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A Deadly Collision: When Artistic Values & Sustainability Values Fail to Align
The Challenge
As we scan the news and listen to colleagues in the field discuss current concerns, we are hearing and seeing what we would describe as a looming value collision inside arts organizations.
The current environment has caused two deeply held values – artistic integrity & organizational sustainability – to wrench people, teams, and organizations apart; especially those principal leaders whose role it is to ensure that each of these two values are actualized: artistic directors and executive or managing directors.
To some extent, this is nothing new. These values have been more or less at odds since I’ve been around, but there seems to be a riper smell to the danger these days, a condition that is somewhat ironic given the explosion of large cultural complex building that is taking place throughout North America. It’s not easy to operate these places. Has anybody noticed?
Why is this happening?
Despite all the buzz about the explosive importance of the creative economy and the role of the arts in fueling same, attracting audiences and growing contributed income have become increasingly difficult.
Because audiences seem less predictable, organizations are reluctant to raise ticket prices. Marketing costs are going up, and so are operating costs. As belts tighten, artistic directors feel like they have less money to work with and higher experiential expectations to meet.
To complicate matters further, as tensions between executive and artistic leaders have increased, so have the tensions between each leader’s supporting teams, both within professional staffs and boards of directors. A host of contributing factors – ranging from generational transition to disruptive technologies – has created an ideal environment for contagion. Complexity has made solutions more evasive and ephemeral. Silver bullets are in short supply.
Artistic works that are believed to be good are not attracting audiences as they once did. Organizational performance results contradict “Build-it-and-they-will-come� assumptions. The artistic staff’s confidence in marketing efforts declines when tried-and-tested marketing triggers produce inconsistent results.
While organizations try and figure out what’s going on, defensive routines emerge. Blame-shifting starts. Marketers look askance at artistic works and wonder, “Are we out of touch with our audiences?�
Without a strong organizational culture – one that characterized by explicit and deeply rooted value systems, the current dynamic steals focus. But because flailing is at least doing something, the players feel better.
As these questions emerge and organizational tensions mount, the values, beliefs, and assumptions that have traditionally aligned and strengthened arts organizations are being tested. This “testing� environment is a tough one to work within and a lot of people are leaving as a result. Is it disenchantment or foresight?
Will the ship’s timbers hold against these swelling waves of doubt and uncertainty? Is a refreshed conversation about the tensions between sustainability and artistic merit worthy of pursuit? How can such a conversation be purposed so that both goals are served?
Why Values Matter
Values are the North Star of organizational leadership. In ambiguous circumstances or challenging moments, they offer leaders a way to orient their actions in order to navigate toward the best of prospective futures.
Values are unique in that they ground people while offering a principle or condition to which to aspire. When values are shared deeply, they bond couples, teams, organizations, and even nations.
Some people might argue that leadership is more goal-driven than value-driven. This observation ignores the fact that there are endless means toward any end. Values define means. Since work and life are more about means (journey) than ends (destination), values trump goals. Speaking personally, my experience shows that values shape goals more than goals shape values.
Because self-aware people will usually act in accordance with their values, values provide a degree of predictability among leaders. Predictability helps create comfort among those being led because people crave leadership that is behaviorally predictable. Leaders who do not walk their talk breed unease among those around them. As the old adage goes, people who don’t stand for something will stand for anything. Change is not nearly as scary as is aimlessness. Values matter.
How Values Are Expressed
Nearly fifteen years ago when I was in a seminar with Global Business Network’s Jay Ogilvy, he defined values as “an individual’s representation of society’s goals.� I have never forgotten this definition. It is clear and robust. It also taught me several things of critical importance:
1) Values reside in and are expressed by individuals.
2) Individuals shape their values based on what they believe are society’s goals.
This is strategically material to both understanding and expressing leadership. We talk about organizational values as if an organization could have values. It cannot. Values become useful when they are shared and expressed in action by individuals within an organization. Conversely, the force of any value is weakened to the extent that it is not shared nor expressed.
How an individual perceives society’s goals depends upon one's frame of reference that, in turn, shapes perspective. For example, if one’s frame of reference is the marketplace, sales and financial performance are likely to be more important indicators of success than are subjective, qualitative considerations like artistic quality.
If one’s frame of reference is artistic quality, then the satisfaction of those more subjective dimensions guide action. This is not to imply that one frame of reference excludes others. However, frames of reference influence value hierarchy. The strength of one value within a hierarchy may suppress the expression of another.
For example, if a theatre’s managing director is held accountable for balanced budget performance, it is not unreasonable for this person to act accordingly. Their frame of reference – which in this case is role-defined – might establish organizational sustainability as superordinate to artistic quality.
What happens when values are internally inconsistent or when they compete?
Among enlightened organizations, artistic and managerial leadership mutually commit to each other’s values, goals, and purposes. Not only does their mutuality of purpose strengthen their relationship, it increases the probability of realizing both artistic integrity and organizational sustainability.
For decades, artists and managers have told themselves and each other that these sustainability and artistic integrity are compatible; each fosters the other. Make a great work and people will flock to see it – our own version of “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path….�
While a case may be made that among the best leadership teams that this is true, there is undoubtedly occasional tension and disagreement between the roles of artistic and executive directors. There is nothing wrong here. It’s just what’s so.
