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Brush Up Your Suetonius

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The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace recently commissioned a study about the value placed on higher education by employers.

I initially only scanned the article, but listening to the Marketplace report on the radio on the way home brought me back to read it again when I heard the president of a technology company talk about how they make their new hires read Cato the Elder and Suetonius. He mentioned they were looking for people who could talk about the process of putting an idea forward, supporting it and problem solving.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.”

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how college students need to focus on practical majors like business and STEM fields rather than wasting their time on Liberal Arts. But businesses keep saying they need well rounded problem solvers, not just people with technical knowledge.

Yet that technical knowledge and specific experience is becoming ever more important, predominantly in the form of internships. The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses that specifically in a separate section of their report. What I really liked about it is that it starts by relating a story about a student failing in her internship and learning from it. I think that is a hallmark of a good internship experience.

What I was a little taken aback by was the fact this woman had six internships. My concern is based on the fact that it takes considerable resources to support oneself while they are participating in an internship. Cost of college and the necessity of attending is certainly revealing the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer means. Now to learn that incurring the cost of internships is increasingly important for employment and to see that one woman has worked six of them presumably to make herself more marketable, is somewhat disheartening to someone like myself whose family didn’t have a lot.

I have written about internships a fair bit over the course of this blog discussing the laws that apply to them as well as some interesting ideas for giving arts majors more practical skills through the design of their training programs.

As I read and listened to the sections of this report, it occurred to me that arts training programs need to insure their education and internship opportunities are providing is relevant and valuable. But it also occurred to me that arts organizations offering the internship opportunities would benefit by marketing them to students outside the arts.

The interns from other disciplines can gain the practical experience and educational “leavening” they need to become more well-rounded. The arts organization can benefit in turn by having someone with a non-arts perspective working for their company.

True, this may reduce the number of internships available for people pursuing arts careers, but those students can also benefit from working for a non-arts company to become well rounded in other areas and pick up skills they can bring back to the arts.

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t have thought doing semi-farm work as a teenager would have translated into anything useful for the arts until it came time to drive a farm tractor around while setting up the grounds for an outdoor arts and music festival.

The Chronicle article mentions much the same thing:

Such exercises don’t always ensure connections, at least at first. Jacquelyn M. Lomp, who graduated from UConn last May with a B.A. in English, initially wasn’t sure how her internship, in which she wrote newsletters for the university’s pharmacy department, related to her studies. “I’d go from dissecting different pharmaceutical research,” she says, “to studying Norse mythology.”

Only after college did she come to recognize that both her academic work and her internship required intense focus and the ability to analyze language for deeper meaning.

The title of this post, inspired of course, by the song from Kiss Me Kate:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ&w=420&h=315]

Put Your Board On A Diet

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The Chronicle of Higher Education had a piece about the problems inherent to large board size on their website today (subscription required). While the article is about large boards in higher education, there are lessons to be learned.

Governance experts say such large boards dilute accountability and invariably allow a small group to seize control of an institution, leaving the remaining trustees on board merely to cut ribbons and big checks.

But it is easy to see why a college might want a big board. It is simpler to add trustees than to remove members who are no longer pulling their weight, and growth can be justified as an effort to broaden the diversity of opinions in a group. It is also true that there may be no better way to cultivate donors than to give them active policy-making roles at a college.

These two paragraphs appear to outline all the major problems faced by boards-lack of accountability, small number of people really in control, some members not engaged in the board functions and valuing board members pretty much solely for their fund raising capacity.

Obviously, these problems can plague boards of any size. In fact some of you may privately be wishing you were “cursed” by a larger board figuring if the ratio of valuable to problematic members stayed true, you would have enough useful people to accomplish something. But the problems and dysfunction can become more pronounced and harder to avoid as the group grows larger.

The article provides a number of examples where weak controls and oversight brought on by large board numbers were the source of financial and sports related scandals. While the article doesn’t draw a direct link, it occurred to me that having large numbers at a meeting means that certain people never get a chance to talk and therefore are never invested or feel responsible for the decisions being made.

Perhaps a small group of people on the executive board make the decisions or perhaps the feeling of personal accountability is diluted across numbers. As they say, no raindrop feels they are responsible for the flood. Either way, the environment can contribute to bad decisions being made.

Another contributing factor seemed to be a lack of board education. The article spent some time on anecdotes from various university presidents who discovered their boards really didn’t have a sense of the business of higher education. The schools embarked on efforts to make their boards more knowledgeable.

Recently when I read about board relations, the importance of educating boards about their governance and oversight responsibilities seems to be discussed with greater frequency. In fact, the idea that board members are fund raisers and need to “give, get or go” seems to have taken a back seat to the importance of boards contributing to good governance and planning.

Perhaps the conversation has turned in this direction as reaction to Sarbanes-Oxley or perhaps the non-profit sector has started to recognize the importance of the board to organizational leadership.

Distinguishing Yourself With Your Own Best Practices

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One of the big focuses on college campuses today is tracking student success. It is important that students both earn their degree in a timely manner and have developed appropriate mastery. Classes are scrutinized and numbers crunched to insure quality is being maintained but that instruction is not delivered in a manner that inhibits student success.

