Leadership

Arts Instruction Is Critical…As Long As You Volunteer To Do It

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Last week I came across a link to a story about Columbia University students who created a program to provide after school arts experiences in NYC. I absolutely applaud the efforts of these students for seeing the need and providing arts experiences to public school kids for the last seven years.

However, the title of the piece sheds some light on the underlying problem – “Students sub for arts teachers at underfunded MoHi school.”

Artists Reaching Out (ARO), the program created by the Columbia students is now teaching arts during the school day. While this is a positive step for the group since their reach has increased beyond those they can serve after school, it a poor reflection on the NYC Public School system that has replaced arts teachers with unpaid volunteers. This great learning experience for the Columbia students is marred a bit by the fact they won’t be able to use the experience as volunteers teaching the arts to find employment teaching the arts in NYC public schools.

I give credit to Reginald Higgins, the principal of P.S. 125 where the ARO program is teaching during school hours. He seems to be trying to lead his teachers toward integrating the arts into the subject instruction.

“It’s really hard for teachers to include dance, music, and theater in their lessons,” Higgins said. “It’s a lot easier when you have it built into your schedule and when you have individuals come in to help you learn ways to work with your students.”

The Columbia students make an effort to learn what topics will be taught in the coming weeks and customize their activities to complement the instruction.

Given the dichotomy of instruction which is especially marked in this school, the efforts of the Columbia students seems particularly valuable in the lives of the PS 125 students.

“PS 125 shares a building with two charter schools, which receive public funding but are privately managed.

“They’re surrounded by children in uniforms who have arts programs, have more resources, and that affects me,” said Emily Handsman, BC ’12, ARO co-coordinator, and head copy editor of The Eye.”

As I read this piece, I thought about an interview Sir Ken Robinson recently gave where he spoke about creativity not being an add on. As I went back to watch the video of the interview, Robinson’s made a comment about a literacy program in the UK where teachers had to provide a prescribed unit of instruction for an hour and how he felt there were those in the “government who hoped they would recommend a creativity hour…on a Friday…after lunch.”

That comment barely registered on my conscious mind at the time, but popped to the surface when I looked at the ARO website and noticed their program required “Volunteer commitment of 4 hours/week, Friday afternoons, off-campus.”

That is certainly nothing more than coincidence, of course, but as the article describes the experience of the ARO participants in the schools, there is much the same sense of the arts instruction being relegated the status of an add on and being viewed by some as an inconvenience.

“The ARO students are building the capacities of my teachers,” some of whom are “art-phobic,” he [Reginald Higgins] said, adding that teachers of older students were worried ARO lessons would take away from time to prepare for standardized tests.

Fox said that increased attention to standardized tests has nearly wiped out exposure to the arts in public schools, but that teachers’ concern was “definitely legitimate.” “We’re really, really aware we’re taking time out of the school day for this, so we want to be sure we’re helping the teachers and not placing an additional burden on them,” Handsman said.

It is a bit dispiriting that the ARO students view their activities as taking time away from more important efforts. Ken Robinson made a comment that made me realize just how un-student centered standardized testing is. He points out that instead of serving education as a guide for making changes, instruction serves the standardized test. He notes that no student gets up in the morning inspired to help increase the standardized test score rating of their school.

Students don’t become unemployable adults because someone looks at their 5th grade standardized test scores, they are unemployable because there was a lack of engagement in their learning. The tests have meaning to teachers, principals, superintendents, legislatures, governors, Congress and the President of the United State and fulfill their needs, but have no direct significance to the students whose educational lives they will purportedly help.

The 5 minute video of Ken Robinson’s interview is worth watching. He points out the “there is not enough time to do it right first time around, but time to do it over” status of the U.S. education system observing that most remedial programs are geared personally to the student after discovering what inspires them. It would be cheaper to have a more individualized focus on instruction than to pay multiple people to teach the same thing to a student more than once.

Can Arts Orgs Play Moneyball With Their Staffs?

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Ever since the movie Moneyball came out, I have been thinking about whether similar system can be applied to the arts. I mean a system by which baseball teams with small budgets were able to compete on par with the most well-funded teams by assembling a team of under utilized misfits? Heck, I am describing the place you work, right? It seems ready made for the arts!

I was happy to see a recent post by Shawn Harris on the TCG website raising the same general question. I agree with most of what Shawn suggests, including taking an objective look at different aspect of our operations and audiences to determine whether we are truly serving the interests of the community or just perpetuating assumptions.

One assumption I feel pretty safe in making is that what motivates people to attend a baseball game is different from what motivates people to attend an arts event. While celebrity is certainly a factor, people attend baseball games looking for an engaging contest. If they don’t know a lot about each of the players, that is okay if the game was well played. Can the same be said about an arts event? If someone is unfamiliar with a performance, will the fact that statistically speaking, the actors, while unknown, are the most effective performers in a period play?

