Future Perfect: Lessons Learned after a Convening of Museum Education Leaders
Ami Davis, Director of Education and Community Partnerships, Monterey Museum of Art
It’s a magnificent time to be a museum educator.
Encouragingly, more of us are occupying positions of leadership — as deputy directors or overseeing diverse museum areas including education, curatorial, and other departments. Such advances indicate that across the industry, museums are recognizing that if our mission is education, educators should be at the forefront of institution-wide leadership, planning, and organization. These developments, among many other issues in museum education leadership, were discussed during the “Leading the Future of Museum Education: Challenges and Opportunities” convening in Denver, Colorado in May 2015, presented by Bank Street College’s Leadership in Museum Education Program in collaboration with the Education Professional Network (EdCom) of the American Alliance of Museums, as well as a network of Denver museums. The event brought together directors and managers of museum education departments to discuss the leadership challenges and opportunities facing museum education. While only the beginning of an ongoing re-examination of our profession, we explored how to be better leaders, exercise agency within our organizations, and empower staff to be leaders themselves.
Leadership is not a simple process.
Perhaps your museum does not subscribe to the turning tide of museum education leadership. You may be a director of your department, but you are so short-staffed that most of your time is spent running programs yourself. Maybe your department’s director is not supportive of your vision. Even on a personal level, in many ways, we’ve sucked the humanity out of leadership, believing that if we are to be effective, we must stoically work sixty-hour weeks and do everything ourselves. Untrue. To be effective leaders, we cannot burn out. Despite challenges within our institutions, we all have the power to build capacity in our own leadership abilities and become more resilient leaders. Since the Denver convening, I have sought to embrace humility, be a space-making leader, and create opportunities at my institution to reflect our museum’s community.
Embrace humility
Humility has been considered a weakness in modern professional environments. Admitting when you are wrong, or when you don’t know the answer, can make us feel vulnerable. Yet demonstrating the right measures of authenticity and humility makes you a more humane leader, more relatable, and more resilient.
Recognizing when you are anxious, and embracing it, is itself an act of humility. Several of us tweeted this quote by Dan Spock, Director, History Center Museum, Exhibitions and Diversity Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society, during the convening: “Know when you’re anxious. Move toward it. Anxiety is trying to teach you something.” Anxiety, a primeval response to environmental stress, can cause us to flee; as leaders, though, we are obligated to stay put and work toward solutions.
There’s a proverb that resonates with me in such situations: “He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.” When discussing complex issues with my staff or volunteers, I try to admit when I don’t know something and ask them for their insights. Even reflecting publicly in this article is a vulnerable act — but it is also a chance to gather constructive criticism and gain new ideas.
To practice humility, engage in small, vulnerable acts. Try cold-calling an admired colleague for coffee to ask for advice. Say, “I don’t know. Let me find out for you” during your next tour or meeting. Modeling humility helps you, and thus your team, be more authentic, more grounded.
Be a space-maker
Many high-achieving professionals are Type A: ambitious, outgoing, taking on more than they can handle. Do you see yourself in this description? I do, and during the convening I recognized that I needed to let go and give more more creative control to my staff.
At the convening, Tom Peters said, “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” I probably wrote that down as I was checking email for the umpteenth time, making sure my staff were managing to get their work done in my absence. His comment reminded me of a 2011 AAM session entitled “Empowering Staff to Take Creative Risks” by Nina Simon, which introduced me to space-making leaders — those who allow space for experimentation and failure. I realized in that moment, by emailing to check in, I was still not practicing the space-making leadership necessary for my staff to thrive.
My staff consists of an education manager, a coordinator, a lead Gallery Guide, and six Gallery Guides, most under age 30 and all relatively new to the field of museum education. We are responsible for programming and interpretation for all audiences, visitor services, security, the museum store, community outreach, volunteers, and other areas of the museum’s operation, at two locations. I cannot possibly closely manage the daily operation of all of these areas. I require my team to demonstrate agency in making decisions to respond to any of the issues that can come up in the daily operation of an art museum. When I returned from the convening, I changed the format of our staff meetings. Instead of updating me on their tasks, we now focus on higher-level conversations about professional development, leading from current positions, and issues that prevent staff from having more agency to make decisions.
Now, when someone asks me what they should do, I ask, “What do you think?” and I try to help them talk through their own solution to a given problem. When a Gallery Guide asks me if they can try out a new program idea, we work out a budget and I tell them to go for it. I completely delegated one of our largest, high-profile family programs to my education manager, which admittedly was difficult for me to let go of (she’s doing a great job).
It’s an ongoing learning process for both my staff and myself. How can I as a leader empower them to make decisions not only in my absence, but all the time? This approach introduces new vulnerabilities, and certainly potential failure. I am accountable for adhering to best practices in art museums and institutional goals. I am also, however, responsible for empowering my team to understand and adhere to best practices too — so that high quality museum experiences for our audiences become a shared responsibility.
Experimentation and freedom of expression means the freedom to fail. I need to be tolerant of failure.
