I realized, though, that my outlook on mentoring was very simplistic and traditional: someone with more experience advises someone with less experience in a formal and formalized relationship.

I wanted to know more. When, where, and why did mentoring start? How has mentoring changed? What makes a mentoring relationship work?

(The image above of Telemachus and Mentor was created by Pablo Fabisch for The Adventures of Telemachus.)

Like a true millennial, I turned to Wikipedia.

I discovered that the term “mentor” has its roots in Greek mythology. When Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War, he entrusts Telemachus, his son, in the hands of friend and confidant Mentor. Later in The Odyssey, Goddess of War Athena, who has a soft spot for Odysseus, takes the shape and voice of Mentor when she urges Telemachus to travel abroad to determine what has happened to his father.

Many, many years later in 1699, French writer François Fénelo penned The Adventures of Telemachus, which fills in gaps in The Odyssey with the tales of Mentor and Telemachus. Think The Adventures of Telemachus is to The Odyssey what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet — but with a decidedly more serious, philosophical tone.

Today’s term “mentor” traces back to Fénelo’s work — a mentor being an advisor, tutor, or counselor.

In developing the Mentorship Tool Kit for the Emerging Leaders Council, I learned that this traditional definition of mentoring is giving way to more informal, but just as effective forms of mentoring.

Over the course of the summer, we’ll be sharing some examples of how Emerging Leaders Networks are making mentoring work in their communities.

In the meantime we’d like to know, what is your definition of mentoring?

At the Summit, a recurring conversation in our sessions centered on how we as individuals and organizations could make professional development for our field a larger priority. And by priority, we don’t mean a larger piece of our dwindling budgets. The majority of arts organizations are struggling to figure out how to do more with less, and we need to develop ways to continue making professional development a priority during this tough economy.

In the results from the 2009 Survey to the field of Emerging Arts Leaders, I was shocked to discover that while 70 percent of our current emerging leaders consider arts administration their long term career, only 28.5 percent either strongly agree or agree that there is room for career advancement within their organization.

How will the remaining 41.5 percent of those who want to stay in the field realistically do so when they don’t feel they can grow?

On top of this, only 20 percent  of our respondents indicated that they have one-on-one meetings with senior staff at their organizations to discuss career development.  And only 25 percent participate in mentoring lunches or other one-on-one meetings.

These are FREE opportunities that we can ask for, or that organizations can provide to their employees as a way to support their continued growth and in turn the growth and expansion of the field as a whole.  Why are we not taking advantage of professional development that is easy to put together, practically free to manage, and can have a major impact?

I also believe that emerging and experienced leaders should both have the opportunity to participate in local, regional, and national conferences, and I was happy to see a good mix of faces at our Summit this year.  However, there is so much more we can do at home in our own backyards that will help foster professional development.
If this survey is repeated in three years, I hope the above statistics will improve.  I know there are at least 30 local Emerging Leader Networks out there, which is great and we want to continue strengthening these programs.   But please tell us what else you do!  Do you have a great working model of providing professional development that is taking place in your organization or community?  Or as an individual, how do you seek professional development for yourself without breaking your budget?

Ian David Moss

On Friday afternoon, I sat in on one of the AFTA Summit’s Visionary Panels, “New and Emerging Business Models.”  Moderated by Adrian Ellis of Jazz at Lincoln Center and AEA Consulting, the high-powered panel also featured Adam Huttler of Fractured Atlas (aka my boss), Clara Miller of Nonprofit Finance Fund, and Terence McFarland of LA Stage Alliance. (Ben Cameron and Shay Wafer were originally scheduled to appear, but could not make it; McFarland sat in for them instead.)

The panelists each brought a somewhat different perspective to the concept of “new models.” Ellis emphasized a separation between means and ends, defining a new model as an alternative way to accomplish one’s core mission (which presumably remains the same). Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Miller cited high fixed costs as the bane of many nonprofits’ existence and drew a laugh from the audience when she defined a new business model – the only one, in fact – as “reliable revenue that is greater than expenses. Any questions?” Huttler quoted the University of Wisconsin’s Andrew Taylor in describing Fractured Atlas’s model as “mission-oriented around sunk costs, profit-oriented around marginal costs.” Put another way, Fractured Atlas will seek grant funds and other contributed revenue to help pay for one-time expenses such as start-up capital, but always with the expectation that any new program or activity will eventually be able to sustain itself through earned income. McFarland described his organization’s historical reliance on earned income, noting that when he took the leadership reins the proportion of revenue that fell into that category was an astonishing 95%. While that percentage has since fallen somewhat, LA Stage Alliance still employs novel strategies such as marketing its connections with member theaters to interested parties in the private sector (such as newspapers). Despite the economy, LA Stage ended last year with a six-figure surplus.

