Leading by Design

Even though 2020 will technically be in our rear view mirror soon, its ramifications will be with us for years to come. Make no mistake, there's a lot of work to do. So, here are my four really tough, but really important, resolutions designed to lay some solid groundwork for doing your best work in 2021. Aren't you glad there are only four? If you're interested in my resolutions from previous years, take a look here  and here .

Times of extraordinary change and disruptions demand flexibility, humility, perseverance, self-reflection and a responsiveness to a complex confluence of realities by museum leaders. Agile leadership requires mapping out a meaningful, relevant, and financially viable path forward to achieve greater public impact, inclusion, and value through resilience practices. Resilience strategies require rethinking long-held approaches and tackling embedded exclusionary, colonial, and outmoded ideologies and practices to establish more flexible, inclusive, and responsive frameworks that better align with external realities. With your purchase of THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK and time with the Resilience Team, your organization can reimagine a future that is relevant and responsive to the changing world around us. Specifically, THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK encompasses 5 Resilience Goals and 20 Plays that offer practical and empowering approaches to help your organization realign around equity and inclusion, c...

I am currently working with two colleagues from the cultural and heritage fields to think and write about organizational resiliency in times of upheaval and ambiguity. We believe resiliency in this crucible moment requires, first and foremost, nonprofit organizations activate equity and inclusion by embracing it as central to all their internal and external work. It begins when organizations commit the time to examine their own historical roots and practices as a critical step to ensure they “live” their most meaningful missions, visions, and values. Resiliency requires many organizations also renegotiate what it means to be valuable to their communities. The traditional idea of “value” has changed and is changing, and recognizing the extent to what our communities really value is key to being wanted, needed, and, thus relevant. All organizations must retool their financial mindsets, taking a hard look at their current financial realities and realigning the costs of doing business with...

On July 2nd, Joan Baldwin and I joined Cali Buckley and an audience from the College Art Association to talk about gender equity in museums and cultural organizations. Our conversation was wide-ranging with thoughts about pay equity, the intersectionality of workplace issues, and next generation arts leaders. Here's the video of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zgnb7FAr-E&feature=youtu.be

Are you a nonprofit executive director in search of a better relationship with your governing board? Is your relationship with your board collaborative, contentious, or non-existent? Does your board drift between non-management and micromanagement? Do you mentally or emotionally check out of the relationship due to lack of time or commitment? I'll be leading a new class for Museum Study starting August 3rd on Leading Together: Working for and With Your Board of Trustees . This four-week course is geared for executive directors and will cover roles and responsibilities, assessing the board-staff relationship, and putting strategic and integrative thinking to work at board and committee meetings, among other topics.  Each week will include readings and assignments. We'll also gather in Zoom chats to explore topics in more depth and problem-solve your CEO-board challenges!  The cost is $400. I hope to see you this summer!

On May 19th, exhibition designer and developer Paul Orselli and I sat down to talk about museum and nonprofit leadership. If you'd like to watch more of Paul's Museum FAQ's, find him on YouTube .

We read and hear a lot about transparency and accountability these days, but these are by no means new concepts. However, they've taken on renewed meaning in a world where spinning the message and dodging the glare of scrutiny seem to be prized skills. Yet.... “…our funding is principally from sources requiring superficial accountability, our strategic planning is rarely compelling, board and staff are uninformed about exactly who is and is not participating in our exhibitions and programs, and we provide fare that is indexed to internal priorities, with minimal effort to explain what we have chosen not to do, or the explicit rationale for what we have chosen to do. It is essential that museum leaders resist self-congratulation and start explaining our priorities, our intentions, and the desired and measurable outcomes of our efforts.” Maxwell L. Anderson, Ph.D. from “A Clear View: The Case for Museum Transparency,”  Museum Magazine (March-April 2010) pp. 48-53 T...

Periodically, social media is ablaze with comments from nonprofit leaders bemoaning the fact that their organizations are too small to keep up with a seemingly overwhelming amount of professional and regulatory standards. While one may hear less outright complaining from big nonprofits when they turn a blind eye to the importance of standards, ethics, and the public trust, chances are we'll be reading about their transgressions in the headlines. Whether nonprofits flaunt the public trust due to ignorance or by design, the performance expectation for all nonprofits -- no matter their size, discipline, or resources -- is grounded in the fact they have been incorporated to perform a public service. They have entered into a relationship with the public that fulfills a need for which they receive benefits in return. Chief among these benefits is tax exemption for mission-related activities and the opportunity for donors to make tax-deductible contributions. When a nonprofit honors ...

On the eve of a new year, lots of you (myself included) are thinking about the shape of your lives and careers in the year ahead. Taking my own Strategize Me advice, I like to reserve New Year's to reflect on my past accomplishments and map out a plan for the coming year. The year just ending was overflowing with work commitments: a full plate of employee and consultant responsibilities, a new book, co-developing a new museum studies course and trying to teach it, trying to be present with colleagues and friends, struggling to be creative and interesting and interested -- well, the list goes on and on. It's easy enough to chalk it up as a busy year. What's struck me as I attempt to catalog my 2017 accomplishments is that I get no satisfaction from being so busy.  Busy-ness does not equal quality; it doesn't begin to describe depth (or even lack) of commitment. It fails the authenticity test. I'm tired of being busy, of describing myself that way as my pat ...

