Co-Directorship at NAMAC: Sharing Our Leadership Model
I don’t regularly wake up at 3am anymore worrying about my organization like I used to. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night for other reasons, but not because of my job. I no longer feel the need to always focus on what NAMAC is lacking, or how to strive to get the “half-full glass” overflowing. I’ve been able to let go of the often exhausting sense that if I could just (fill in the blank), we would be more stable and more successful.
I now share the national directorship of NAMAC with Jack Walsh, and by all accounts, our collaboration is solid and successful. This partnership has made being an executive director of an arts organization more fun, less stressful, and endlessly fascinating—if for no other reason than the passion and sense of purpose we encounter everyday among the people we work with throughout the media field.
Executive co-leadership is not that uncommon, especially in the creative industries where collaboration is a tradition and where artists and entrepreneurs often team up to commercialize a product. Yet in the nonprofit arts world that we work in, we have not seen this kind of executive relationship formalized as a simple “co-directorship.” While leaders at the top (CEO and CFO, director and deputy directors, executive and associate directors, artistic and managing directors, executive director and board chair) often collaborate very closely in the governance of an organization, there are few instances of formal job-sharing at this level. When it happens successfully, it grows from an organic process built on personal and professional trust, requiring a commitment by the board to allow the role-sharing design to unfold and deepen.
“The arts are always trying to justify their existence,” says Deidre Searcy, longtime NAMAC board member and one of the five founding co-directors at Street Level Video in Chicago. “We fall back on the old models in order to prove to our funders and the public that we are managerially competent. But does replicating traditional organizational structures really protect us, or can we dare to look to new models more suited to our current realities? You have to play to each staff members’ strength. When it works, shared leadership is a quick way to get the organization to leapfrog into period of growth and depth.”
The Collaboration Begins
Jack Walsh and I have shared the NAMAC executive director position since 2004. I had been NAMAC’s national director since 1996, willingly working at 50-percent time. After I came back from a 2003 sabbatical, during which Jack had taken my place as our interim national director, we saw an opportunity to explore ways to share the job.
Since we were both active media makers, co-directing the organization would give us time to continue our other professional and personal pursuits. Jack is an independent filmmaker, television producer, and consultant who works with foundations on funding programs for artists. I am a filmmaker and producer, writer, and mother of two children. Given our life and work experiences, we were both rather adept at compartmentalization, and we were both able to see issues in the field from multiple perspectives, given that creativity has been at the center of our work, whatever form it has taken.
The partnership made good sense for both of us personally and, we felt, for the growth and sustainability of NAMAC. Our longtime experience in film production made us comfortable with shared leadership models. In production, roles between producer and director can overlap and blur, and no one doubts the need for intense, transparent, and responsive communication, brainstorming, and troubleshooting to successfully execute a project.
Jack and I discovered that our work styles complement one another: I am intuitively creative and Jack is analytically creative. I am product-oriented and good at creating new partnerships and projects, but I also like to think strategically about the big picture while connecting ground forces to larger currents out on the horizon. Jack is results-oriented, handles “in the moment” decision-making, and works well to create organizational structures that are effective, understandable, and transparent. We share strategic and tactical duties when situations arise, and because we are always picking up new tips from one another, we have become adept co-creators in our organizational culture.
As many of us find out, it is almost impossible for a single individual to have the total skill set to successfully supervise staff, administrate, fundraise and earn income, lead projects, and perform external relations in the larger national arena. The expectations for an executive director can be so high that nothing short of perfection would be appropriate. Individuals might not be able to make a split position work for them financially; similarly, boards of smaller arts organizations will often not consider paying for two full-time directors, or might feel uncomfortable with what is perceived to be an unusual arrangement.
Fidelma McGinn, NAMAC board member and executive director of Artist Trust, said to me recently about the nonprofit sector, “We demand so much of the job (and the person in it) and give them back so little in compensation.” Seasoned directors realize this and “compensate” by developing ways to share their roles with trusted staff and board members, often mentoring them into unofficial, higher-level leadership positions that the organization may depend on more heavily than it wishes to acknowledge.
We decided to propose a co-directorship to our board because we felt confident we could grow the organization with energies and creative behaviors that would be supported and enhanced by each other’s presence. Since neither of us was in danger of confusing our identities or egos with the position, we both believed that “two heads are better than one.” We were betting that we could accomplish much more as a team—one that was actually cost-effective. We would be able to expand our labor hours on projects by both working three days per week, thus giving NAMAC an executive director for a full six days per week.
Many arts nonprofits find themselves dealing with variations on two extremes: either directors don’t stay long enough (burnout, not enough money, better opportunities) to really guide the organization into a next meaningful phase; or an entrenched executive director, exhibiting “founder’s syndrome,” has inadvertently molded the organization to fit his or her personality, while permitting little new oxygen into the mix.
