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!

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 .

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...

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...

MY MENTAL LIST OF CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS ABOUT TO GO UNDER was significantly lengthened this week.  Just yesterday a neighbor told me that a small environmental/ natural history research organization she works with was about to fold.  She was told that the board was casting around for a place to transfer the organization's collections of books, maps, photos and videos (although no one knows exactly where that will be despite the fact that they may have to shut their doors in a couple of weeks).   The day before that, a colleague called to say she was retiring from her organization and that there's a movement afoot to dissolve it (not her doing).  A third organization has burned through its endowment fund to the point where some board members think it's time to close the whole place down.   That's all in just the last week. I've been hearing for a long time that the pace of consolidations and dissolutions in the nonprofit sector would speed up as the ...

The museum sector would do well to move away from a sense of its own importance to demonstrating the true value it can bring to lives. As cultural networks proliferate, the museum is ideally placed to lead discussion and debate, to create participatory media and develop the role of the active cultural participant. -- Angelina Russo commenting on Ross Dawson’s blog post , Thinking About the Future of Museums: Fourteen Key Issues , May 22, 2008 This quote really struck me, because it’s where many culturals – not just museums – seem to be stuck. And we’ve been stuck here for a long time, with some noteworthy exceptions. It may have a lot to do with the fact that we excel at great ideas, but drop the ball when it comes to their execution. I relate to that. The Management Centre recently released an international compilation of studies on innovation in the nonprofit sector. Using a Harvard-developed research model that identifies seven stages of innovation...

I have had the good fortune to think about ethical questions from different standpoints and in a variety of contexts, as well as to grapple with actual situations that have arisen from time to time.  I certainly don't have all the answers, but what I do know is that standards of ethics sometimes differ among types of cultural institutions and are almost always evolutionary -- in other words, it's rare for a new institution to start out at square one with a full-blown understanding of its ethical responsibilities and a written policy to underscore them. My career has allowed me to develop an awareness of ethical issues as I have developed as a museum professional.  I suppose that may sound obvious, but I do think that the longer you remain in a field, the more opportunities you'll have to discuss and ponder ethical issues - perhaps even act on one or two of them -- and they will all add to your body of knowledge and your understanding. I think the topic of museum ethics is, ...