the hopes they will continue to spur action toward raising the field’s salaries.
One thing that struck me listening to the report-outs was how important negotiation or at least human interaction is in launching or continuing a job successfully. Ilene Frank, COO of CT Historical Society, and Diane Jellerette, Director of the Norwalk Historical Society, both commented afterwards how few people seem to know their own worth when an offer is on the table. Too many view that moment as if there is still a line outside the door of equally qualified people all clamoring for the position. “They don’t understand, we don’t want our second choice,” Frank said. “And they don’t understand their power,” Jellerette added.
Their point? Too few, and particularly too few women, understand the power job applicants possess when the offer is on the table. Job searches are time sponges. Work is neglected. Money is spent. Teams–and sometimes boards of trustees– assembled and focused. After a process that can last weeks and occasionally months, no one wants a no. As an applicant, you weren’t chosen as one of many, you were chosen because you were the best for this position. USE THE MOMENT. It is potent.
In fact, the way you negotiate your offer sets a template for your future. Your salary and benefits recalibrate from whatever you and your new employers decide. Years from now your retirement package will be determined by how you behave in this moment. So…no pressure, but DON’T LEAVE MONEY ON THE TABLE. If you’re in the job search process, particularly if you’re new to the museum world, here are some things to think about when someone picks you for what hopefully is your dream job.
- Be grateful. You aren’t the only ones who’ve been through a lot to make this happen, and these folks picked you. Say thank-you.
- Ask to think about it. The little person in your head may be doing your happy dance, but you’re in the sweet spot. Press pause.
- Go home. Talk to the people who matter to you. Look at your budget. Calculate your expenses. Can you live in this town/city/region on what they’ve offered? If you don’t know, find out how much that costs.
- DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE. Know what the field is paying. AAM, along with many of the regional museum and statewide nonprofit associations, do salary surveys. Find them and use them. And for goodness sake, if you’re in a field like development or IT that moves across the non-profit world, know what organizations outside museums pay.
- Some of us are epically bad at math. Because your offer also includes monies dedicated to state and federal programs and taxes, use sites like this to calculate your net take-home pay.
- If you haven’t already asked, read the Employee Handbook. Know what working in this particular place will mean to you. If you have an elderly relative you care for, if you’re planning a family, if your partner works long hours, these questions are all part of the calculus. Does it offer paid leave or only FMLA? Things you wouldn’t have mentioned during the interview like you have a toddler and day care is $100/day are now fair game as you decide what you need.
- Time is also money. What if your new employer offers full benefits at 35 hours/week? Your offer is 40 hours/week, but you have two kids in kindergarten and first grade. Can you negotiate for fewer hours? Yes.
- Ask for assistance with moving. What if you don’t know a soul where you’re moving and you literally can’t afford movers? Ask. A $2,000 or $3,000 one-time expense is better than losing a great candidate.
- Ask for time. Do you need time off before you start to clear your head and settle your family? Ask.
- Know your own value relative to the field. Are you the second coming when it comes to exhibit design or conservation? Do others call you with questions? Is the reason you’re job shopping because you know you’re worth more? Well then, don’t throw it away. Use it.
Joan Baldwin
Image: Molly Brown House Museum
2018 Museum Leadership Myths and Realities
Posted: August 27, 2018 Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Development, Museum, Nonprofit Leadership, Organizational Values, Professional Development | Tags: Leadership, Leadership Matters, museums Leave a comment
Thinking about leadership is something even adept leaders don’t do often enough. As we work on the revision of Leadership Matters (2019), Anne and I are pondering how museum leadership has changed in five years. Just for fun I scrolled back to the beginning of this blog (2013). There we talk a lot about the need for the museum world, particularly the history museum world, to make leadership a priority.
Leadership Matters opens with “10 Simple Myths,” where we outline the myths that frame the museum world’s professional narrative. Sadly, many still ring true, like “We don’t have to make money, we’re a nonprofit,” or “Building collections takes precedence over building talent,” or a favorite on these pages, “Compensation is secondary because the work is its own reward.”
There is one myth, however, that suddenly feels like it might be at the end of its shelf life: “We are the source of our own best ideas.” In describing why this sage-on-the-stage mentality isn’t such a great idea Anne wrote, “Their [museums] implacable deference to hierarchical decision making insulates them from ideas and solutions flowing between and among sectors.”
We could be wrong, but it feels as though in the last five years engagement, both intellectual and actual has mutated from something only the education department thought about to something more all-encompassing. Organizations are actually reaching out, and not in the give-me-your-stuff way, more like in the work-with-us-to-tell-your-story way. Not everyone and not all the time, but it feels like a sea change. Finally, history museums and heritage organizations realize that trying to force feed communities the life stories of American furniture and tools isn’t compelling. In fact, a quick scan of leadership positions on AASLH’s and AAM’s job boards yields the following phrases:
- .….Fosters connections with local community and history in relevant and sustained ways by building beneficial partnerships, raising the level of civic dialogues …..
- The director is responsible for developing positive community relations and partnerships with national, state, local organizations and for developing strategic initiatives in areas of community outreach, educational programming, exhibits, public history and tourism.
- The Museum’s new leader should embrace its deeply held values, especially the active practice of diversity, inclusion, engagement and the critical representation of our multiple communities, their histories and current issues.
But….apart from engagement, many of our 10 myths are still alive, healthy, and posing as the truth. And, it’s 2018 not 2013, and there are new conundrums and problems for museum leaders. Here are five that we think need some work:
- That understanding community is more than an anecdotal exercise. It is data-driven. Read Susie Wilkening and Colleen Dilenschneider to see what we mean.
