While you are gone

I spent the last week or so out of town.  While I was gone, I follow the same set of vacation rules I give my team. 

No responding to email.

No calling to check in.

People are only allowed to call you in case of an emergency . . . and because we work in the arts nothing is really ever an emergency.

I left during a pretty important time.  When I came back, everything was running smoothly.  Some things were going better then when I left.

A key element to solving our leadership problem in the arts is hiring and empowering people who can lead.  This is hard to do because we still work under the industrial hiearchy that has the order givers on top and the order takers on the bottom.

The goal has to be the hiring and empowering of people who DO NOT NEED YOU AROUND.

That way when you are gone (on vacation/sick/whatever) things can actually improve.

 

 

Comments

[Aunt Snow]

Interesting. A commenter on another blog sent me over here. I'll just hang out here a little while, peek in the cupboards, check the archives, lounge around on the couch.

I'm in the non-profit arts world - actually, let's call it "arts adjacent." And too much of our institutional culture where I am is that everything does seem to be an emergency, and leadership takes great pains to assure that things can't function without them around....yet, oddly, they often aren't around, so things tend to stall and flounder.