Tag Archives | Drew McManus

Everyone Wants To Be A Leader

By Joe Patti | on May 14, 2013 | 0

If you do a Google search for Management vs. Leadership, you will likely find the top results imply it is much better to be a leader than a manager. (Though the Wall Street Journal guide says you need to simultaneously be both.)

However, as I noted in a post some years ago inspired by Drew McManus’ thoughts, a leadership approach can be detrimental to your organization.

I searched again this year and if anything there are only more articles that point you toward leadership over managing. Many portray managers as authoritarian and inflexible. However, as I noted in my entry there are those who acknowledge the need for both roles and the capacity of managers to be flexible and creative.

One of those I quote suggests that what might be contributing to the view of management as being detrimental to companies is that there is such a push toward leadership, no one is investing the time to develop excellent management skills.

It Only Appears A Mockery of Reality

By Joe Patti | on May 8, 2013 | 1

If you look around at all the negotiations between the boards of symphony orchestras and their musicians and wonder how it can all go bad so quickly, some entries in which Drew McManus recounted mock negotiation exercises he conducted might give some insight.

While I was looking back at old posts for topics to revisit while I moved jobs, I came across an entry that reminded me about the exercises Drew had run. It all seemed so timely that I knew I had to call attention back to them.

Drew recounted his experiences running mock negotiations with Andrew Taylor’s graduate students at UW-Madison in two parts.

The first part was pretty fascinating to read about as the students immediately identify problems with the accuracy of the financials they, as the musicians negotiating committee, were given by the orchestra management.

“students seemed to expect that this was all some mistake and they would receive the “correct” figures at some point. In several cases, students claimed that an organization’s figures simply couldn’t be this messed up but I helped them along with relating a number of real life examples so they could begin to establish a useable frame of reference.”

Upon realizing that Drew hadn’t misunderstood the “mock” part of the exercise to mean he mocked them with absurd scenarios, those playing the part of the musician negotiation committee begin to get very angry. They accused the management of incompetence in the face of what Drew notes are no-win proposals orchestra musicians are often faced with.

Drew had previously run the same exercise with music students at the Eastman School of Music. What happens next may be illustrative of the difference in outlooks between music students and management students.

Instead of coming back to the table with a counteroffer,

With a certain sense of smug satisfaction, they informed management that they believe the organization is being mismanaged and unless they were presented with a better offer, they were going to break away from SimOrchestra and form their own, musician run, ensemble. In a sense, they were going to take their ball and go home.

… I then inquired if they put together a counter-offer that would provide the board with a better idea of what the musicians found acceptable. They informed me that they did not have such an offer and, furthermore, they refused to craft a counter-offer and reiterated that they felt confident that they could create an organization that had an annual budget equal in size, compared to what the board was currently offering them all while creating a better artistic product than is currently produced.

That pretty much brought the exercise to a close. Drew discusses the debrief in the second entry on the exercise. The students were eager to learn how they, as managers of the future, could avoid the mistakes and problems they perceived in the management’s offer, including the error filled financial statements.

Another student was curious how musicians could come back with a counter-offer at all given that the management’s initial offer was so egregious. They said it would be extremely frustrating to present a counter-offer that management would perhaps perceive as ridiculous as the musicians found management’s offer. “So what happens then, do we just keep going back and forth until we meet in the middle?” the student asked.

Unfortunately, the answer is both yes and no. Nevertheless, this question opened the door to another core component of the mock negotiation session: the environment of collective bargaining agreement negotiations isn’t black and white. Instead, there’s an inherent political dynamic which increases proportionally based on the severity of the negotiating atmosphere.

[...]

Based on conversations with some of the students later that afternoon and the next day, I observed that they were beginning to understand that, as the managers of tomorrow, they need to be prepared to enter into an administrative world that is neither perfect nor cut and dry. They also learned that they can’t rely exclusively on their academic management skills to get them through the woodshed experiences all organizations face at some point in their development.

Drew also wrote up a comparison between the UW-Madison session and the Eastman School of Music sessions for those who are curious.

As I went back to re-read these these entries in the context of all the contentious contract negotiations that have occurred in the intervening seven years, I wonder if administration and musicians both found themselves in situations as impossible, if not more, than the scenario presented to the students.

Even in the face of an unfair labor practice complaint that Drew notes would have resulted from the musicians walking away from the table as the students did, I am surprised we haven’t seen at least one group of musicians stand up and decide to form their own new organization.

The fact that they haven’t may be a testament to the difficult operating environment orchestras face and a recognition that it isn’t so simple to avoid the ridiculous set of circumstances with which the students were presented.

We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

By Joe Patti | on December 10, 2012 | 0

Last month, Drew McManus posted that we need another Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t go into many details, but I wonder what he could be thinking. Since he suggests replacing Henry Ford with Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar, perhaps he is implying musicians need to be freed from the slavery of assembly line performance where standardization makes one concert interchangeable with any other concert.

All Abraham Lincoln exemplifies is lead from behind disengagement. When Republicans met in Chicago to nominate someone for president, Lincoln was in Springfield content to let his surrogates drum up support. After he was nominated for president, he didn’t even hit the campaign trail, again content to let surrogates like Henry Seward, a former rival for the nomination, speak for him while he sat in Springfield never making a speech.

