22 Arts Management / Administration

Arts Management / Administration

“…the work we do as arts leaders and arts organizations is meaningful, is profound and is vital to our civilization and our humanity. Our job, our mission, our passion as arts leaders must be to do everything we can to build the organizations we need to sustain the meaningful work for ourselves, our communities and the world.”

– Arts Leadership: Creating Sustainable Arts Organizations by Kenneth Foster (p. 119)

This is a large category as the arts admin and management side of things can include many roles and several positions depending on the size of the organization. For some small, independent companies the Artistic Director does all the admin work. Others will have a single administrative staff whether it be a General Manager, Managing Director, Administrator, or Office Manager. Then with larger companies the General Manager, or equivalent, will supervise an array of other staff who keep all aspects of the operations running.

The broader category of Arts Management also overlaps with roles like Production Manager, Marketing Manager, Development Manager…basically all those who oversee staff, departments, schedules, and budgets.

Pathways 

Some administrators and arts management leaders started working in non-theatre organizations and then brought their skills to the arts. Others focused on the arts right from training and either knew that administration was their jam or came to it after working in other artistic roles. There are Arts Management, Arts Admin and Cultural Management certificate and degree programs for those who want to go the formal training route. Some of these even have built in practicums or internships.

Ultimately, there is a real need for those with management and administrative skills. As a result, there are a lot of opportunities, as well as ways to pursue hands-on training.

I trained as a teacher, I trained as a drama teacher, and I went to university because I had an incredible drama teacher and went to university and wanted to be her. And so, I did my undergrad and I did my education degree. And my very last placement was at Young People’s Theatre in Toronto. I had worked there in their drama camp, and I worked there as an usher and in their concession stand as a teenager. So, it was really a natural place for me to go back and do this last placement. I was in their education department, and at the end of that they offered me a job and I looked around at my colleagues who were all graduating with education degrees, and Mike Harris was at that point the Premier of Ontario, and he was making massive cuts in education. And so, I took a job in theatre, you know, and never really imagined that it would necessarily turn out to be my career.

So, from that job, you know, other jobs followed. I was laid off every summer because my job was serving teachers so it ran September to June. And so I started working the festival circuit and I ran the Summerworks Festival and I worked as a grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council and then was at Factory Theatre and did a lot of independent producing on the side. And a whole series of interesting things led me basically to be a general manager for a very tiny company called Volcano Theatre for two years, which led to being the General Manager of the Tarragon Theatre, a much bigger organization for five years. And that then led me here. You know, I always joke that I’m a true generalist. I worked in education, I worked in box office, I worked in marketing, I worked in fundraising. The only department I haven’t really worked in, but I’ve managed people in it for many years is production and artistic, of course, I’ve always been on the backstage side of the equation. So that was the path. – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

I have to say, it’s a pretty circular route. And you tell me if I’m going into too much detail. And so, I mean, most immediately I was the lead administrative person at Western Canada Theatre. My final title there was Executive Director, and I was there for 19 seasons. And it really, I mean, played a key role in how I ended up here, right from the beginning. I’m a theatre kid, born and bred. I started off in ballet and choir and performing and school plays and taking drama and all of that and I was met with both encouragement on the part of my parents to pursue a more professional leaning, what they deemed a more professional leaning career, of course, to study. But I have to say, I also knew myself well enough at 18 to know that I really didn’t want to work in the gig economy, that I wanted to make sure where my next paycheck was coming from. So, I have a degree in English literature. I studied all the theatrical literature courses UBC offered, and I studied literature in both English and French and the French language. I did break down and take an acting course, and I broke down and took a directing course. When I graduated, I worked for the B.C. Native Women’s Society. I think what’s important is that, of course, as a First Nations person of status, that university degrees used to be a cause for disenfranchisement. If you gained a university degree, you were, you lost your status and your ability to go back to community and live there. So even at, in my time, a university degree was a relatively new thing. I think when I was at UBC, there might have been 20 in my year. And so, the change in that number, looking now, I think the really easy marker for me is when I graduated from high school, the First Nations grad was about eight of us. And when my daughters graduated from high school, it was like over 800. So, there’s much more opportunity that opened up for Indigenous people in that respect – First Nations people in particular – without the ramifications of losing their status.

