Leaders are not “plug-and-play.” And a multi-headed model just makes it worse.
Maybe you remember 1980s American history. Likely you didn’t because, hey, you weren’t born yet. And nothing of note ever happened before you were born.
There was a moment during the republican convention of 1980 when the people who managed the presumptive nominee, Ronald Reagan, were mulling the choice for vice-president.
According to sources, Reagan asked popular choice Gerald Ford several times. Ford had “been there, done that,” according to campaign chronicler Jules Witcover, and was not interested in doing more guest appearances at state funerals and the like. During the process, an idea floated about. The job was too difficult for one doddering ex-actor with a spotty record as the governor of California. The idea was a Reagan-Ford co-presidency. It was seemingly the only way to include the former unelected president and unelected vice president on the ticket, at least in Ford’s view.
According to Witcover, “Ford never used the term. But he did not contradict it. In fact, he only added to the confusion, telling [Walter] Cronkite: ‘I really believe that, in all fairness to me, if there is to be any change, it has to be predicated on the arrangements that I would expect as a vice president in a relationship with the president. I would not go to Washington and be a figurehead … Before I can even consider any revision in the firm position I have taken, I have to have responsible assurances.’”
After watching this on TV, Reagan evidently sat bolt upright in a chair in his suite at the Detroit Crowne Plaza and asked, “Did you hear what he said about a co-presidency?” And then he chose a guy he rather disliked, George H.W. Bush, to be his vice president.
History lesson over. But this isn’t about Reagan, Bush, or Ford. It’s about co-leadership. And it’s about your arts organization.
Two- (or multi-) headed arts organizational leadership is a rare solution to a systemic problem. Sometimes, the setup works just fine – founding partnerships, for example. But not always. And certainly not as the continuing model.
About 6 months ago, Dance/NYC, an advocacy and grant-making organization whose mission is to “promote the knowledge, appreciation, practice, and performance of dance in the metropolitan New York City area,” issued a letter. In it, among a spin-art splashing of catchwords, buzzwords, and grandiloquence, was a description of their new leadership direction, at least on staff.
Externally, challenging the status quo of singular leadership models has resulted in disparities in communication from our stakeholders (who are inclined to communicate only with the individual leader), anxiety about resource scarcity, and barriers to efficient work. We acknowledge these temporary and necessary pain points in our process of becoming.
“Our process of becoming”? Becoming what? But I digress.
This particular distribution of power, a virtual Hydra of decision-makers, really breaks down to these four jobs: Director of Programming and Justice Initiatives, Director of Development, Director of Operations and Finance, and [Interim] Executive Director. If you’re scoring at home (and congratulations if you are), those are the very same jobs that your nonprofit arts organization probably has. How this is earth-shaking news is hard to fathom.
The problem isn’t how many people it takes to screw in a light bulb. (It takes one. Really.)
A leadership Hydra is not the answer. That’s an idea that comes from the old “I Wanna!™” game of arts leadership, originally developed in 2014. It’s where the hard stuff gets assigned to someone else because, um, art is hard.
Here’s how to play:
Players select their tokens to start play. Each token designates their role in nonprofit art.
- Marionette: Performing Artists/Designers
- Blob of Clay: Writers/Composers/Visual Artists
- Pawn: All technical/administrative/volunteer personnel (one token represents all)
- Change Purse: Audience
- Louis Vuitton Pocketbook: Donor/Funder
- Fake Louis Vuitton Pocketbook: Development Director
- Sledgehammer: Board Member
- Bent nail: Managing/Executive Director
- Telescope that only looks up: Artistic Director/Curator
- Microscope that only looks down: General Manager/CFO
- Bloody leech: Critic/Journalist
- Just a Plain Token: DEI Consultant
(Sorry: tokens for marketing directors were deleted in the last budget cycle.)
All players spin the wheel simultaneously in all directions and yell, “I Wanna!” The wheel comes off its bearings; breaks into millions of pieces. Players move tokens anyplace in the room that feels most advantageous, regardless of the playing board or other players. All players push their Community Cards to other players until they get swept under the rug.
End of game: Chaos. All players proclaim victory. Nobody wins.
Stop playing games with your community.
You have to configure one (and only one) place where the buck actually stops. When more than one person is in charge, no one person is in charge. There is no final word when there is disagreement – and disagreement is key to the disequilibrium necessary to grow your nonprofit arts organization. When things go south, it is too tempting to insist that the problem is the “other.”
When the person in charge is the chief artistic officer (rather than the executive director), your organization inevitably turns into a) an echo chamber in which all decisions are unanimously (and blindly) followed; or b) a paranoia chamber in which any disagreement may become grounds for termination. Either way, it’s a bad model. Your community deserves better.
In May 2022, we advocated for boards to fire the artistic director if that person is the leading executive for the organization. We still do. From that column:
Hire a new artist to an officer-level position. Commit the “sin” of pay transparency and pay all of your officers the same salary. This is the next normal that everyone’s been talking about. And make sure that your staff not only represents the people in your community, but highlights the cultural differences among you.
Then let the executive director work with the board to do activities that help your community rise.
Remember that, no matter what, the new member of a partnership will always be known as “the new Jack,” no matter how much people liked or disliked “the old Jack.” It’s an unconscious shorthand to help people understand what that new leader does, even if there’s a major change afoot within the organization. It’s unfair to the new leader, to Jack, and to the remaining partner, because expectations change immediately with that framing.
What’s the organizational chart of your nonprofit arts organization look like? Where is the community (the owners of your organization) in all this? Do they even appear? Why not?
Based in Kirkland, Washington, Alan Harrison is a writer and speaker specializing in nonprofit organizations, strategy, the arts, and life politics. His columns appear regularly in major publications. Contact him directly at alan@501c3.guru.
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution to leadership structure. Solo leader and multi-leader models succeed or fail based on many factors, including a shared vision, compatibility, and trust (and of course many external factors). There are plenty of examples of this historically. Some have worked well short-term while others have been long in duration.
Hmm… completely agree with Rick Stein’s comment. As for firing the artistic director, few EDs that I’ve met and worked with have the interest or ability to set the artistic vision for their organizations. Interestingly, almost every founder of a non-profit arts group has been an artist. That should tell us something.
Peculiar Works Project has had 3 leaders for 30 years. If it were easy, we’d probably be doing something else, and it never gets easier. In fact, it requires even more communication than a traditional leadership model. It’s theater, nothing it easy. Better not be.