In arts management, the most important set of communication requirements is between the Chair and the CEO. There are all sorts of Chairs:
- The Chair who wants your job
- The Chair that can’t run a meeting
- The Chair that insists on meeting with your staff without you
- The Chair that doesn’t donate time, money or skill
- The Chair that can’t remember what was agreed last week.
And of course, there are good ones who know what their job is: to hire and fire the CEO and to make sure that organisation is fulfilling its mission and on track to meet its strategic goals.
But what if you have one of the bad ones? Your options are to work around them, to put up with them or to have a very open one-on-one conversation with them knowing that one of the results might be that you have to leave. Why is it so hard to manage your Chair? They are usually senior executives in their own world where no-one would tell them how to behave. There are plenty of examples of bad management in the corporate world and it’s certainly a less collegiate world than you’ll find in the arts.
I’ve been extremely lucky with the Chairs of organisations that I’ve managed. They have been intelligent and generous men who have given of their time (and often their money) for the good of the organisation. Their most important virtue was that they all understood the role of both a Chair and a Board. I’ve also been on Boards of organisation where again, the Chairs, in this case mainly women, were equally as informed about the best way a Board can contribute to an arts organisation.
Horror stories
I have heard horror stories of Board Chairs involving attempts to micromanage the CEO, holding secret meetings without the CEO, attempting to impose organisational change on companies. One story is documented in Kirby & Myer’s biography of Richard Pratt. In it they describe, without questioning his behaviour, an attempt by Pratt as Chairman to run the Victorian Arts Centre (now Arts Centre Melbourne). It included bringing in “his own man to be his eyes and ears in the VAC ”and what Sue Nattrass, CEO at the time, politely described as “legendary arguments”.
The negative impact on both the CEO and the organisation of this attempt by the Chair to manage the Arts Centre led a number of the major hirers to go to the Premier of Victoria and ask (unsuccessfully) for the Chairman to be removed. The biographers say that Pratt was trying to turn the Arts Centre into a ‘people’s palace’ and put it on a more commercial footing but “[o]bservers said that some of the discord at the VAC was deliberately created by Pratt in the way it was in his business. He felt it useful to provoke people to see what they really thought and felt about issues to allow him maximum information of decision-making. The difference was, however, that at the VAC he was not making decisions alone”. This last point is telling because it captures one of the major problems – a Chairman who was used to running his own company and clearly didn’t understand the role of a non-executive board in an arts organisation with its multitude of stakeholders and its complex mission.
As for using discord to provoke people, I remember being in a meeting with Pratt as he described some of his more outlandish plans for the Arts Centre including serving yum cha in the Concert Hall when it wasn’t being used or turning the balconies of the State Theatre into closed corporate boxes such as found at sports venues. There was no sense in that meeting that he has interested in our ideas or even our views on his ideas. His biographers describe the managers of the major hirers as an “arts elite” who were opposed to both his style and his desire to bring a more commercial approach to the organisation. Rather than the dismissive use of “elites” I think it’s more accurate to describe us as good managers with effective Chairs who therefore knew how a Board should operate.
A marriage of unequals
The relationship between Board and CEO is more subtle in arts organisations than in corporate boards because a volunteer committee is overseeing the work of a professional CEO. If the relationship in a co-leadership model between Artistic and Managing Director is like a marriage, then so too is the relationship between the Board Chair and the CEO/s. But there are a couple of interesting dimensions to this ‘marriage’. From one perspective there is an imbalance of power because the Chair can choose the CEO but not vice versa. However, from another perspective, the CEO has more power because without their reports, the Chair can be completely in the dark about what is actually going on in the company.
In a conversation with a peer, we were discussing the Chair of a particular organisation that was searching for a new CEO. I asked if my compatriot was going to apply for the job and the answer was “no”. Not because they weren’t interested in the job and the organisation but because they knew the Chair and didn’t think their working styles would be compatible. Being able to find that out in advance is a problem. The Chair should be on the interview committee so you’ll have a chance to see them in action and can ask them some questions. However they are not going to confess that they are micromanagers or never available to make a decision or bad in a crisis. It’s one of the risks you have to take when working as a CEO or co-leader. Before you take on a job, you should insist of having a one-on-one meeting with the Chair to try and tease out their way of operating and being upfront about what you expect from them. This is an example where truth telling will pay off. Ultimately, the existing partner will have to adjust their approach to the new person.
Obviously, if neither party is good at their job, the relationship and therefore the organisation will suffer. Support and respect are interlinked. A CEO needs to feel that the Chair will back their decisions but equally, the Chair needs to feel that the CEO is giving them enough information to do their job. A Managing Director told me that their Chair would talk over them, not listen to them, have meetings with other board members and staff without them and – not surprisingly – the MD felt completely undermined by the Chair. One doesn’t respect your staff who aren’t good at their job. The same applies if it’s the Chair.
Boards only gather for conversation on a limited number of occasions. They may wave across the room at an opening but Board meetings usually happen between 6 and 12 times a year. A lot can happen in a month, let alone too, so it’s important to keep your Chair in the loop about issues with the potentially to create trouble. As David Fishel says “The CEO wants support and advice. The Chair wants no surprises. The CEO wants the space to get on with the job. The Chair wants to be associated with a successful organisation.”
This article is an excerpt from The A to Z of Arts Management by Ann Tonks recently published by Tilde, Melbourne.
REFERENCES
Fishel, D 2003, The Book of The Board, Federation Press, Sydney
Kirby, J & Myer, R 2009, Richard Pratt: One Out of the Box, John Wiley & Sons, Milton QLD
