Leading by Design

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!

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...

MY LAST POST DESCRIBED HOW I WAS PREPARING FOR A GET-TOGETHER WITH CONSULTING COLLEAGUES to examine the next steps of our careers.  If you visit Linda Norris' blog, The Uncataloged Museum , you'll read a really good recap of how five of us came together last week to work through a discussion that none of us had had in quite this way with others before.  Linda describes the flow of our activities and some key ideas and elements that made our time together not only worthwhile, but truly energizing.  What we did is not a new concept -- people get together all the time to share information, network, and help sort out career questions.  Our families and friends often are our sounding boards, mostly because they're convenient, they care about us and are, therefore, likely (or required) to listen.  But they may not be as helpful as colleagues or mentors who bring the world view of our respective professions, as well as some critical distance, to our se...

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS' 2009 Emerging Museum Professionals survey gives us a sense of how the museum field is meeting the needs of its future leaders. The survey rates the importance of nine professional development resources to this group and its related satisfaction with access to each of them. The resulting "gap" between importance and satisfaction thus becomes the point of the story. The biggest gap is the ability of young professionals to access leadership opportunities within their own institutions. It's a gap that has grown significantly from the time the last survey was done just two years ago. Back in 2007, 55% of survey respondents ranked finding leadership within one's institution as very/somewhat important. That stands at 73% today. But as far as these folks are concerned, they simply aren't being given the opportunities to challenge their leadership abilities. Why is that, especially when most museums are understaffed (and becom...