Leading by Design

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'M A LONG-TIME CULTURAL ORGANIZATION DIRECTOR, several decades down the road from my first job.  I've been fortunate to have worked for boards that were mostly active and engaged with the work of the organization.  As my experience has grown and my abilities have been honed, I've found also that the boards I've chosen to work for have relied on me for direction as well as expertise.  No longer. Last year I made a conscious decision to switch it up.  I moved to an allied profession, but one I have no formal training in, no name recognition, and little, if any, professional capital to spend.  I'm an unknown quantity in need of proving myself in order to gain the trust of others.  I joined an organization as executive director that is just ten years old -- for all intents and purposes a start-up -- with a very active board that is fully engaged in setting direction, pursuing funding, and undertaking the work.  There's been more...

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR I'VE BEEN COLLABORATING WITH FOUR COLLEAGUES, each of us an independent consultant in the cultural/NGO sector, all of us looking to hone the business end of our work.  We've SWOT'd and career planned together, mapped and graphed our work, and brainstormed solutions to each other's challenges.  We're branching out now with a workshop program encouraging others to take a similar career evaluation journey.  (Our next one is coming up in Burlington, VT next week!) We've also produced a pithy little newsletter together, called "Take 5".  It's our intent is to bring readers bite-sized ideas to get your creative professional juices flowing.  Our inaugural issue suggested readers think about planning execution before launching into planning, explore a trend called ' flawsomeness ', try an activity to think differently about your audience, and most presciently, get your organization's (or your own) disaster planning in o...

THIS WEEK, THREE COLLEAGUES AND I HAD THE CHANCE TO PRESENT a session at the NYS Museums in Conversation Conference about how we are working together to shape the next steps in our careers.  We began by explaining how the four of us came together: we and one other were actually brought together by one person because 1) she knew that all of us are at career crossroads of one sort or another; 2) when she asked, none of us admitted to having a personal/career strategic plan (yet we're all rabid proponents of organizational planning!); and 3) we all knew one another to varying degrees and she thought we'd make a good group.  We've dubbed our group The Gang of Five.   Since last summer, each member of "The Gang" has reflected on his/her career path and shared those thoughts with the others.  We spent time doing SWOTs on each other (very productive) and we've questioned each others' motives and decisions, offered advice and solutions, commiserated and s...

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...

DESPITE THE FACT THAT I DO A LOT OF ORGANIZATIONAL PLANNING in my consulting work, it's been far too long since I've sat myself down and drafted a personal plan for my career and life.  I think the last time I did any real serious work on a personal plan was more than ten years ago.  'Yikes!' was my reaction when fellow consultant Linda Norris asked if I had one.  Turns out neither did she.  Nor several other colleagues she asked.  Hmmm..... It wasn't long after that conversation when Linda called again with an invitation to attend a personal planning retreat at her house.  Starting tomorrow, five consultant colleagues are converging for 1.5 days of conversation, soul-searching, group problem-solving, and individual plan creation, and I, for one, am getting really excited about what I might contribute as well as bring home. I think I've done a fair amount of preparation -- we kick the party off with a discussion about our past and current work and whether ...