Sparks began to fly a bit during the next exchange, when Huttler pointed to the contributed-income model (in which the people using the product or service – the customers – are not the same as the people paying for the product or service – the donors) as being inherently problematic. In his view, though the sector is likely stuck with it to some extent, this arrangement can distort programming because those holding the financial cards have a disproportionate amount of power to direct outcomes. Ellis responded that this is in fact what distinguishes the nonprofit sector from the private sector — why would we change our mission in response to the market instead of changing how we accomplish our mission? In retort, Huttler questioned why we have the right to consider our artistic missions so special anyway, pointing out that “we don’t have plumbing for plumbing’s sake!” When you do something for pleasure without a customer involved, he argued, that’s called a hobby. (Demonstrating the taboo status of that word, a number of audience members let out a shocked murmur at this point.)

Miller offered that the reason arts organizations do have nonprofit status is out of a recognition that the market doesn’t always work. Due to a number of factors, such as difficult labor economics, providing goods and services to people who can’t afford them, and the lack of a predictable commercial return, the tax status offered to arts organizations is designed to make operations whole. At the same time, she pointed out, “nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.” Support from third parties is not a license to disregard the importance of generating revenue in general.

The next discussion, prompted by an audience question, focused on the pressure to increase productivity in the arts and the difficulty posed by the labor economics inherent to the field, as detailed by Baumol and Bowen’s famous work from the 1960s. Ellis asserted that nonprofits are not necessarily very efficient organizations – while lean, they are not always mean. Miller reminded the audience that while differences exist between the two sectors at large scales, the vast majority of both nonprofits and commercial enterprises are very, very small – and that the economics in such situations are quite similar. Either way, you need capital to grow. On the other hand, nonprofits due to their structure have difficulty building up retained earnings, and there is rarely exit from the field in response to financial difficulty. “A good signal for death would help us a lot,” she mused. Huttler commented on several recent organizational collaborations aimed at saving costs through sharing administrative functions (such as development and marketing). He expressed skepticism about this idea, claiming that it could put personnel in a difficult situation in which it is impossible to treat all participants equally. In contrast to this “personnel-centric” cluster management, he favors a “systems-centric” cluster management paradigm in which as many of those functions as possible are automated and centralized through technology.

I was surprised that in all of these conversations about productivity enhancement and labor economics no one brought up the fact that arts organizations spend a surprisingly small amount of their operating budgets on artists. According to Americans for the Arts’s Arts & Economic Prosperity III report, expenditures on artists (which are most often cited as the source of difficulties with increasing productivity – you can’t perform a Beethoven string quartet any faster or with fewer players now than when it was first composed) averaged only 11% – and this figure held consistent across a wide variety of geographies and organizations. If productivity difficulties are indeed the source of nonprofits’ chronic financial woes, that apparently has little to do with the artists.

Further questions from the audience addressed a range of issues as follows:

• Several questioners were interested in Fractured Atlas’s for-profit subsidiaries (a technology company that is organized as an LLC, and an L3C, or “low-profit limited liability company,” designed to eventually become a liability insurance provider). Huttler revealed that Fractured Atlas has to pay unrelated business income tax on its earnings from Gemini, but is hopeful that this won’t be the case with the L3C.
• Miller asked why Huttler doesn’t just start a for-profit (LLC) insurance brokerage instead. Per Huttler, in addition to the possible tax advantage described above, the L3C (in theory, at least) could attract program-related investments (PRI) from foundations, and removes the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits.
• An audience member wondered how LA Stage Alliance can be true to its constituents even as they play a role in earned income opportunities for the organization. McFarland indicated that relationships are the primary driver of these decisions, and that he sizes up each situation on a case-by-case basis to determine whether there is a conflict or not.
• A questioner asked about forming a microlending operation in the United States for artists, and asked for resources to investigate. Miller warned that the economics for this are torturous in the United States, and so many previous attempts had failed. Fractured Atlas briefly tried such a program and had to close it because the default rate was too high. That said, the questioner may want to check out Assets for Artists and the Arts Loan Fund.