Probably not. But then again, you shouldn’t be selling the show based on statistics anyway. Even though stats are a huge part of sports, that isn’t what primarily sells tickets. While a well-known artist would make it easier to sell a show, in the long run it is going to be better to take the “brains in the seats” view and work on engaging audiences in the organization, one aspect of which is going to be based on the quality of your personnel choices.

That is what I first started thinking about when I was considering whether Moneyball could be applied to the arts–are we hiring the best people? More over, are we actively seeking the best people or just casting a net and taking whatever swims our way?

I recall going to an Arts Presenters conference where Andrew Taylor talked about how a lot of arts organizations didn’t know how to effectively evaluate the skills of job candidates. He said there was a tendency to hire to the specifics of a job description rather than to the general needs of the position. Though he did mention an associate who hired a person who managed a Sears call center to run their ticket office after some unsatisfying interviews with people from the arts field, it seemed the exception rather than the rule. Taylor said he teaches his students to take control of the interview in order to illuminate their skills and illustrate how it applies to the criteria laid out in the job description.

While I am reluctant to put arts people out of work by suggesting that you look to hire those without any industry experience, I think it can help to always be mindful of the basic abilities you seek in employees. I once had lunch with some representatives from Enterprise Car Rentals and they were so impressed by the affability and service provided by one of the wait staff, they tried to recruit her at the end of our meal.

When was the last time you even thought about adding a person you met outside the context of the arts to your team? In fact, other than pursuing people who would increase the prestige of your company, when is the last time you tried to recruit someone way from another arts organization based on abilities and effectiveness alone?

When I think about the Moneyball model of finding success putting together a seemingly mismatched set of players few other teams desired, I wonder about our collective ability in the arts to effectively identify and cultivate the talent of people who aren’t necessarily shining in their current position. I know this can be tough in the arts where everyone wants to be the star actor/dancer/artist/director. Even if you are perceptive enough to see their talent lay elsewhere, people may be resistant to taking a different role.

The thing is, non profits should be pros at identifying and leveraging undiscovered skills. With all the volunteers we use to assist us with our programs and to serve on our boards, we should be championing seemingly unorthodox hiring decisions. But if Andrew Taylor is correct, the hiring practices in the arts are actually more orthodox than in the for profit sector.

If that is the case, perhaps we aren’t using our volunteers’ skills as effectively as we could, as well. That question starts to bring me back to my post last week featuring Aaron Hurst’s suggestion that certain volunteer programs may be a waste of time.

The research he cited found little difference in effectiveness between well- and poorly- managed programs involving less than 50 people. I wonder though if well managed programs might have beneficial side-effects for organizations in the form of improved hiring skills. In other words, the capacity to identify and employ highly capable people may be developed in the process of effectively doing the same thing with volunteers.

Info You Can Use: Efforts You Can Skip…Maybe

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From time to time I advocate for carefully evaluating the technology tools ones organization uses rather than jumping on what appears to be the hottest new thing everyone is apparently using. Not every tool is appropriate for every organization.

It was with great interest that I started to read Taproot Foundation president Aaron Hurst’s piece, Five Investments You Can Skip. In it, Hurst follows a similar theme in suggesting that non-profit organizations of a certain size and scope consider giving certain “must haves” a pass. Upon reading them, however, I was a little skeptical about some. The five he suggested were:

1) Volunteers. Recruiting and managing volunteers generally isn’t worthwhile unless you use at least 50 per year, they do at least 50 hours of service each (or fewer volunteers and more hours each), and you invest in volunteer management systems. Short of that, it’s almost certainly a waste of time.

2) Websites. Most nonprofits (the small neighborhood ones) would likely be fine with just a Facebook page. A template site would do the trick for slightly larger group. Only 25 percent of nonprofits need customized web design.

3) Board. There is a tremendously high fixed cost to training your board to facilitate donations (in kind or cash). If your board can’t generate a large part of your budget (say, 20 percent), you are likely to find them getting in the way of fundraising success and eating up senior staff time (and increasing burn out). If that’s the case, your organization would likely see more success with a smaller board focused solely on audits and the legal requirements of governance.

4) Social Media. Does it drive your advocacy, fundraising, or program success? It does for likely less than 2 percent of nonprofits. Everyone else is wasting a ton of time and energy on it. Much like my local car wash that urges me to “like” it on Facebook.

5) Strategic planning. You need a strategic plan, but for most organizations it can be a lot lighter than most MBAs want to admit. It doesn’t need to be perfect and frequently should be more of a living document.

Numbers 3 and 5 I can agree with pretty readily. The suggestion to eschew websites in favor of a Facebook page in number 2 seems to be contradicted by the implication in number 4 that social media, including Facebook may be a waste of time and energy.

