Selena Juneau-Vogel

Finding Professional and Leadership Development

Posted by Selena Juneau-Vogel, Apr 06, 2010 0 comments


Selena Juneau-Vogel

This conversation has been percolating for a while and I know it will continue for years to come, but this chance to connect with my peers across the country in a forum supported by the Irvine and Hewlett  Foundations is especially exciting.

Irvine and Hewlett Officers: In case you haven’t heard this enough from your friends out in Cali, THANK YOU for your vision in supporting emerging leaders in the arts. We know the arts do not have a history of taking care of our own professional needs. It’s just not part of our culture—with every dollar we manage to scrounge up we buy another paint brush or pointe shoe. We need visionary supporters like you to nudge us to take care of ourselves. I hope the initiatives you’re supporting in California encourage other philanthropies to see the long-reaching potential of investing in the next generation of arts leaders.

Okay, gratitude out of the way, let me just take a moment to recognize the frame I am bringing to this blog salon. After three years working in a service organization and thinking about what arts managers want, my graduate program in public administration now gives me a chance to step back and see what other ends of the nonprofit sector and corporate world are doing in terms of professional and leadership development. I have just grazed the surface of leadership study, but let me tell you—there’s a lot out there and we, in the arts, need to take every opportunity to make ourselves a part of that conversation. We have a lot to learn and contribute.

One source of leadership study I think we can benefit from is the Research Center for Leadership in Action (RCLA) which is housed at NYU and was one of the aspects that attracted me to the school. Working with academics and various public servants, RCLA aims to “move beyond the traditional ‘heroic’ image of a leader to facilitating leadership in which people work across sectors and boundaries to find common solutions.”

RCLA  emphasizes “Collaborative Inquiry” or “CI”, which they describe as a “learning technique in which a group of people use their own experience to generate insights around an issue that is of burning concern to all of them.” Participants formulate questions, agree upon a course of action, individually and together engage in action through their work, and then collectively make meaning from the data generated by these actions. Outside experts may be invited to provide the group with additional insights or coaching and facilitators help group members use the process to its full advantage.

I think a CI is a good strategy for emerging arts leaders. It goes beyond distillations of past generations’ best practices and gives us opportunities to make our own practices. I believe our knowledge will be deeper and our skills more flexible if they are grounded in our own experiences and relationships.

RCLA recently announced a partnership with Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) to launch a Leadership Development Institute this year. I look forward to seeing how that program uses Collaborative Inquiry and hope we can all use the techniques to make our leadership practices more deliberate. (For more information on the APAP program contact Alison McNeil at [email protected].)

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