That’s it! I report, you decide. Have opinions? Share ‘em below.

When asked what career they would choose if finances were not a concern, a plurality of Harvard seniors chose the arts, with 16 percent indicating it as their “dream” field. Similarly large numbers of students chose public service (12.5) and education (12), while finance and consulting trailed with five percent each.

This is from last year; this year’s edition, assuming they are repeating it, should be out soon.

Why is this important for arts advocacy? Think about this way. Harvard seniors carry with them tremendous lifetime income-generation potential, both for themselves and for their communities. From the perspective of local and state governments, Harvard grads are like giant, magnetic sacks of cash walking around, because not only are they likely to earn a substantial living over their lifetimes — meaning that they are likely to pay substantial taxes over their lifetimes — but so are their friends, and the people they will probably date and marry. And guess what? They like to be around their friends and partners and spouses. Which means that if one of them moves, don’t be surprised to see others follow.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that if one-sixth of all Harvard ‘09 grads could choose any career, any career at all, they would choose the arts. We know that that is more than said the same for any other career. And thus it strongly implies that a pretty substantial proportion of our nation’s perennial overachievers, people who you can bet are going to play decidedly outsized roles in the local economies of wherever they live, care a lot about the arts.

Via (of course) Richard Florida.

As the Americans for the Arts’ Emerging Leaders Council started to develop our focus for the coming years, we kept asking ourselves, who is our audience?  What do they need?  So before we start assuming how we can help emerging leaders, we decided to ask you.  The Emerging Leaders Council spent 2009 drafting the questions for an Emerging Leaders Network Field Survey.  By January 2010, 554 of you had let us know about yourself and what’s on your mind.

The survey confirmed a lot of what we thought to be true:  Most of you are very active in seeking out professional development – either within your community or at national convenings.  The majority of you (over 75%) are also very involved with advocating for the arts at the local and/or national level.

While the survey results indicate that emerging arts leaders want and need professional development, only 31% of you indicated that there is a budget line for professional development in your organization’s budget. It is clear that organizational support for employee’s professional development has been reduced or eliminated entirely in 2009/2010 budgets.

Where will this leave our field?  If we are not investing in our own professional development, then what will the leadership of our field look like ten to twenty years from now?  Sure, there is plenty of learning on the job.  However, it is clear that young arts leaders are craving more.

Therefore, the Emerging Leaders Council has identified specific action items to help address the professional development gap.

From the survey, some of the most requested resources by emerging leaders include a mentorship resources toolkit, information on what emerging leaders are reading now and case studies on successful local emerging leader networks.   The Council has heard you and will work on disseminating this information to the field over the next nine months.

Interested in learning more?  Americans for the Arts has made the full results of the survey public, and I invite you to check out the full findings – click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

Or check out the survey’s Executive Summary for a top line analysis of the results.

We hope you will share the results with your networks and let us know your observations.  I found the responses impressive.  The Survey results put real numbers and figures to what we have said all along – we are a well qualified, dedicated force.

Thanks to all who took the time to complete the survey.  Your time and energy will help shape the direction of the Emerging Leaders Council for coming years.   Now, how do you compare to the emerging leader profile?

(My thanks to Jean Cook of the Future of Music Coalition and Adam Huttler of Fractured Atlas for their contributions to this article.)

We hear a lot of talk about the coming leadership transition in the arts. Baby Boomers are nearing retirement age, and Gen X’ers and Millennials are itching to take on increased responsibility. Both for the good of the arts as a whole and for the individuals involved, we need to make sure that, when the time comes, the people getting behind the wheel will have had some experience riding shotgun first. Hence our conversations have frequently centered on professional development, training, networking, and mentorship as strategies to better prepare our young(er) drivers.

It’s important to recognize, though, that the conversation isn’t—or shouldn’t be, at any rate—solely about passing the keys from one generation to the next. That’s something that has been happening since time immemorial, and is part of the normal cycle of nature and humanity. What’s so newsworthy about that, really? Naturally, there are lessons about leadership to be handed down from the elders to the newbies – and our conversations on ArtsBlog have boasted some elders’ generous attempts to do just that. Every so-called “emerging leader” who knows what he or she is talking about acknowledges that there is much to learn from those who came before, and that we would be foolish to pretend that we already have the answers. After all, the calls for mentorship are coming more from the younger generations than it is from the elders.

