This is the third post in a series of artist responses to the Get on Board: Workshop and Speaker Series by the Creative Champions Network, an initiative of the Toronto Arts Foundation. As a co-creator of the series in 2022/23, Generator has engaged Artist Responders to attend each session, to summarize, reflect and respond to the emerging conversations and activities. In this post, Shannon Litzenberger (dancer, choreographer, director & facilitator) reflects on the What Happens When People Leave session on April 4th, 2023. This is one of two reflections on this session. Find an alternative reflection from Juliana Bandeira here.
Facilitating leadership transition is one of the key responsibilities of any non-profit board. In this moment of accelerated social and cultural transformation, what are the leadership models and practices that will lead us toward a positive future aligned with our collective thriving?
In listening to the distinctive experiences of three arts organizations undergoing leadership transitions, I was struck by how leadership changeover offered opportunities to reorient and experiment with new processes and models. I was also heartened by the attention paid to carrying forward positive legacies (change doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater), while letting go of models and practices not aligned with the emerging future.
I will summarize my reflections in three parts.
First, leadership transition is offering an opportunity to experiment with new hiring practices and models of leadership.
As we heard from all three organizations, leadership transition offered the opportunity to try something new. In the case of Native Earth, the near simultaneous departure of longtime artistic and executive leadership Keith Barker and Isaac Thomas gave way to the hiring of Joelle Peters and Himanshu Sitlani - two new, developing-in-their-role leaders buttressed by a support circle comprised of experienced leaders in the arts community, available to provide guidance and share learning.
For The Toronto Consort, flutes player Alison Melville spoke of an emergent model of Artistic Associates (there are eight of them!) that has been adopted following the departure of founding Artistic Director David Fallis. The decision to distribute artistic leadership among associates rather than enter into a hiring process is allowing for the preservation of specialized artistic knowledge already present within the organization, while carrying forward a valued (but atypical) legacy of collaboration established by Fallis.
For Generator, attention to the hiring process itself was the first consideration in their approach to a new co-leadership model, motivated by problematic and extractive executive hiring practices experienced by board and staff leadership through their careers. In a re-imagined search process, Generator aimed to serve the leaders they wanted to attract, engaging in a way that was respectful of their time, their intellectual contributions, and with a mindfulness toward the power dynamics at play during executive search processes. Importantly, this work became a sharable resource for the field, allowing other organizations to model their success.
Second, leadership can successfully shift away from heroic models toward co-creative models, if we give time for learning, experimentation and risk-taking.
Early in my career at the tender age of 23, I was hired into a significant leadership role at a small but fast-growing national arts service organization where I was supported by several mentors who guided my development. At that time, I wasn’t ready to take on the role without support. This on the job experience was invaluable to me, accelerating my growth as a leader both through their ongoing counsel and through the connections they facilitated in the field.
The community-based support circle model in place to support Joelle and Himanshu at Native Earth offers similar benefits, ensuring that as new-to-their-role leaders are learning, they have strong guidance and a robust support system. With the right balance of offering support and agency to new leaders, advisories can impart something better than skills and knowledge, they can offer the wisdom of experience and confidence-building encouragement as leaders are learning into their potential.
Likewise, Kristina Lemieux and ted witzel at Generator note that over the past eight years, the company has been learning its way into a new business model, moving toward producer training in a paradigm where more often than not, models of production for live performance are no longer ‘one size fits all’ but ‘one size fits one’. Experimentation has been paramount here, sometimes involving trial and error, but always avoiding the wholesale replication of existing systems. Kristina notes that the board’s higher than average risk tolerance was critical to the shift toward a new model.
How can boards better support learning through doing? This kind of experiential development holds tremendous potential to mobilize imagination and emergent possibilities.
Third, if we want strong and sustainable leadership, we need to stop sacrificing people in the name of organizational preservation and mission realization.
Perhaps one of the outstanding features of the capitalist system at this moment is the extent to which it is willing to generate profit at all costs. Even in the non-profit sector, including in the arts, we regularly achieve at our own expense, modeling the toxic aspects of our society we are often simultaneously trying to transform.
I was heartened to hear the ‘small and mighty tired’ workforce addressed by ted at Generator who is working to re-model organizational processes in ways that balance the health of people with organizational needs and capacity. There are so many cultural and structural reasons that motivate the perpetuation of burnout in the non-profit sector that I won’t get into here. However, I will say that uncoupling from this deeply conditioned habit is challenging. The key to lasting change just might be in how we understand what ‘leadership’ means and how we do it.
Leadership in any arts organization, whether solo or collaborative, carries a tremendous burden of responsibility. When that responsibility is unreasonable (ie- a recipe for stress and burnout) and unsupported (ie - isolating and hierarchical), we bleed out talent from our field and struggle increasingly to fill leadership positions. The shared and community supported leadership structures in all three organizations aim to spread responsibility and care, allowing for more sets of shoulders to carry the proverbial load.
While our workforce is highly motivated by the mission of the arts, it’s unacceptable for boards to exploit that motivation with below average wages coupled with unrealistic expectations of work output. As a sector, we are too often failing to protect a basic state of wellness for artists and arts workers. And we’re often doing it because we are trying to maintain activity while balancing budgets.
What can we reasonably ask of leadership in the arts? What is an organization’s responsibility to the wellbeing of its people? I was encouraged by Alison’s comments at The Toronto Consort who signaled that the development of people, whether they stay or leave, is, in and of itself, a positive outcome. Positive experiences help retain talent in the field.
If we thought about the arts less as a system that produces culture, and more like a project of human growth and development, we might find ourselves centring new leadership values inside our organizations as well as in our public facing endeavors, as these three organizations are demonstrating.
Leaders model the worlds they are working to bring into existence. Organizations can too.