After graduation, I worked for B.C. Native Women’s Society and I worked for the Canada Employment Centre for Students, which is actually where I met David Ross, who was the Artistic Director, longstanding Artistic Director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops. We connected over a grant for students that the theatre had. And when I moved to amazing places like Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Whitecourt, Alberta, and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, David was good enough to stay in touch. He always answered my calls. When in Thunder Bay, I was the Executive Director of the Ontario Native Women’s Association, dealing with the impacts of Bill C-31, a piece of federal legislation that enabled Indigenous First Nations women to regain status who had lost it through marriage, as well as their children. And I worked for the Ontario Human Rights Commission. When I became pregnant with my first daughter, we moved to Whitecourt, Alberta, a town of about 7000, with a very active community theatre organization. I had the immense privilege of being able to stay home with my daughters and be a full time mom. I went back to theatre, I went back to community theatre to, you know, just stay connected with adults and have adult conversations. And really, truly, as I said, I’m a theatre kid. I walked in and said, I can direct, I’ve taken a directing course, and they let me. And David was kind enough to be on the other end of the phone and stayed engaged with me. I took David out for lunch when I was back in Kamloops just to say thank you. And he said, I didn’t mean to turn this into a job interview, but… And I think, he basically hired me as his transition plan. And, the company grew immensely under his leadership and continued to grow after that.

And so, it really was a blend of my love of theatre and producing experience coupled with my knowledge of admin and HR and, really, governance through other work on boards that I did. And a very, very generous sharing of knowledge from David and a vast, innumerable number of elders that I’ve had the privilege to have in my life. – Lori Marchand, Managing Director, NAC’s Indigenous Theatre, Ottawa, ON

Skill Set

Now there are skills as an arts administrator that you can learn in other ways, right? If you go take an HR course, you can apply that course. You could take an accounting course or a creative communication course, you can apply that. But the nub of not for profit is you are charged to hold this for the community, and the community is represented by your board of directors. And so, when you don’t learn about governance — when you don’t know what good governance looks like, when you don’t know how to work with a board, work for a board, work around a board — that gap can become very big and very profound. Now a lot of things that we do, get caught by professional standards. If you have a problem with your bookkeeper, eventually the auditor will catch it. If you are fundamentally not delivering your mission and mandate in the community, eventually your funders will notice. But you can have a terrible relationship with your board and nobody knows about it. And nobody can know about it until they’ve gone through three artistic directors in four years. So it’s a really critical kind of piece that I think is a gap in training. Also it’s an area that has to be demystified because as long as people are misinformed about what a board can do and misinformed about what they can do as management working with the board, then that gap is going to grow and grow, right? – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

As with most administrative work, many of the needed skills in arts administration include the ability to:

  • stay organized
  • juggle multiple tasks
  • communicate effectively
  • problem-solve
  • understand and work within budgets, sometimes creating budgets
  • work well with others to manage deadlines and tasks
  • supervise or guide other staff and volunteers

It often requires a wide array of knowledge and a heavy workload. For those who would get restless doing the same thing day in and day out, working on the operational end of theatre is never boring and always comes with new challenges.

Leadership

Management is often seen as implementation, whereas leadership is conception and vision. There is a great deal of overlap though, since as soon as you are managing human resources you are as a result taking a position of leadership. Leaders have to know how to positively motivate others, role model behaviour, and set a tone. They have to be responsible for the heavy lifting of putting out fires, dealing with the messes (not often of their own making), and making hard decisions during challenging times (or even in crisis, such as the recent pandemic). This requires a balancing act between what is best for the organization and what is best for the humans involved.