But even as we honor and benefit from the contributions of the Boomers and Silents, we also must face the fact that there are some forms of wisdom that are not transferable from previous generations. Our world has changed dramatically just in the time that Generation Y has been alive, and the rate of change only keeps increasing. Certain ways of thinking, communicating, and organizing ourselves are proving to be a better fit with the past than the future. Accordingly, as we develop new strategies to support the next generation of arts leaders as they begin this leg of the journey, we need to keep in mind that simply talking about where we’ve been will provide an incomplete map of the road ahead.

So, what is this new normal that we face? What are the imperatives that anyone leading an arts organization in the 21^st century, regardless of generation, must grapple with in order to lead effectively? Recognizing once again that we do not have all the answers, here is an attempt at identifying the most important factors.

• Technological literacy. Nearly all of the sweeping changes in how we do business and live our lives that have taken place during the last 20 years can be traced to dramatic advances in communication and data storage technology. Twenty years ago, there was no World Wide Web, cell phones as we know them today did not exist, word processing software was still in its infancy, and a typical hard drive held 1/10,000^th of the space boasted by a comparably-priced device today. Think about that for a second. In a single generation’s time, our collective capacity to store, process, and share information has exploded beyond all recognition. This one development has completely transformed our work and our relationships, and its impact on the arts and arts organizations is no exception. Future arts organization leaders will need to, at a minimum, be literate in current technologies, and ideally should be fluent in them. As for the leaders of our entire field, the service organizations and grantmakers among us should have the capacity to shape technological trends, not just keep up with them.
• Transparency. Yes, all of those status updates on Facebook about what people had for dinner are annoying. And why would you broadcast details about your love life to everyone you know? It may seem nonsensical to those of us who grew up in a different environment. But in the digital age, secrets are increasingly a fiction. The proliferation of data, the ease of sharing it, and the slow demise of less easily tracked transactions (e.g., cash) all mean that unless you remove yourself from the grid (and thus miss out on all of its benefits), information about your activities is out there for people to find whether you like it or not. If this is the case for individuals, it’s doubly so for arts organizations, many of which are nonprofits and subject to various regulations governing the sharing of information with the public. Recognizing how thoroughly technology has changed the rules around information-sharing, the more forward-thinking leaders in the sector have begun taking a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to transparency, recognizing that trust ultimately remains the true currency of effective operations. Proactively sharing data that previously would have been considered confidential and merging internal and external “faces” can enable the organization to speak authentically with one voice. But transparency need not be merely a defensive measure. What arts leaders are realizing is that transparency, widely adopted, can have benefits of its own, especially when taken to the next step:
• Collaboration. The advent of numerous “crowdsourcing” platforms has shown us that sometimes, things get done better, faster, and more cheaply when we all chip in. While competition certainly has its virtues, the arts sector can only thrive in the 21^st century if its individual actors remember that, in the end, we are all on the same team. The theater that opens up shop down the street from yours is not a threat – it’s an ally in your quest to make your street a place to see theater. The organization that starts a program similar to yours the next town over is not drawing foundation funds away – it’s a source of new capacity that can benefit your program even as you teach the lessons you learned from your own experience. As much as the private sector extols the virtues of competition, in every well-functioning workplace collaboration and division of labor is the norm. When we are working toward a common goal, that is as it should be. Thus, the arts leaders of the 21^st century will need to be ready to embrace coordination of efforts, willing to occasionally divest their ego from a program for the good of the field, and enthusiastic about learning from and teaching their peers in a variety of contexts.
• Openness. One could write an equation based on the previous two concepts to the effect of “Transparency + Collaboration = Openness.” Openness is the state of mind, the work philosophy that results from adopting both a collaboration orientation and a commitment to transparency. When fully absorbed by the arts field, openness will have far-reaching implications for how individual organizations go about fulfilling their missions. At its most fundamental level, openness translates to letting people into your line of sight whom you would normally keep at the margins, if you noticed them at all. It means accepting and seeking out conversations with total strangers who nevertheless share your interests (now easier than ever before thanks to blogs, Twitter, and other social media). It means considering how the work you’re doing intersects or parallels the work people like you are doing in seemingly unrelated fields, like education, communications, international aid, or urban agriculture. It means changing hiring practices and internal organization management to reflect the fact that people are multidimensional and that good ideas sometimes come from the least expected places. And most of all, it means opening up the important conversations and decisions about our future to everyone, not just the select few who have always had those conversations and have always made those decisions. Generational transfer is all well and good, but if the only result is fewer gray hairs and balding heads among the power elites of our field, we will have completely missed the point of our moment in history.
• Adaptability. Finally, the reason we find ourselves where we are today is because things changed so fast and so completely in a single generation. If those two decades are any guide, the pace of change is not about to let up anytime soon. Who had heard of blogs ten years ago? Who had heard of Facebook seven years ago? Who had heard of YouTube five years ago? The arts leaders of the 21^st century, above all, will need to be prepared for a bumpy ride and many twists and turns as they make their way forward. Strategic planning, formative evaluation techniques, and data analysis will play increasingly important roles as arts organization leaders learn not just whether their decisions are effective, but how to make effective decisions in such an environment. Those who are most adept at adaptation will, just like Darwin predicted, be best positioned to survive and thrive.