The students need to master the material, but the way the material is delivered may need to be changed to facilitate the learning process. As you might imagine, there are a lot of conversations about whether standards are being compromised along the way.

I hadn’t really seen many connections with the arts until I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week one of the early sections struck a chord.

1) Institutions should improve student success by focusing on practices within their control instead of blaming external factors.

When asked about the challenges they face in helping more students graduate, higher-education leaders tend to list external forces, such as budget cuts and poor academic preparation. Yet regardless of whether states or the federal government restore needed support, or our K-12 system produces better-prepared graduates, institutions can do more with mechanisms directly within their control to help the students they enroll.

Research has shown that institutional practices make a big difference in student success. Similar institutions (of comparable size, selectivity, and student composition) vary more significantly in their completion rates and success with underrepresented populations within segments than they do between segments—with high performers outpacing low performers by as much as 40 percentage points.

The same complaints are made by arts organizations- funding cuts, lack of arts exposure/involvement and other external pressures. The article goes on to mention that the profile of students diverges from traditional in some way and that they “swirl,” attending more than one institution, sometimes simultaneously.

Certainly the arts face the same thing with audience composition changing and splitting their arts and entertainment activities between many choices. Arts organizations struggle with the expectations their audiences bring to the experience in much the same way as colleges struggle to meet student expectations that their credits will transfer from other institutions.

Yes, even if you are adept at handling them, external forces impact your organization immensely and can not be ignored. But there are still many things within in the scope of your control which can positively impact audience experiences.

Unfortunately, unlike college, the arts are not seen as critical to life long success. Where colleges can answer the problem of poor K-12 preparation by offering more remediation and earning money by the effort, there isn’t as much money to be made from filling in the gaps in people’s cultural education.

Which is not to say educational programs can’t be successful for an individual organization, the necessity of bolstering one’s creativity and arts knowledge just isn’t as widespread a cultural value driving people to our doors. I suspect that this is where the second paragraph I quoted applies. Internal institutional practices can probably likewise make a difference in successful audience/community engagement and set one organization apart from similar organizations.

If you read as many articles and blogs as I do in the pursuit of improving your practices (and creating content for your blog) you may be intimidated by the long list of things you are supposed to be doing to improve your organization. I think one of the things that doesn’t get emphasized enough is to make sure your internal practices are playing to your particular organizations strengths rather than trying to replicate/adopt what you read other people are doing.

Using social media may help raise your organizational profile immensely, but the tone and frequency of your interactions should be your own and not mirror that of the big organization you wish you were. The same with your website, the people answering your phone, your ushering staff, curtain speech, lobby decorations, press releases. It should all play to your strengths rather than reflect industry best practices.

You would think all this would be a given, but think a moment and if your like me you can think of a few encounters you have had that ran contrary to the general environment and screamed “industry best practice.” (And if you think a little harder and honestly, you can probably identify some you have perpetuated.)

Granted, some times it is difficult to separate what you value about yourself from the actual organizational strength. For example, a farmer may view his expertise at growing a certain crop as a strength, overlooking the assets of the quality of the soil that can allow him to grow other crops now in demand.

This is a rather simplistic example, but in a similar way arts organizations can define themselves by their performances only, overlooking the asset of their production studios which can meet a burgeoning demand.

Creativity To The Left Of Me, Creativity To The Right

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I am just getting around to reading a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Stephen Tepper and George Kuh (subscription required) about the need to get serious about teaching creativity. By coincidence or design, Americans for the Arts is holding a blog salon on arts in education that also focuses heavily on creativity. Clearly this is becoming a prime topic of discussion.

Tepper and Kuh argue against a prevailing image that creativity stems from environmental conditions rather than being developed through hard work and practice.

“First, we must move beyond the naïvely egalitarian, almost mystical view of creativity advanced by many creativity enthusiasts. This view suggests that to unleash creative capacity, we have only to set up conditions in which creativity will naturally blossom—informal workspaces, nonhierarchical organizations, flexible jobs, opportunities for cross-fertilization, and diverse and hip urban spaces. Such conditions are thought to encourage lateral thinking, brainstorming, and risk taking, all of which set the stage for innovation and entrepreneurship. No wonder creativity is an irresistible solution to our nation’s most pressing challenges! It appears to flow like tap water, requiring no significant investment in research or training. To transform our economy, we just have to get out of the way and let creativity grow free, like kudzu.

Existing research suggests otherwise. Creativity is not a mysterious quality, nor can one simply try on one of Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats to start the creative juices flowing. Rather, creativity is cultivated through rigorous training and by deliberately practicing certain core abilities and skills over an extended period of time. These include:

1. the ability to approach problems in nonroutine ways using analogy and metaphor;

2. conditional or abductive reasoning (posing “what if” propositions and reframing problems);

3. keen observation and the ability to see new and unexpected patterns;

4. the ability to risk failure by taking initiative in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty;

5. the ability to heed critical feedback to revise and improve an idea;

6. a capacity to bring people, power, and resources together to implement novel ideas; and

7. the expressive agility required to draw on multiple means (visual, oral, written, media-related) to communicate novel ideas to others.”