Heck, Lincoln was so disengaged, he wasn’t even going to go vote on election day until someone pointed out it was his civic responsibility to do so for state and local races also being run that day.

This is not the type of leadership the arts need, especially orchestras. They need leaders who are engaged and involved with all their constituencies.

You may say that this is unfair and the Lincoln was only following the custom of the time and you would be correct. In Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential race, Stephen Douglas,

“Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country…becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

Even though Douglas was supportive of the spread of slavery, shouldn’t we look to him and the strength of character it took to break with tradition and face criticism when the country was at the brink of a national crisis as an example of leadership for the arts?

All right, so…. admittedly I am exploiting the fact Drew was a little vague about what characteristics of Lincoln are needed and quoting from a book whose premise is that Lincoln was a good organizer of people rather than a solitary leader to refute Drew’s thesis. Lincoln was faced by challenging circumstances which forced him to alter his position and practices throughout his career. That is what makes it so easy for those with opposing political view points to claim him as their own. It is easy to cherry pick from different periods of his life.

Not to mention that some people’s strength lies in mobilizing capable subordinates while others are really only effective when they step to the fore. There is probably more blame to be attached to bowing to pressure and adopting practices that run counter to your leadership strengths than to resisting popular expectations in order to operate effectively.

The fact that I was being intentionally inflammatory doesn’t diminish the fact that we are at a crossroads in history that will demand changes in behavior. Some aspects of how we operate may never change.

Lincoln stayed at home and didn’t make speeches because he didn’t want to commit to any course of action or give the newspapers anything to misconstrue. Today we expect presidential candidates to make an appearance everywhere, but they still try their hardest not to commit to anything specific and fear what the media may make of what they say.

For his time, Lincoln was actually rather politically savvy and aware of all the different constituencies he needed to please. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the reasons why Henry Seward didn’t get the nomination was because he spent the summer touring Europe while Lincoln was shoring up his support among key groups.

The changes the arts world need to effect are numerous or else there would be little for myself and hundreds of other arts bloggers and writers to talk about. So in effect we DO need someone like Lincoln as a leader, one who can recognize they stand at the crux of complicated times that requires one to change and respond in a nuanced manner.

There is a lot to admire in Henry Ford. He did much to improve the lives of his workers, but like the parts of his automobiles, they were viewed as parts that could be replaced without any impact to the viability of the company. Ford created a system where the means of production was low skilled labor. That is not necessarily the case with the arts.

Info You Can Use: Job Descriptions, Not Everything Is A Critical Duty

By Joe Patti | on June 18, 2012 | 0

Not long ago I came across a job posting for a non-profit organization that listed over 25 duties and marked each one of them as a core responsibility.

Now, my first thought was, if every job responsibility is a core one, why did they go to the trouble of applying a special symbol to each one.

My second thought following soon after was that this is why there is so much burn out in the non-profit field.

Theoretically, a job should only have 4-5 core responsibilities. Every other responsibility should be subsets of the core responsibilities or be something you do occasionally. (Vendor coordinator for the annual street fair, for example.)

Core job responsibilities are ones to which you should expect to devote a large portion of your day/week. If you have 25 core duties and even assuming you work at 10 hour day, you will only be able to devote 24 minutes each day to a duty. If indeed they are all core responsibilities.

If you have a job as a marketing director, your core responsibility might broadly involve promotional efforts, external relations and sales. In pursuit of that your a subset of your responsibilities might be supervising writers, designers, front of house staff, relationships with the boards, vendors and various constituencies. You will have many responsibilities, for certain, but most will be aspects of the core duties and not equal to them.

The ticket office manager’s core responsibility is to supervise the ticket office. If your core responsibility is listed as supervising the ticket office, marketing and publicity people, house manager, then you need to have as much contact time with those people each day as the ticket office manager does with the ticketing staff. Presumably those managers are competent enough that they don’t require such close supervision.

Your job descriptions may be very long in order to clearly define what your duties are. I had an email exchange with Drew McManus regarding this topic and he mentioned he has a history of advocating for detailed job descriptions.

I would probably agree with him. The way some job descriptions are worded, it often isn’t clear what the duties are. There are times I read job postings for executive director positions and I don’t know if the person will be supervising a marketing department or actually writing/designing promotional pieces themselves. With non profit arts organizations, one can never assume…

Now I will confess I understand the impulse to make everything a core responsibility. When you have so few people working for your organization, it is crucial that so many things be accomplished and you want to underscore for the job applicant—-it is IMPORTANT to our operations that these duties are successfully implemented.

(I will also confess this topic is something of a sore point with me since 90% my own job description is boiler plate putting “performing arts management” in place of the “facilities operations and management” hire the week before.)

But some things are more important than others and people need to know what the overriding priorities of their position are. The resources and personnel of the marketing department may be necessary to support fund raising campaigns and outreach programs in addition to promoting events.

Determining which of these functions receives the most priority will depend on a number of factors, but the marketing director’s position description should provide a basis for that decision. If the reality does not match the position description, it may be worth examining that fact during a performance review.

But that is a different entry altogether.