What do we do first?

Get organized. As individual arts and culture workers each of us must build our own capacity for risk and to make mistakes. Build it, try it, fix it is my new mantra. I am working to be both a planner and doer, to be ambitious and creative, while building in time for self- reflection, evaluation and course correction. I’ve also found that risk and learning can be supported through shared leadership, mentorship, collaboration and coordination.
The other task is to create the opportunities in our lives or workplaces to integrate the many wonderful ideas shared about leadership, work/life balance and new business models. In some instances this can happen in established organizations or institutions if the leadership is willing. In other instances, new ventures are needed. But planning, strategic planning I think it important to make these new ventures effective. Young people’s penchant for self-organizing can lead to regional and national networks that can be leveraged to create new space for leadership, professional and experimentation in the sector as a whole.

These are ideas we have built into the development of our EL network. We will be a platform for our participants, a space to pilot ideas and try something new.

Marc’s Seder post

I want to remind myself and my fellow Millennials that with all our pounding on the “glass ceiling”, our subversive questions, and our demands to sit at the adult table, let us not forget that there are others that follow us. In our fit to close the generation gap before us, we are not always as attentive as we could be in preventing a gap behind us. Who’s that behind us? Who’s the youngest in the room? She’s the one that you’ve had silently de-duping the mailing list for the last two weeks at the desk in the basement by the boiler. She’s your intern.

Unpaid internships are quite the racket. Our parents didn’t intern at all but now there’s inflated pressure to spend every summer from 14 to 22 and often beyond in servitude (no, not service) just to get into college, then into grad school, and THEN get a job. I’m exaggerating a bit, but I think we’ve all seen the trend.

Sunday’s NY Times reports many interns are exploited (surprise, surprise!). The law says, in order for an internship to be unpaid the intern must receive training “similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction” and the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees.” In other words, it’s a charitable contribution to the intern. If the internship doesn’t meet those criteria, the company has to pay them. These rules do not really apply to nonprofits but I think they are guides we could better adhere to when considering the development of the next next-generation of leaders.

Especially in this economy, it can be very tempting to take on interns just to get the day-to-day done. Even if there’s a glut of students willing to labor for free and the theatre down the street is exploiting that doesn’t mean you should too. Yes, nonprofits use volunteers to do a lot of the grunt, but an “internship” is an educational commitment, and no, envelop stuffing does not suffice. Unlike many other volunteers, interns are actively considering careers in the arts and internships are our opportunity to help cultivate future peers and colleagues. Granted, we’re not going to reverse this trend completely but we’re supposed to be practicing good leadership qualities and as individuals we can make the internships in our own organizations the best they can be.

Often supervising an intern is the first management responsibility a junior staff member has. It’s a great opportunity to establish good managerial habits for ourselves such as job design, delegation, and giving and receiving feedback. Even as we are developing our own careers and asking our own why-questions, let us remember to nurture inquiry from others and keep the conversation going.

So perhaps we should be creating our own challenges.

Last year I joined fellow community members and arts-minded neighbors to create the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition, which produces, presents and supports public art while addressing the needs of the North Brooklyn community. In keeping with its advocacy efforts, I moderated a conversation of 25 arts leaders of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. We gathered to discuss the role of public art in our open spaces and, more broadly, the state of the arts in our community. 