What matters is what is done with the tension. Tension can be a fuel for either innovation or immolation. How leaders choose to see tension and then deal with it matters more to organizational sustainability than the presence of the tension, itself.
What’s difficult among people with integrity who commit to both values is that these values occasionally compete. Sometimes one is sacrificed to a greater or lesser extent to the other.
What’s problematic is how people observe the occasional compromise. Too often compromises are framed as “selling out� either organizational sustainability or artistic integrity. This isn’t helpful, but these characterizations will continue without active and authentic interventions from the leadership team – together.
A particular downside of loyalty is that a leader’s team can be somewhat blindly resentful in response to a perceived defeat of their leader’s agenda. If the leader doesn’t make a joint decision their own – in a very public sense – then that decision may be experienced as an unwelcome coercion.
Alignment requires compromise to remain strong. Compromise should never parade about in its own clothes. As a former boss of mine used to say after every defeat: “I’m going to declare victory and go home.�
Beware of Romantic Archetypes When Values Collide
Artists are among the most charismatic and wonderful of people, but they can also be the pettiest of tyrants, especially if they suspect that someone would compromise artistic quality for reasons about which they disagree. When tyranny raises its leonine head, it is almost always justified by the promise of art. Like most brands of greatness, the promise is seductive and dangerous.
No one is so quick to don the victim’s mantle as is an artist. Misunderstood, unappreciated, ahead of their time, alone in their integrity, and Delphic among the near-sighted are just a few of the garments in the artist’s closet. The Romantic archetype of the artist is unsurprisingly most dangerous to the artist, but their organization runs a very close second.
Artists are dangerous, that’s why we need them. (We have insurance actuaries and accountants for safety, but I digress.)
It intrigues me in these cynical, solipsistic times that our culture continues to cling desperately to its inclination to romanticize the artist. Garret-bound, consumptive, genius-blighted visions stubbornly persist. Archetypes die longer and slower deaths than do opera’s slowest expirers.
Much great art has failed to succeed in the moment. (Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime – to his brother.) Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself:
“If someone with genius akin to Van Gogh’s were creating theatre, music, or dance today, would this person’s managerial counterpart support this work if it meant the destruction of the organization?�
While we might wish for ourselves and posterity that the answer might be “yes,� is this decision the right one? It depends on what we value. Clearly this question’s thorny aspects burgeon in the collaborative arts where many artists’ livelihoods and futures are at stake. How much can or should be sacrificed for the great artist who is - like Van Gogh was - ahead of the times?
In romanticized scenarios, our society seems to have been more than willing to sacrifice people to get great art. We are less willing to sacrifice organizations.
In organizations, the stewardship of reputation, credibility, prudence, and accountability are distributed beyond artistic and managerial leadership to Boards of Directors, whose charge is to ensure that the ox is not wounded, let alone gored. The “ox� is made healthier when an organization’s volunteer leadership helps regulate – through clear policy goals – how competing values are balanced in action.
What usually happens, however, is that the “ox� is experienced as the organization’s artistic agenda. Because Board Members almost always hitch their organization’s fortunes to an Artistic Director’s vision – and in very public terms when the Artistic Director is appointed – they are loath to throw the weight of their support behind a managerial agenda when conflict erupts.
Because artistic interests almost always prevail, the Artistic Director rightly or wrongly infers that he or she is the real leader of the organization, and everybody else better get in line. These inferences or behavioral norms may exacerbate a conflict once it starts, or worse, encourage the Artistic Director to take an unwise stand.
A Board of Directors can do serious damage to an organization’s ability to build mutuality of purpose and a shared set of values between artistic and managerial leadership by simply favoring one value over another as a matter of ideology. Ideologies have a pesky habit of turning into behaviors.
Organizational sustainability requires a commitment to both artistic integrity and to organizational sustainability, not to solely one or the other. How and when one value trumps another is best left to the private and joint ruminations of an organization’s leadership.
When deliberations are finished, both leaders would be well-advised to jointly own the decision. Making tough decisions is like making sausage; the product is more enjoyable when the process takes place discreetly.
Taking Foundational Action
When an organization is experiencing good times, value-collisions are difficult to negotiate. In bad times the difficulty increases exponentially, especially in organizations where the hard work of building and annunciating an intentional culture has not taken place.
Values are organizational culture’s foundational stones. It is up to leadership to facilitate, organize, clarify, annunciate, and live the value hierarchies that underpin the work of their organization.
Alignment is always important. In challenging times it is as key to sustainability as is attracting resources.
We believe that the spread of this contagious malaise within arts organizations can be stemmed. Further, we believe that the mission and values exercise – much maligned as of late as a navel-gazing waste of time – can not only align values, but add value, too.
Posted on July 25, 2006 02:18 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Amen.
You couldn't be more on target. Identifying, discussing, arguing about, and then agreeing on core values will be the key to the success of the 21st century arts organization.
Several of the Roan Group's clients have been through this careful and at times stressful values/branding process and now are much better equipped to project/live their core values.
A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a group of marketing and development directors. I suggested that there might be a disconnect between the values of access, equity and diversity presented in marketing materials and the practices of extending benefits to generous donors.
While these conversations are not easy, it's likely best we have them internally within the arts field first before we engage in external conversations.