They admit that not all university arts programs are designed to engender these qualities, nor are the arts the sole discipline that engenders these abilities, but by and large arts students are challenged in these ways.

In the last few years I have frequently talked about how businesses are saying there is a need for creativity in leaders and employees. Other than citing other people who have said it, I haven’t had any solid evidence to back the claim up. However, thanks to a post by Emily Peck on the AftA blog salon, now I do. She links to an IBM survey of 1500 executive directors, Capitalizing on Complexity, where their top insight is that CEO’s need to:

Embody creative leadership.
CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.

Notice the words ambiguity and experimentation also listed by Tepper and Kuh.

Another salon blogger, Sarah Murr who works as an arts and culture subject matter expert for Boeing, cites Seven Survival Skills created by researcher and author Tony Wagner that …”people need in order to discuss, understand, and offer leadership to solve some of the most pressing issues we face as a democracy in the 21st century”

These too look very much like those listed by Tepper and Kuh which provides me some confidence that the thinking in the arts and business worlds are resonating to some degree. But there is still some work to be done in communicating these commonalities. Another arts in education salon blogger, Eric Booth, reported the general message he came away with from a National Arts Policy Roundtable retreat.

“The key message I took away from them could be stated like this:

Most people in business think “creativity” is a fluffy indefinite word, yet more hokum from the touchy-feely-artsy set. Indeed most business people do not want new employees arriving with the expectation that they can be creative all over the place. What we want are innovations, and hard-working employees who can recognize and deliver on the unusual occasion in which their creative input is valuable. If you can identify for me the key skills within creativity that produce successful employees in my real setting, and produce innovations that work for my company, and can show me the data that affirms you can reliably develop those key skills, I will become your biggest supporter. Til then, it sounds like fluff to me.

We can’t even name the key skills of creativity that we train, no less demonstrate that we reliably develop such skills.

[…]

I do meet a lot of creativity in good students of all interest areas, which makes me wonder if the arts really are delivering something distinctively potent. I even find research that affirms parts of this assertion that the arts are unusually powerful in developing creative capacity. But even if we are succeeding in developing creative capacity effectively, few can articulate what it is we are doing, or what those skills are.

How can we change the status quo if we can’t make a clear, well-founded statement about a core claim?

[…]

Identify the top three skills of creativity that matter to you in your work with career-track students. Not 10 or 23 skills, but the most essential two or three skills…

And one year from now, add a very simple and non-intrusive documentation-and-assessment practice that illuminates the ways in which your students are getting better at those skills over time. That’s it. That simple.

This may sound like a lot of work, but if you are in education you know that everything is moving toward evidence based whether it is K-12 No Child Left Behind or to meet accreditation standards in higher education. Measuring what Booth suggests should at least be marginally more interesting than performing most evaluations because you are establishing your own criteria.

Crucial Policy Decision: Unwelcome Solicitations

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about sexual harassment in fund raising today. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read them, but if you have a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the same articles appear there.

I really had no idea that sexual advances on development officers by donors was such a prevalent problem. But upon reading the main article, it makes sense that the potential would exist.

In many cases, those women are appealing to older, powerful men for large donations. To succeed, fund raisers must build long-term relationships with donors. And they often visit donors in their homes or meet them in social settings where alcohol and personal information are plentiful.

To be sure, unwelcome sexual advances are not a daily occurrence for most fund raisers. But the problem happens often enough that they and the organizations that employ them should have better guidance on what they can do to prevent and deal with harassment, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, a Washington consultant to nonprofit groups.

Ms. Stamatopoulos says she has rejected inappropriate sexual requests from donors and observed several incidents in which other donors or trustees made sexual overtures toward fund raisers she supervised. People who raise money for a living, she says, should be required to take “a class in the sexual politics of fund raising.”

It occurs to me that this may be an even bigger problem in the arts where the development office is often comprised of one person with few people to turn to for support or to shift a donor to. Given that the executive director is often the primary fundraiser in many organizations, the situation can even be worse with no one but the board to turn to for support. One of those interviewed in the articles spoke of feeling an obligation to keep the donations coming. Her sense of obligation was entirely self imposed because when she spoke to her supervisors after tolerating the advances for two years, they readily assigned the donor to another staff member. The donor never gave to the organization again. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that in some situations staff supervisors or board members would discourage the affected person from rocking the boat too much lest they endanger fund raising efforts.

Most organizations have sexual harassment policies that cover employee behavior, but I suspect few have explicit statements that employees should expect reasonable treatment from patrons and donors as well. Dealing with advances from members of the public is much more complicated than similar situations with employees. That only means that clear policies should be generated so that people can confidently and knowledgeably handle the situation.

It makes sense for organizations to train fund raisers about how to carry themselves as a representative of the company in social situations far away from the work environment. Instruction on how to handle every manner of uncomfortable situations, including unwanted advances is a logical component of such training. But I am guessing it not the sort of training many arts organizations provide.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is hosting an online discussion on Wednesday, July 14 about coping with unwanted advances if anyone is interested in exploring the topic.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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