In meeting my peers, I was amazed at the breadth of organizations and quality of work they are producing. In recent years and in just three neighborhoods, innovative exhibition spaces are being created, theaters renovated, films screened, and public art produced. The founders and executive directors of these emerging organizations are emerging themselves. They are smart, ambitious, original; most are creating these organizations in addition to their “day jobs.”

In today’s times, jobs are scarce. And as we’ve read in other posts and know from economic impact studies, the arts creates jobs.  So go create one for yourself.

Yes—we can read about and listen to mantras on teamwork, ethics, giving and receiving feedback, results-based decision making, strategic planning, emotional intelligence, and business acumen but without a complimentary system with which to practice these skills are we really supporting leadership development? No amount of leadership lecturing can help a young manager who is returning to an organization that doesn’t want to change.

I think if we sincerely want to cultivate leadership we need to build it into job definition by identifying key leadership competencies for every new team member and veterans moving into new positions. We need to give each other feedback on these skills with both regular formal and continual informal mechanisms. We need to make mentoring and coaching accessible and authentic.  And maybe most importantly, we need to change the way entire organizations think about leadership and make it into a value everybody owns as opposed to the dominion of an elite few. All too often arts organization are structured like Industrial Age smelting plants or are enamored by the image of a heroic, charismatic executive who single-handedly saves the day. These are not models for the Information Age, for the Creative Economy, or for Millennial Generation.

We need to become “leaderful.” We need to learn to work concurrently, collectively, and collaboratively. But that’s really hard to do! Even if you read a bunch business books, go to tons of lectures, and revise your strategic plan every two months!  We need examples of holistic organizational evolution that we can follow. We need to be able to look at a great organization that has been successful in fostering distributed leadership and learn from their model.

I think there is a excellent opportunity for foundations, arts agencies like Americans for the Arts, or corporate sponsors to help highlight arts organizations that are doing leadership well. To hold up best practices that can be judiciously borrowed and replicated. With what little funding there is for arts leadership, perhaps this is the most democratic and far-reaching way to spend it—recognize, reward, and share. As artists we understand this cycle of ideas—one artist building off the ideas of those before her, riffing off the inspiration of peers, moving towards a thing of beauty. Let us make creating real arts leadership a celebrated and shared process.

Los Angeles-based institutions have picked up on the trend of cross-disciplinary art practices and art programs. Artist collaborative Fallen Fruit recently curated an exhibition and participatory event series at LACMA that brings together concepts of urban farming, sustainability, politics and architecture called EATLACMA. Edgar Arceneaux and Watts House Project wants to ignite economic revitalization through community engagement with the arts. LA Commons invites the public to investigate the LA urban landscape through cultural treks through the city. The Unusual Suspects brings play-writing, play producing and acting opportunities to probation camp teens to inspire, change lives and ultimately reduce recitivism. These are the types of civic engagement projects that my peers and I are eager to conceive and be a part of.

But, how do we equip ourselves to be savvy about forging groundbreaking cross-sector programs? How do we befriend and woo our non-arts nonprofit counterparts think about the arts as a tool for their work? Perhaps learn more about the way other sectors operate. Having worked in the arts ever since undergrad, I am now hungry for opportunities to build my knowledge of education, law, politics, urban planning, environmental policy, economic development and business all so that I can devise smart intersections with those sectors.

When asking fellow ELs about their graduate school aspirations for instance, more often than not, they speak of their attraction to non-arts programs. For me, it’s urban planning. We want to think about art in the context of other disciplines and sectors and we want to advocate for the arts with our presence in new forums. You’re thinking, “Well, you’re just mapping an escape route from the arts field.” Perhaps there is a subconscious appeal, but for me, I want to understanding and use the vocabulary, problem-solving approaches, the design mechanics and policy around the built environment so that it can inform my work in the public art field. We all know that the arts can be a vehicle for change, and I think that our generation is eager to exercise that capacity perhaps from a different angle.

Should ELs be encouraged to invest in education (whether graduate or extended learning programs ie. one that I look at longingly ie. the Southern California Leadership Network’s Leadership L.A. Program outside of the arts field?