- The digital world is here to stay. Museums–even tiny ones–need to get a grip.
- Museums are community partners. They build, they renovate, they employ, they use utilities, they sell things. Non-profit doesn’t mean money doesn’t matter. Just because you’re not paying shareholders, doesn’t mean you can’t be a downtown anchor.
- Maybe, just maybe, there’s a recognition that an all-white, all-privileged field is not such a great thing and creating a more diverse field means making it a better paid field.
- That leadership can be learned, and organizations can invest in it just like they invest in anything else; building talent is as important as constructing a new wing.
So what do you think? What leadership sectors do you think the museum world needs to work on?
Joan Baldwin
Image: Burke Museum, Seattle, WA
Museum Leadership: Being vs Doing
Posted: April 30, 2018 Filed under: Leadership, Museum, museum career, Nonprofit Leadership, Professional Development | Tags: career, museums 5 Comments
There’s something we’re puzzled about. There are now a lot of graduate programs in museum studies. There are even more if you include the ones in nonprofit management. But here’s our question–what if you’re mid-career, whether it’s your second job or your fourth and suddenly you find yourself managing people more than things. Huge junks of your time are spent on personnel, and short and long term planning, rather than what lured you to the museum field in the beginning. And whatever you learned about leadership, assuming it was part of your graduate school curriculum, has long since left your brain. Where should you turn?
Just for fun, we looked at AAM’s and AASLH’s websites. At AASLH we found “Leadership” and “Professional Development” both listed as topics under Resources, and some leadership and management topics specifically listed in “Continuing Education.” So far so good. AASLH also has some of its sessions–some very interesting–from its 2017 annual meeting available for purchase, but few about museum leadership. (And just to be clear, for us leadership isn’t always a corner office, a sophisticated board, and a multi-million dollar budget. Sometimes it’s a team of three, and a budget of $1,500.) However, the options for a person who wants to be a better leader can be few and far between.
AAM has a tab called “Manage Your Career,” where one can find the Salary Survey, links to various affinity groups and professional networks, and connection through Museum Junction. AAM also has a wealth of information on career transition, but weirdly many of its career tab links are from other job sectors and no longer connect directly. What’s even stranger is there’s almost nothing–with the exception of posting your problems on Museum Junction — that addresses leadership, management, and career problems or the “being” part of working in the field.
There are also the regional and state professional organizations. We looked at New England (NEMA), the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC), the California Association of Museums (CAM) and the Museum Association of New York (MANY). Of this limited search, SEMC offers a long-standing program for leaders/managers and CAM is gathering trend data and case studies that touch on several aspects of leadership. Like AAM, NEMA separates career support from museum resources, making the former about getting a job and the latter about advocacy, funding and policies. MANY, too, spends web space on jobs and advocacy. Don’t get us wrong. There is nothing wrong with any of these web page topics. They are necessary and important, but it’s curious how the field, whether its service organizations or graduate programs, puts greater emphasis on doing–what job do you want, how to advocate for your organization, how to advocate for your field–than on how to “be” in the museum workplace. And by “be” we mean how to be a good curator, not as someone who knows content, but someone who knows her staff or someone who leads with self-awareness, courage and vision.
Museums are tricky, complicated places. They require a wealth of knowledge on the content side coupled with massive leadership skills. Why does the field continue to ignore one for the other and what should a museum leader in the midst of an existential crisis do? How do you know if what you’re experiencing relates to your inexperience, some anomaly related to your site or to the field as a whole? Who should you turn to? Obviously, the type of advice and support you seek depends on the nature of the problem, but leadership is leadership, whether it’s an organization with a staff of 2.5 people or 250 people. You can be a bad or successful leader in both instances.
It’s a Leadership Matters tradition to offer advice for different strata within the field, so here goes:
If you have no money and want to stay local:
- If you don’t already have a peer network, kitchen cabinet or advisory group, now’s the time. These should be people who know your work, but who aren’t your friends. They should be people you’re comfortable baring your professional soul with, but not your grandma. Presumably she likes everything you do. Invite them for drinks or coffee and pose your question(s). And before you meet with these folks, listen to this: to the Ted Radio Hour on how to break out of your comfort zone.
- Contact your local Chamber of Commerce. See what it has in the way of resource groups and continuing leadership education. Ditto for your local community college or university.
- Link to Harvard Business Review. Not everything will help, but much will.
- Read regularly about leadership. If you haven’t read Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Judith Glaser’s Conversational Intelligence and Sheryl Standberg’s Lean In, get them. At the risk of causing monumental eye rolling in your workplace, you may want to assign one to your team.
**If you have money and board support:
- Consider applying for a spot at the Getty Leadership Institute.
- Explore AASLH’s Leadership Institute or look at Jekyll Island Management Institute
- If you are an art museum person, don’t forget the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s low residency NYC program.
- If your museum is one of 20 art institutions chosen for a combined initiative in diversifying museum leadership you may be eligible to participate in one of the programs supported by the Ford and Walton Family foundations.
- Think about a graduate or certificate program, either locally or online in leadership or business which these days often encompasses leadership.
**This is by no means a complete listing and we welcome other suggestions for mid-career leadership training for museum professionals.
Last, but not least:
- If you feel your state, regional or national service organization isn’t offering what you need, say something. Say it the moment the 2018 meeting is over. Be specific. If friends or colleagues feel the same way, get them to join in your ask. These are membership organizations that exist to support the field and the field is you.
Joan Baldwin
Leadership Matters 