This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s September/October 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership.
In my first few months as the President & CEO of AAM, I’ve been on a listening tour. I’ve taken as many meetings as I can with our members, partners, and allies, hoping to form a big picture of where the field is now and where we could all use some collective support.
One thing I’ve learned: it’s not an easy time to keep a museum running, for just about anyone. There are a common set of concerns that keep museum leaders up at night: relationships with their staff and boards, escalating threats like political polarization and climate change, and, most of all, shortages in funding. Business models that have been precarious since at least the 2008 recession, when financial pressures led funders to pull out and the public to reduce their attendance, have only grown more so between the economic disruptions of the pandemic and the increasing reluctance of philanthropists to support our missions at face value.
How do we find hope amid all this turbulence? For me, and many of the people I talk to, it’s the thought that in all the challenge lies great opportunity. I hope that one day, sooner than later, we’ll look back and be glad we went through these difficult times for the positive changes they yielded, the profound relationships and ingenious solutions we forged through fire.
To arrive at all this needed change, we’ll need to start with listening—the key to good leadership if ever there was one. We will need to challenge our old assumptions about how our workplaces should run, how we should engage with our communities, and what appeals our supporters will respond to. And the best way to get these answers is to ask, and then really listen to what we hear.
I remember at one of my old museum jobs, for example, we tried to convince a successful businessman and his wife to serve as the hosts for our annual fundraising gala. At first, he declined, saying that he loved the organization and was honored to be considered, but he couldn’t accept. When we pressed him as to why, he finally told us, “I hate galas and tuxedos.” So the organization went off-script, pivoting to throw a more casual cocktail party in an industrial loft space with food carts and sponsored seating areas. The party was a huge success and taught us that building relationships requires compromise and flexibility. It takes good listening skills and time to understand what people want and then find a pathway to meet them where they are.
I think we can also benefit from listening to each other, placing our individual difficulties within the bigger context of the field. This issue of Museum is a prime opportunity for that, with articles from current and future museum leaders candidly discussing their challenges and coping strategies, plus sage advice from management experts on boosting your leadership skills. Working as an Alliance, instead of in isolation, is the surest way to get to where we need to go.
7/17/2024
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