These are questions that the next generation of cultural leaders are seriously exploring as a way to stay working in the arts, while still keeping time for personal, family, and community relationships, including other creative projects. This thinking also contains an awareness that organizations must build innovative internal structures to remain agile and fresh in an uncertain cultural environment, where the next expansion or contraction cannot be simply predicted. Jack points out that “at NAMAC we cluster management, and it is the difference between the power of the many versus the power of one.”
Neither Jack nor I feel the burden to be a superhero for our organization. We’ve discovered, to our delight, that time away from the office gives us the distance to hold on to an organizational and field-wide “big picture” and, ultimately, to make decisions and implement projects more clearly and less reactively.
Tandem Leadership in Action at NAMAC
Before we brought our co-directorship proposal to the board of directors, we sat down to talk about how to codify this shared position. We began by making lists.
Since we both knew what the NAMAC job encompassed, we first identified areas of interest that satisfied and inspired us individually.
We asked ourselves questions like, “What do I want to do now with this position in NAMAC?” and “What part of the organization can I contribute to most meaningfully? How can I help strengthen it with what I know how to do well and enjoy doing?”
We looked at the spheres of activity that we would have to manage and administer, immediately and in the future, and we wrote these down too, with special attention to the areas that were not “fun” but would have to be dealt with consistently and in a timely way. We were particularly sensitive to the fact that with a small staff, we would have to take care of a lot of support duties ourselves.
The discussion, the lists, and the feedback helped us trust, understand, and listen to each other, and ultimately agree upon which broad areas of the job we would take on as uniquely our own and which we would share.
As a result, I direct all our communications, outreach, and marketing efforts, presenting the face of NAMAC to our field and supporters. I also am the “policy person” who works with our partners on advocacy issues and projects. Jack works on convenings like our regional meetings and the biennial NAMAC Conference, directs the Mapping the Field project, and is developing new income-generating business plans. We share fundraising, administrative, and staff supervisory duties. As specific new projects or initiatives arise with a defined beginning and end, we can easily negotiate whose management area they fall into.
We both work closely with the board and make special effort to report to each other regularly on board-related news. Since we only see our thirteen-member board twice a year at our semi-annual board meetings, I make it a priority to speak to each member individually at least once a quarter to check in on their general thoughts, concerns, and ideas about the organization and the field at large. Because of our board’s diversity, we consider them a great experiential resource to tap into on a regular basis.
After Jack and I established the general outline of our autonomous and joint roles, we created a new organizational chart that showed who reported to whom and how our chain of command worked. Both Dewey Schott (program director) and Amanda Ault (program and membership associate) had a chance to review this and make any changes that were appropriate to the smooth operation of their jobs.
This was a back-and-forth process, resulting in an amiable and clearly defined co-directorship. The image of our work together looked like a Venn diagram: two separate circles with a common area overlapping in the middle.
“Shared leadership has so much potency,” says Fidelma McGinn. “It gets lonely and isolating being an ED. When Helen and Jack came to us with their plan, we could easily see where the overlap was, and how it clarified rather than blurred each of their areas of expertise. We thought it was a great asset to have both of them in the office, especially since we were familiar with both their work styles. The board was eager to move ahead and evaluate them and their plan again after twelve months in action.”
With the confidence and help of board members (many of whom are EDs themselves) we developed a system in which we would be individually evaluated annually by the board. At the beginning of each new fiscal year, the personnel committee receives a document from each of us outlining our personal goals for the upcoming year, goals that are contained within the spheres that we originally agreed to take on. This a subtle balancing act for both of us and the board, but to date we have not tipped over where one or the other is either over-accomplishing or underachieving.
Communications Structures: From Board to Staff
A key part of our one-plus-one equation is that we work on sustaining productive interpersonal relationships with each other, our staff, and the board. We try to encourage techniques to stimulate easy communication—about our work, our ideas, our projects and concerns—in ways that feel matter-of-fact and trusting, not enforced.
Jack and I only share one day a week in the office together. On Mondays, we meet, review our projects, and report on new information or opportunities that could affect our workflow in the coming weeks and months. We also hold a 90-minute meeting with staff, which is rather unusual but highly effective.
On a large, wall-mounted board, we calendar-out each week in columns using individual post-it notes for actions and activities, large and small. In the meeting we go through the calendar discussing what has been completed (then throwing that post-it away), moving other post-its further out on the calendar, and adding more as we think of new items. Using this simple and very mobile technique, we each talk about what we are working on, what has been done, and what still needs to be done around projects long- and short-term. And if there are problems around any task, we can all offer suggestions or help in order to move the project along.