Activity: Think about what has made you feel valuable and appreciated in past work experiences. Write down some ideas for how would you keep a team (who is likely working long hours for little pay) feeling valued, excited and committed.

There is much writing about leadership you can explore, including examinations of different leadership styles. It can be very useful to understand your own working style but also how you may need to adapt to support those you work with who may have different approaches. It often comes down to knowing what motivates each person on your team and figuring out the best way to provide them with information, feedback, and guidance.

Leaders also need to have the experience or ability to predict what impact decisions will have in order to figure out the best way forward (ideally one that has a completely positive impact or the least negative impact). In theatre in particular the future is so unpredictable that having a vision and being able to communicate that to others is crucial. People need to know why they are doing what they are doing and they also need to trust that their leaders will be there to support them no matter what happens.

A few other traits often discussed in regards to good leadership are:

  • skilled at communication
  • able to articulate clearly and passionately
  • able to understand how words can be interpreted differently and try to tailor communication to individuals
  • focused on the future
  • not afraid to have difficult conversations, and do so with a calm, logical understanding
  • able to know when to challenge and push without pushing anyone too far
  • can encourage their team with a sense of optimism and maintains calm even when things get stressful, preventing group panic
  • able to manage change in a way that allows for everyone to welcome new ideas without fear
  • diplomatic, recognizing that there are a lot of politics in theatre and many people who you need to answer to even when you may be in a leadership position

Continuously reconsider the idea of arts leadership and develop your own unique approach to it:

  1. Engage in serious self-reflection; know and understand who you are, what your values are and what contribution you want to make to the larger community
  2. Be a learner; integrate what you know and what you are experiencing every day such that you are in a continuous process of learning on behalf of yourself and your organization
  3. Build and work in partnership with a dynamic team of co-collaborators who are committed to joining with you in advancing the conversation

– selected items from a longer list in Arts Leadership by Kenneth Foster (p. 100-111)

Advice to Arts Leaders

  • Hide from the madness! Try to avoid stressful tasks right before big meetings.
  • Team build – your vision drives the theatre so you have to build a theatre team.
  • Ask for advice – your voice doesn’t have to be the only voice.
  • Thanks, thanks, and ever thanks… – there is always enough time to say thank you.
  • Just say ‘no’ to defensive behavior – learn to stay open to constructive suggestions and graciously ignore rude remarks.
  • Lead by example – demand ethical standards.
  • Take risks but stay out of trouble – risk in the art not risky behavior that can impact your working relationships.
  • Forgive and forget – forgive your own foolishness and the periodic idiocy of others.
  • Behind closed doors – keep things that should be behind closed doors, behind closed doors and respect staff privacy.
  • Dream on! – take time to dream (both in terms of physically sleeping and allowing yourself to have a vision for the future).

– selected items from a longer list in How to Run a Theatre by Jim Volz (p. 41-44)

Board of Directors Relationship

Much has already been said about the Board of Directors, but it is important to note that arts management work in the current mainstream model will require working with a Board. This can mean supporting, guiding, motivating, answering to, and engaging a dozen or more disparate personalities.

What I find working with admins or emerging administrators is they are terrified of boards. Terrified. Terrified or actually kind of antagonistic towards boards. Also, they are looking to specialize when I think it’s still great opportunity to be a generalist and those two things I think are preventing them from looking at leadership opportunities in a real way. Emerging arts administrators are curious, they are smart, they are dedicated. They have this extraordinary gift of bringing in their communities and their conversations into the room. I’m really privileged to work with them. But they often get terrified about that board paradigm, like the idea of reporting to a board or what does a board want, or working with a board, or how do you leverage a board. And I think that holds them back in some ways. Because at the end of the day, you know, if you want to run an arts organization, you are not only going to report to a board, you’re going to be hired by a board. So you sort of have to crack that code to get in those doors and get those jobs. – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

Communication

Effective communication is crucial in all management areas. Detailed considerations are included in the Production Management track. An important thing to note here is that communication flows in many directions. If the environment is healthy, you will receive open communication from those you supervise so that you know what challenges those on your team may be experiencing. It isn’t just about what and how you share information to others, but about listening and receiving information.