Today I'm meeting up with my career planning posse. We call ourselves the Gang of Five and we've been meeting periodically for about six years to share our career challenges and aspirations, our plans; seek and offer advice, support, and the critique as appropriate. The Gang is my personal board of directors, who collectively and individually I can call on when needed. As a result, I've advanced my thinking about my career journey, if nothing more than to make it far more intentional. Earlier this summer, I got to talk with my friend and colleague, Greg Stevens at the American Alliance of Museums, about career planning. The result is this interview, published at Alliance Labs. Greg is a terrific proponent of career planning and development -- not surprising since he's the Director of Professional Development at AAM and the co-author of A Life in Museums: Managing Your Museum Career . Whether you work in museums or some other type of cultural institution, check out...

I've been following some of the running commentary in a couple of Facebook groups that cater to nonprofit leaders, both veteran and emerging. I'm glad to know there are active and supportive fora where folks can vent their frustrations and celebrate their accomplishments. We all need a safe space in which to do just that. The venting focuses almost exclusively on workplace issues -- you can probably guess them -- lousy pay, crushing hours, troubles with subordinates, trouble with board members, ethical dilemmas, general frustration with the pervasive notion of scarcity to which many nonprofits cling. While the members of the Facebook groups represent a teeny fraction of the actual nonprofit workforce, I believe their challenges are widespread and probably growing as the number of nonprofits continues to expand. These challenges aren't new, although increased external scrutiny and competition have made them more pressing, more in-your-face, and no longer avoidable.  T...

I've written about resolutions for nonprofits before (see the infographic  and read more here ), but this year -- especially this year -- nonprofit boards will be put to the test in the face of civic dissonance, uncertain government support for education, arts, history, and science; and the continuation of dramatically shifting demographics. So, here's my short list: Know your organization's mission cold and I don't mean memorize the mission statement.  I mean deeply and fully understand the impact your nonprofit makes to those who benefit from the work you do. Understand how you meet the need, how you excel at doing so, and why that's important.  Be able to tell the stories about your organization's impact to anyone. Get up to speed on what real governance is all about.   Set goals and success measures, exercise oversight, consider the future (a lot), strategize pathways to success, and keep at it.  Good governance is intentional and sustained. Be ...

It's hard for me to believe I've let my blog writing lapse for so long and to my many readers I apologize for that. It's not that I haven't been writing, because I have, just in other fora. The last year-and-a-half was taken up with co-authoring a new book, Women and the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace , which will be published next spring by Routledge. Gender equity for all women is on my mind. Hardly a day goes by without seeing or hearing a story on this topic, but there seems to be little movement toward positive change despite the attention it's getting. Lest you think gender equity is a symptom unique to under-resourced nonprofits and old-school for-profits, I'm here to tell you that it plagues every sector from Silicon Valley to higher ed to Hollywood and, oh, yes, it's alive and well at your friendly neighborhood cultural and social welfare organization. A group of colleagues and I recently published A Call for Gender Equity in the Museum W...

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for?  This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.)  Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although ...

IS 2015 THE YEAR YOU JOIN A NONPROFIT BOARD?  Perhaps you've been thinking that board service would be a great way to give back to your community or perhaps you've decided to give in to your best friend's pleading to join her board.  Whether you're giving back or giving in, don't waste any time in asking these five questions: 1.  Am I comfortable with group work?   Everything you read on nonprofit governance casts it as group work: deliberation and decision-making as a team; working with and through committees; and working to consensus.  If you're the lone wolf type, preferring to tackle problems and projects on your own, you'll find group work difficult, even drudgery.  So, if you're intent on joining a board know that the group trumps the individual.  Yes, your individual skills, opinions, and talents are needed and will be welcomed (hopefully), but when it comes to execution, it is the group that will capture the flag. 2.  Where will m...

RECEIVING A SUM OF MONEY UNEXPECTEDLY (or half-expectedly) isn't as unusual as it may seem in the nonprofit world. It often comes in the form of a bequest, but it might just as often come as a year-end gift from a loyal member.  Sometimes, it's a grant few thought the organization would ever be competitive enough to get.  Or a local corporation or government acknowledges the efforts of a nonprofit that is making the community a better place. The question that gets some organizations tied up in knots is how to make the best and most efficient use of these funds.  We all dream about how we'd put a few thousand bucks to use if it were to arrive on our doorsteps, but when actually faced with a check in one's hands, the dreams may be...well... too dreamy.  Where should it go, if the donor hasn't stipulated a place for it to land? The director of a small cultural nonprofit asked me this question.  After several years of increased attendance and program income,...

WHAT'S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT A NONPROFIT'S MISSION STATEMENT ANYWAY?  A recent exchange of emails with a museum client about their mission statement underscores the potential they can play in a nonprofit's growth and development.  I've been encouraging this client to go beyond the usual, inward-focused litany of activities that virtually every museum in the world cites as their mission.  Yes, museums collect and preserve stuff.  But if that's all they did, they'd be more like mausoleums than museums. The museum director and his staff have had several robust discussions about what the museum does and the audiences they serve.  It's clear from their conversations that the museum is much more than a place full of stuff.  There's meaning and resonance there, too.  Sorting through that has been both an intellectual and emotional exercise. Museums are not the only victims of tepid mission statements.  There are plenty of nonprofits of all stripes t...

THIS SUMMER I'M LEADING AN ONLINE COURSE in museum administration -- a new venture offered by the American Association for State and Local History.  The small band of participants -- most not museum administrators, by the way -- are being treated to the basics of nonprofit organization spanning how museums are founded to issues of leadership.   The most recent lesson explored the complex and sometimes competing roles of the museum director.  A director has allegiances to both the governing board and the staff requiring continual alignment of priorities and mitigation of distances between the two.  A director also has allegiance to her vision for organizational health, sustainability and excellence. Add to that the fact that as an organization develops, its leadership needs will change.  What worked for the start-up may be too informal and inefficient for a more mature organization.  The director's role, therefore, is not only played out vertically and...