By leadership and leading, I mean influencing.
As I suggest in my first post, it begins with understanding and respecting your various stakeholders—an audience being one of many important constituency groups. Observe and learn from them, inquire and engage them. Take the time to create trust and fortify the relationship. Also, learn to take the good with the bad and be better for it. Sustain the effort for the long term. Institutions, and therefore its leaders, should invest in their futures in this way.
Now there is a full range of effective leadership styles an individual and an organization can adopt (it’s a robust area of research). I’d like to highlight one style different than those characterized by John Holden in his blog, “The Cultural World Has Fundamentally Changed.” It’s described as the Participatory Style where leadership is enacted by involvement and conversation, essentially allowing others to be a part of the decision-making and own the work involved (more about this and others in the article, “Managing the Arts: Leadership and Decision Making under Dual Rationalities”). I’m describing shared leadership, in essence, versus heroic leadership. This takes talents from many to tackle complex issues—sounds like many of our institutions, right? In fact, museums leaders self-identify with this style the most. On big things at relatively complex levels (life in organizations), we’ve learned from many organizational behavior scholars that leaders can’t tell people what to do (when has this really worked?), they only have the ability to persuade.
So perhaps style matches circumstance. Let’s say today’s museum leaders and organizations are able and willing, maybe even downright ambitious to create a kind of effort that seeds constant innovation and achievement. I still ask, are they being effective to those around them (namely in this debate, for their audience)? If yes, great! If no, why? Here’s when a more agentic style of leadership often comes into play. Leading can become more proactively declarative with this or that, moving forth regardless…often leaving many behind.
Can it simply be that we just don’t have enough time, money (Mr. Osborne, I hear what you’re saying, in part) and thinking space? True, to influence well takes more of all of the above. But what does it say when museum leaders for over 30 years in our summer institute have always made this case, we don’t have enough time, money, thinking space, etc.? What appears to be constant is a never ending feeling with this construct.
So now what? I would go back to the top and give listening and building a try and lead by trudging on with observing, learning, inquiring, engaging, influencing… What else do we really have?