How can you be a space-making leader? Examine your workload, and ask yourself objectively if there is an area of your work that you can entrust to a staff member. Acknowledge the talents of your team, and ask them what they like doing. Next time someone asks you if they can try a new programming idea, ask for what you need from them (budget, program description) and let them try. Gradually adopting this mentality will help you trust your staff, and trust in your own ability to effectively make space and empower people to take risks.
Reflect your community
At the convening, we discussed in-depth the need for change in the museum industry to meet the needs of 21st-century audiences. One major component of this transformation is to hire staff that reflect the demographics of the surrounding community. This is a moment to be adaptive, prepared to change course as we recognize new ways museums can serve community. Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments. Adaptive leaders make personal connections; take accountability for difficult decisions; eschew personal gain; and give their staff space to manage their own tasks (1). It’s important to think not in terms of what’s best for the manager, or even what is best for your department, but what is best for the organization as a whole. At the convening, we recognized that as adaptive leaders in our museums, eager to change to maintain relevance in a 21st-century society, we need more diversity in our field.
We admitted that within museum education, we are no more effective at fostering diversity than the rest of our institutions. We looked around the conference room: yes, many races, classes and backgrounds were represented; men and women were present. But no one could deny the preponderance of white women in the room. Further, the degree to which our institutions depend on interns and volunteers who are of a class, race, or geographic demographic that have the privilege to donate time also perpetuates a flawed system. This is not a new concept: Elaine Gurian told us in 1990 that “we must change our staff compositions to reflect the many perspectives of our communities” (2). We are learning the hard way that we won’t be successful if our institutions are not diverse.
The lack of diversity in our field is a “wicked problem” (wickedproblems.com) — one that is complicated and without easy answers. This particular wicked problem is field-wide, and will take time to solve. But there are steps we can take at our own institutions to make a difference. At my museum, our staff essentially follows the same homogeneity that is reflected in the rest of the field, with few, but encouraging, exceptions. As adaptive leaders, we are obligated to mindfully approach this issue. Moving forward, I plan to speak with human resources about where we post job opportunities, how we frame open positions, and consider how descriptions can better attract some of our community’s dominant constituencies, such as veterans, Latinos, and state university students. Another step I am exploring is applying for grants to offer internships with stipends for emerging museum practitioners.
Taking action
Embracing humility, making space for creative risk-taking, and reflecting community merged for me recently during a gallery installation, when my department was asked to put together an exhibition that supported our education goals. We knew this could be an opportunity to release control and invite more voices into the exhibition process, and so we developed “Active Voice: Contemporary Landscapes from the Museum’s Permanent Collection,” with a focus on community voices.
We let go of what interpretive labels “should” look like and invited museum staff and volunteers to choose artworks that resonated with them and write personal interpretations. To set the wheels in motion, I led a label writing workshop inspired by Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, as well as the American Alliance of Museums Webcast, “Exhibition Label Writing at its Best.” Their labels, with the writer’s photo, are mounted on a plaque in the shape of a speech bubble next to each painting, and a corresponding blank plaque is mounted next to it. There, we encourage visitors to read our responses, then participate in the dialogue by writing their own and displaying it next to ours.
We decentralized the voice of institutional authority and, best of all, we engaged staff, volunteers, and visitors in a dialogue, giving everyone a voice. The payoff has been rewarding; anecdotally, staff, volunteers, and visitors have remarked that they felt more connected to the art after reflecting on their viewing experience in this way. Next time we plan a project like this, I would engage community members to contribute the initial labels in order to create a greater sense of inclusion. Overall, the risk was worth it — the labels are insightful, expert, and impassioned, all key components of successful interpretive labels.
As museum educators, we are uniquely positioned to lead our organizations. Museums collect, preserve, and exhibit objects valuable to art, history, and science — but they are also educational institutions, research agencies, and cultural centers. Education is a core function of our operation, as noted in the constitution and bylaws of the American Alliance of Museums. Educators integrate and empower. We are light on ego and eager to share ownership and credit (someone at the convening even suggested changing the title of Museum Educator to Chief Matchmaker).
While we are natural leaders in all of these regards, our insistence on excellence is no longer enough. We have to start thinking like institutional leaders, see the bigger picture, be better advocates, and talk about our work with rigor and confidence.
The reflective practice we bring to our profession makes us perfect leaders: we teach, we connect, we bridge.
At the end of the convening, Laura Roberts, founding member of The Museum Group, challenged us to stop thinking like educators and start thinking like leaders. Let’s be both. We’re ready.
Ami Davis
Ami Davis (Twitter) has been Director of Education and Community Partnerships at the Monterey Museum of Art since 2014. She has worked as an art museum educator for 17 years including positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.
Footnotes
(1) Useem, Michael. “Four Lessons in Adaptive Leadership.” Harvard Business Review. November 2010. https://hbr.org/2010/11/four-lessons-in-adaptive-leadership
(2) Gurian, Elaine Heumann. “Civilizing the Museum: The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian.” New York and Canada: Routledge, 2006.
