The first tip: for a nonprofit organization to work, everyone has to care about why they’re there; otherwise, there’s no need for them to stay.
Over the next few years, your nonprofit arts organization will be tasked with trying to succeed in a local and national environment not terribly interested in your work. Certainly not your art. It is with that in mind that we start the discussion of how to become the most successful your organization can be. This is not to say that your US-based organization will be successful, but it may give you some comfort to know that your failure will not be because of the change in administration, but because your leadership continued to concern itself with the wrong things.
There are no miracles. Your organization can only maximize success, not ensure it.
Which leads us to Tip #1. Don’t terrify your employees.
In 1999, Jeff Bezos, the near-trillionaire owner of Amazon, a company that has put way too many small businesses into bankruptcy (and he’s coming for you, too, unless you give him a piece of the action — straight out of every bad 1940s gangster movie), revealed his motivating message to his employees. Bezos told Wendy Walsh of CNET, “I asked everyone around here to wake up terrified every morning, their sheets drenched in sweat.”
This is a company where, purportedly (and from a lot of ex-employee reports), warehouse workers feel compelled to pee in a bottle so that they don’t leave the production line. It is not apparent why they’re peeing in bottles. Likely, it’s just the terror of being seen not at their station. The jobs pay pretty well, but no compensation can make up for being terrorized.
I, too, worked in an office environment like that once. Owned by a billionaire. Tight security to the point of Severance-like subjugation. The pay was great. Rampant paranoia from all quarters, especially the executive floor. Full gym on site. Arbitrary hirings and firings. One of the company’s two emperors would feel no remorse for firing people just because they walked by their office. Expectations were ridiculous. The environment was enough to drive one employee to say, as we all descended down a staircase during a fire drill, “Let it burn. Please let it burn.”
That person was not joking. Nor did anyone laugh.
I’ve heard it said numerous times: “It’s not paranoia if they are, in fact, out to get you.” This was that kind of place. Which leads to the obvious question about your own nonprofit arts organization — how toxic is your work environment? Moreover, whatever the answer is, how do you know?
On January 22, the Seattle Times reported that the CEO of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) had resigned. He’d been on sabbatical since December and decided to just not come back. And while we’ll never know the real reason for his departure, the environment at SSO has been reported as back-stabbingly toxic for years. Not only did the CEO resign, but so did the CFO/COO and the Chief Diversity Officer.
Further down the ladder rungs of the organizational chart, there have been numerous discussions on LinkedIn and other websites from people who felt betrayed by the company.
The CEO was no angel, it would seem. According to one first-hand report from a former long-term hire, “I lost faith in him and the SSO leadership team after several former SSO musicians and administrators were fired silently and unjustly or pushed out by politics and VP/managerial power trips.” There were reports of the over-monitoring of social media accounts as a symptom of the organization’s insecurity over its own activities. Micromanaging is/was evidently rampant.
A good investigative reporter would probably not only discard those reports as hearsay, but at the same time, they’d look into the company’s tax-exempt activities as detailed in IRS returns, grant requests, grant reports, and other publicly available information over the years.
Three years ago, the music director abruptly resigned by email, saying, “I felt personally not safe. I felt threatened.” The board has repeatedly denied that there was a hostile work environment, which leads to a discussion of perception vis-à-vis reality.
It is at this point that I should mention that I have no first-hand knowledge of any wrongdoing or bad management at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. I should also mention that I have no first-hand knowledge of any rightdoing or good management at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Nor is this a way to impugn the reputation of the leadership there. All of this alleged activity is exactly that, alleged.
Yet, other former employees have chimed in.
“I had a horrific experience at SSO as well, under a different CEO. All VPs also left within 1-2 years after I left. Bullying and power trips are pervasive in the industry. It needs to stop.”
Within the community, this kind of toxic behavior at the SSO seems to be a not-terribly-well-kept secret. Sometimes, when a nonprofit arts organization morphs into an institution, the sinister and corrupt side of the corporate management textbook holds sway. Did that happen here? I don’t know. All I know is that there are myriad former employees of the SSO that claim they were treated poorly, enough to make their feelings public.
Once that becomes public, of course, the company should go ahead and change its official moniker to “The Terrifying Seattle Symphony Orchestra,” or simply “TSSO.” When it comes to depending on toxicity for funding, other orchestras across the country have figured out that the community depends on them, not the other way around. But not the TSSO.
According to their official 990 tax return, “The Seattle Symphony unleashes the power of music, brings people together, and lifts the human spirit.” All these are lovely phrases that are harmless and ornamental. Without any proof that their intent is to do those things (let alone any progress toward making those things happen for the communities of Seattle), it’s spurious gobbledygook. At no time, even among the several pages of their website, do they answer the key question, “Why?”
Without knowing why they see as their ultimate mission to “unleash the power of music” (something that can be done effectively with a Led Zeppelin album and a 20-foot speaker), how would community-minded employees know why they work there? Where is the charity? Except for the money and the credit on the résumé for a potential employee, it appears to be a charitable wasteland.
Finally, if the TSSO exists just to make sure that the TSSO exists, that’s the kind of toxic workplace reality that leads to its best people leaving, running like hell to the next job. Take it as a lesson: don’t terrorize your employees. It makes you look bad (and not worthy of funding), not them.
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