In July I joined participants at the annual Arts Fundraising University of Leeds Summer School to discuss what we really mean by a resilient arts organisation.
Resilience is the buzzword at the moment. As we strive to ensure that our arts organisations have a sustainable future, management teams up and down the country are focusing on income and diversifying business models as key drivers for resilience. But this session in Leeds reminded me that we often forget the softer areas that are really at the heart of creating great organisations – its commitment to vision and purpose, our ability to collaborate, the way we treat our people and overall the culture we create that are the hallmarks of the organisations with staying power.
Putting organisational culture at the heart of the resilience agenda, and of the training for our arts leaders therefore seems a no brainer. I can already feel people recoiling in horror at the thought of this, but if we look to some of the world’s fastest growing and sustainable organisations, what singles them out is their unrelenting focus on culture – and I mean unrelenting – it’s a daily focus on creating, reviewing and reflecting on culture.
For organisations such as Facebook and Amazon, when you get under the skin of their leadership agenda, the area that takes the most management time is the focus on creating culture – and by culture we mean skills, behaviours, how we treat people and how our audiences and partners experience our artistic offer.
However, rather depressingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, within this group of participants at the Summer School, the majority didn’t feel that the leadership of their arts organisation gave time to create culture or to reflect on what was going right and what needed improving. Perhaps worse still, some felt that the leaders of their organisations did take time to ‘consult’ but as a mere tick box exercise and that often such sessions were used to push through change from the top despite feedback from staff.
But then it’s very easy to bash our Artistic Directors and CEOs. They already have an impossible role being chief artistic planner, fundraiser, operations director and strategist, with not enough hours in the day. In this economic environment those roles can be utterly thankless. And its also all too easy for junior members of staff to lay blame at management, to moan and to get into a ‘no before yes’ mindset which just exacerbates cultures that are less than ideal and protects the status quo.
The key point for leaders to realize is that a culture exists in your workplace whether you like it or not. And that’s the point – to develop and co-create a culture you need to be ‘intentional’ about it. If you don’t think about it, it’s going to emerge anyway, and in that scenario more often than not, you might not like what you find.
These more accidental cultures are determined by what employees do and how management react – they can be both fragile and fluid, and they certainly aren’t sustainable.
From my perspective, creating an effective and intentional culture requires one key ingredient – and that’s ‘time’. Our arts organisations have some of the most creative employees in the world, but ironically often we don’t take time to harness those skills. And whilst communication and vision are important, we can’t short cut the fact that creating culture takes both time and investment and you have to work at it every day. We also have to remember that existing cultures are very hard to break, that takes a massive amount of effort and energy.
So what emerged as our top tips for creating a culture that can support organisational resilience?
Create space
Leadership needs to make space to think about culture. To identify the core values of the organisation and then to make sure that there is time for employees to engage with them, bring their ideas to the table and to reflect. There needs to be a regular period of ‘check and adjust’ to make sure that organisational purpose and culture are aligned.
Write it down
Developing effective communications around culture is an obvious point but in our fast-growth companies, evidence of culture appears throughout the building and wherever employees engage with the organisation. It needs to be visible and constant and tailored to the key elements of success for your organisation. So if growing audiences is essential, then your measures of culture needs to put that at the heart of your employee experience.
Train your staff
Investing in staff is important of course but a savvy culture plan will make best use of skills that already exist in the organisation, sharing knowledge and bringing training back into the building. Its not a cliché to recognize that staff can mentor and coach each other and if you happen to have a skilled facilitator or yoga teacher in your midst then using the skills that are already exist is a great start. Great cultures maximize their internal assets; they don’t often buy in ‘experts’.
Be a role model
All staff need to walk the talk but we also need to be much more rewarding of good culture when we see it, and to showcase those organisations that do it well. Many participants were flummoxed when asked the question ‘which arts organisations will be flourishing in 10 years time and why?’ So that’s a great question to start with – and getting under the skin of the ‘why’ is at the heart of any organisation’s culture plan.
Be positive
As more junior members of staff, it’s no good falling into the trap of moaning about what is less than ideal; we have to get into a mindset of taking positive action about what we can influence. So it might not be possible to change organisational policy, but we can impact our own team’s behaviours or ways of working, we can be a positive ambassador, and we can always be positive in putting forward new ideas. After all, it’s people and ideas that are at the heart of resilient organisations.