I did consider that what he says might be true for non-profits in general. I don’t think it is applicable to arts organizations where providing up to date information about events and activities pretty much necessitate a web presence that is adaptable to your specific needs. I have a difficult time imagining that Facebook is a good option for most non-profits given that they need a site that distinguishes them and their mission from everything else one might come across on the web.

His suggestion that only about 2% of non profits are seeing any benefit from social media made me wonder 1) what he based that on and 2) if true, it may just as likely be due to lack of understanding about how to use social media effectively.

Number 1- Not investing in volunteers, held a number of reversals of opinion for me. At first I assumed he opposed investing in Volunteer management software, then I realized he meant not having volunteers at all. This seemed the most controversial of his points as reflected by the long and impassioned comments that followed. Hurst answered those objections with some research that supported his assertion that volunteer programs weren’t effective below about 50 people.

“When an organization reaches 50 volunteers AND achieves an effective volunteer management model, not only do they lead and manage their organizations better, but they are also significantly more adaptable (i.e., reflect the capacity to be a learning organization), sustainable and better resourced (i.e., have skills, knowledge, experience, tools, and other resources to do their work).”

On the other hand, the way I read it, a small number of volunteers, even poorly managed, help to leverage organizational effectiveness at lower budgets.

“Organizations with 10 to 50 volunteers, regardless of whether they are managed well, are statistically equally as “effective” as their counterparts without volunteers on all measures of organizational effectiveness (capacity), yet their average (median) annual budgets are almost half…This implies that organizations that break the barrier of 10 volunteers, regardless of whether they have figured out all of the best practices necessary to manage those volunteers, are equally as capacitated as their non-volunteer-based organizational peers, at perhaps just shy of half the cost…it is important to challenge the assumption that an organization cannot aspire to a more fully “volunteer-engaged” organizational model. Lastly, it is important to acknowledge the need to conduct further rigorous research to test the cause-and-effect assumption of this important finding.”

The other thing about the study Hurst cites is that it seems to be focused entirely on whether volunteers contribute to organizational effectiveness in executing their programs. It doesn’t seem to examine the role of volunteers in furthering organizational goals in terms of advocacy, awareness building and generally representing the organization to the community. If these factors are measured as part of some criteria, it is not clear.

Despite the doubts that one may harbor about whether all his points are well supported, there is some validity to Hurst’s essential idea that it may be worthwhile to assess whether the implementation of all those best practices everyone knows you need to be employing really provides the best return on investment. It is understandably difficult to be a confident skeptic in the face of widely recognized best practices, but these days it could contribute to long term survival.

Organizational Culture–It’s People!!!!

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Rosetta Thurman recently relinked back to an entry she did last year about organizational culture and the importance of not feeling like you are helpless in the face of it. Her basic premise is that organizational culture emerges from the practice of people and not from immutable laws written into the founding documents and the actions. (Though certainly, the initial culture establishes the precedent from which the organization develops.)

Her assertion that individuals in the organization are responsible for whether the culture changes or not struck a chord with me. I have been frustrated with organizational inertia both as a supervisor and subordinate in many places I have worked. While you can feel constrained by the (in)actions of your supervisor, the situation flows both ways. The entrenched reluctance of those you are trying to lead can cause just as much apathy as when the same characteristic is exhibited by one’s leaders.

I generally experience an optimism about a new hire starting work  similar to what I feel when I start a new job myself. I am eager to see what opportunities may be available by virtue of the skills and knowledge the new person brings. Given that most people in the non-profit field are overqualified for the job they are doing, each new person represents a great deal of potential.

People look at taking a new job as an opportunity for a new start. Employers should approach the arrival of a new hire in a like manner. Admittedly, most of the time in the non-profit world a new hire represents the opportunity to clear the backlog of work piling up on your desk. But if you view a new person as a replacement cog, chances are that is how you are viewed as well, perhaps even by yourself. The arrival of a new person is a good time to work on changing that aspect of the corporate culture for everyone’s benefit.

I just hired a new assistant theatre manager in September so these dynamics are at the forefront of my mind. Those who previously held the position provided different benefits to the theatre. The current person is in the position to either maintain or improve upon the gains of her predecessors. Having been in the job for about 45 days, she has enough understanding of the organization to start making suggested improvements.

I will confess that I reflexively feel a twinge of resistance when she starts a sentence with something like “I think that we should think about changing…” How could a new person dare to judge what we do! It is with some relief and then joy that I find that significant elements of her suggestions align with goals I am hoping to accomplish.

Granted, if you have done a good job during the interview process, this should be the result. However, I work for a state institution and the process seems oriented more toward CYA than hiring the best candidate. It is pleasing to realize you did hire the right person in spite of the process.

In any case, the most important factor in creating an environment where new endeavors are either encouraged or inhibited is the participation, or lack thereof, people.

But, of course, people have always been the most valuable ingredient.

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