When we see it all up there in front of us, it is easier to speak pragmatically about how an issue can be dealt with. This calendar board also includes everyone’s deadlines, travel plans, longer-term strategies, and even vague brainstorming ideas to pursue when the time is appropriate. As the weeks pass, so do those columns, and new ones are added. Work life moves ahead.
By capturing the ebb and flow of our work seasons, it is easier to figure out together how to incorporate new program or project opportunities into that flow—or to pass on them because of likely scheduling impact. This is a useful discipline when assessing how new and developing work fits into our organizational mission, as well as a grounding mechanism when things appear messier or more tangled up than we would like.
These meetings are not always smooth. They can feel overwhelmingly task-oriented, but they focus us and remind us to tell each other what we are working on, what is coming up, and where problems lie. These 90 weekly minutes serve an incredibly important function: We are able to process the bigger organizational goals into the minutiae of our daily work. We have absolutely clear pathways set up for staff to express opinions, where issues and ideas are considered and laid out for all to hear—not only through offline discussions or in emails that tend to isolate individuals, but face-to-face, where everyone can weigh in.
Friction, controversies, confusions, and problems are dealt with immediately, and we try to turn them into “action items.” How can this question or complaint be dealt with practically? How can this issue or new idea move from abstraction to concrete change? If we can’t agree on how to close the loop on something, at least we can make it into a post-it item, and at a future meeting we can figure out a way to take care of it. And we usually do.
Continuous and Dynamic Planning
Since 1998, the NAMAC board and staff have been creating a new strategic plan every 18 months (see our current Plan). At the half-year mark, the staff holds a daylong retreat. At this retreat we look at our projects and operations through the lens of our strategic plan and then look at how we are turning the vision into practical reality. A fun and important part of this process is to build in time to revise, expand, or delete work plans as they pertain to the next six months and to articulate the patterns we see emerging from the flow of work from month to month. Accountability is built into our process, and everyone shares in it.
Generally we are pleased, which gives us the energy to envision bold or creative new ideas to pursue, or tweak ones that have not been given that much attention but that will augment and enhance what NAMAC continues to offer the field.
This consistent method of planning—extending from the 18-month to the 6-month to the weekly meeting level—is an integral part of our co-directorship and helps keep us from drifting into isolated activities or duplicating each other’s work. By sticking with this structure and making it a priority, everyone can understand our reporting procedures and evaluation criteria.
We are able to make corrections continuously. Checks and balances are built into our planning process, the workplace, and the styles of interpersonal communication we foster. While each co-director has areas of responsibility and projects that he or she takes ownership of, whenever necessary we make an honest effort to honor and call upon each other’s experience and areas of expertise.
An Agile Workplace
Part of our job at NAMAC has always been to discover, look at, and analyze the big ideas that are floating out there, emergent, but not quite solid. The way we run our organization is as important as what we do on behalf of the field. As we gather and use some of the best organizational development ideas from outside of the arts, we ourselves have become a practice lab for our leadership, mentoring, and peer-to-peer programs.
Art and culture are not going to disappear, but how we connect to our peers, members, supporters, and audiences is radically changing. We in the media arts are usually the first to feel the impact of changes affecting the whole culture industry. Because we work at the vulnerable edge where the arts, technology, and advocacy converge, we often find ourselves more willing to experiment with emerging forms of internal and external collaboration, advancing ways to engage public participation in our exhibition and distribution networks.
I’m often asked how we have managed to make our co-directorship work. People are curious, wondering if they might be able to replicate our system or adapt it to their own needs. It is important to note that we created the co-directorship out of a specific set of circumstances, and took a very measured series of steps to arrive at our shared destination. Jack and I had worked together developing the Deep Focus report prior to collaborating at NAMAC. The board wanted to expand the scope and reach of the organization. They were comfortable trying out the co-directorship, since they had worked with Jack as interim director during my sabbatical. We set up this initial trial period with clear benchmarks, an evaluation process in place, and a clearly stated assumption that we could dismantle the shared leadership if it wasn’t functioning as we had envisioned. Most importantly, we had each other’s trust and got along well as colleagues.
Another question people are interested in: Why would I share power and executive responsibility after being the sole national director? I have no answer except that I simply enjoy working this way—which for me personally combines the best of both autonomy and collaboration, and for the organization enhances our capacity and agility in a volatile environment. Sometimes I’m asked if Jack and I are still “working together half-time,” and I wholeheartedly reply, “Yes, of course,” because I now cannot imagine doing it any other way.
HELEN DE MICHIEL has worked for NAMAC since 1996. In collaboration with artist Kathy High, she recently co-edited NAMAC's Hidden Histories CLOSER LOOK 2005 anthology, and Women Make Movies has just released her documentary The Gender Chip Project.
© 2006 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