We all know that the career path for arts administrators has never been a straight one, so is a strategic diversification of expertise something that employers would find valuable for their staff or is it all about the MFAs and the Arts Administration MAs?

The ‘arts leaders of tomorrow’ are leaping, and getting shoved out of the arts non profits all the time – and it’s one of the biggest problems those of us who want to see dynamic arts organizations contribute to a vital society must solve.  (By the way I know everyone is sick of debating what ‘emerging’ means in the leadership discussion but can we get a cool acronym or something to shorthand the group of people in the early part of their careers in the arts?).

The problem is not just that the pipeline for developing, nurturing and promoting talent is leaking and causing many folks to bail when they make it to the other side of 30 (as Edward notes in his comment); it’s that many of those folks who do the time and who pay their dues hit their head on their career path ceiling and realize that they’re going to have hang out on the rung halfway up the ladder for a long long time.

Ok, so now I am mixing metaphors (pipelines? ladders?) but as I read other posts I can see this theme being called out.  Shannon points to the “ED shuffle,”  – the phenomena of executive directors (usually Boomers) moving from ED position to ED position, never leaving an opening for a younger leader to step up.” Clay comments that “emerging leaders feel stymied by a lack of movement at the top — current leaders can’t or won’t retire.” There are good and bad reasons for managers and executives to stay in place for decades*, but the fact remains: working for years without opportunities for advancement is demoralizing.  And when the pipeline is clogged those stuck in it look for a way out.

As a funder working for a program whose mission is to support an arts ecosystem, and not specific arts organizations, the salient unit of analysis for me is the sector. My problem is not whether the E.D. at Organization X has been in charge for 25 years, the next two senior managers have been there 15 years and the other 2-10 people on staff are in their 20s and turnover every 1-2 years; my problem is that when those 2-10 other people on staff leave Organization X they may not go to Organization Y and, instead, leave the arts field altogether. And when they go they are taking with them whatever investment Organization X made in their professional development, their accrued experience, and the professional networks they’ve cultivated and their own creativity and passion for the arts to deploy somewhere else.

Again, as I mentioned in my earlier post, exiting the system might be the right decision for the individual – and as many others have described in their posts, working in the arts in the 21st century is not synonymous with working for a 501c3s arts organization – but if all the under 35 bloggers participating in this salon, for example, left the non profit arts sector that would probably be pretty bad for the arts, right?  And if every tuned-in person under 35 reading these posts split….well, I think a certain Dr. Egon Spengler said something  about what happens when you cross the streams that sums up how bad that would be.**

Is ‘unclogging’ the pipeline a simple thing to do? Of course not.

Is the answer, to paraphrase the Boomer radical Jerry Rubin, for a board not to trust or renew the contract for any manager over 30? That would be pretty dopey too.

However, organizations that are not attentive to the career goals of their younger staff and capable of making space for the bright lights they have on board to matriculate into positions where they not only have responsibility but real authority, will continue to struggle to hang on to those talents.

*From the perspective of what makes an organization successful I actually have a hard time thinking of ‘good reasons’ for one person to stay in the same executive leadership position for decades. The conventional answer is that experienced and stable management and governance structures strengthens an organization, but I think – and it may be that I am unduly influenced by working at a foundation that limits program officers to 8 year terms – new voices and fresh blood does a body good too.

**This Ghostbusters reference is for all the Gen Xers reading along. In the interests of intergenerational inclusion…

Inexperience, like a bad pun, is undervalued.

By that, I don’t mean ignorance of one’s field, or bring unprepared, but being free of the self-imposed limits can easily come with working in a field for a period of time. Our new and (in the best sense) inexperienced colleagues are often a great source of new ideas and creative solutions. And this creativity is often born of not knowing the “best practices” or the traditions of our lines of work.

A GIA board member once advised me in the midst of a difficult hiring decision. “ Go ahead and take a chance on the younger applicant. Sometimes people can walk through walls because they don’t know they are there.” The image has stuck with me for years. Walk through walls because they didn’t know they were there. How often did I not pursue a line of a creative solution because of a barrier that I perceived to be a barrier? How often did I assume something was impossible based on what someone more experienced had told me? How often was that later proved to be wrong.

There are areas, like IRS regulations for example, where knowing the ropes can be very important. There are others, like program development, planning, creative endeavors, etc., where we need to make sure we give emerging practitioners enough latitude to shine.