Budgets and Funding Specifics

The ability to write grants, sitting down with an officer, any of the funding bodies. And seeing if you can find a successful company who’s willing to share a successful grant application so that you can look at models of what makes a successful grant. Being available to sit on assessment juries at any level. You know, the city, community, you know obviously province and feds would be really great. You know, one of the great things that we’re able to do is to really create amazing work on not much money. So being creative with resources and, and I say, like not just to make sure that it’s not at the expense of yourself. – Lori Marchand, Managing Director, NAC’s Indigenous Theatre, Ottawa, ON

Basic budgeting was covered in chapter 10. Depending on your arts administration role, more intensive budget training and knowledge may be required. General Managers will be involved at the macro level, developing and overseeing the annual budget and financial reporting. Anyone who manages a department will then need to have the ability to oversee their component of the larger budget. Prioritizing is a huge part of making budget decisions as there will never be enough funds for everything.

Arts management roles, often also have to actively seek funding. Writing grant applications, writing grant reports, tracking spending to provide data to funders…can be a very time-consuming part of the work.

Those leading theatres who receive operational funding will have an intensive period in the spring when annual reports to arts councils are due. This requires both outlining the impact and results of the past year, but also mapping out future plans for the organization to maintain and hopefully even increase the annual granting amount.

Season Planning

Understanding how seasons are selected and planned is useful for anyone who wants to work with or be contracted by a mainstream theatre company. There are so many considerations and moving pieces. Although an Artistic Director will conceptualize the vision and ultimately make artistic decisions, these choices need to fall within the parametres of the budget and feasible human resource requirements. Mapping this all out to make sure plans are realistic is a team effort.

Before the season is in place the management work has to start. This begins with making sure the rights to the plays are available and the key artists required are engaged. Generally, directors will be in place before the season is launched and often times designers as well.

Even just thinking through scheduling involves considering many moving parts. What time of year is best for certain topics or types of plays? Are the key artists available for the timeframe? Is there enough turn-around time if you have two shows back to back that require huge sets? How will holidays and other events in the city effect the schedule? Even though most theatre follow a set cycle, there are external factors that can arise to disrupt the routine so it is important to plan ahead but remain responsive.

In most cases, a theatre that runs a regular October to May season, will be announcing their plans for the next year in the spring. An internal calendar will therefore include deadlines to make sure that everything is in place and has been presented to the Board prior to the public launch. All this planning occurs in tandem with the work to run the current season. Arts management therefore is about working in both the present and future at the same time.

Human Resources

Many arts administration and management roles will also involve managing human resources. Large corporations have an HR Department with staff trained to deal with all employee-related issues. This includes creating job descriptions, recruitment, hiring, employee relations, managing performance, developing policies, training, and even resolving conflicts between staff and their managers. Most theatres do not have any human resources personnel so this work falls under the General Manager’s purview.

A challenge in the arts is often the need for human resources management to be added on to the already full plates of those in a management role. Many of whom have no training specific to the area.

Since many issues can be resolved with clear expectations being laid out in advance. One good basic tenet is to develop clear resources, including:

  • Contracts
  • Company Handbook
  • Personnel Policies
  • Plus Additional Employee Policies, for example:
    • Conflict of Interest
    • Confidentiality
    • Respectful Workplace
    • Diversity
    • Accessibility
    • Social media

Getting Work

Hands on experience is crucial and so finding entry level positions where you can learn, be mentored, and build up your resume is extremely valuable. Since there is a lack of strong arts administrators, if you want to do it and can do it well then there will be many job opportunities.

PACT is the main support for arts management specific to theatre and their Artsboard is a great place to find job postings in this area.

I’m looking for someone to play tennis with. Right? So, if I’ve got a mentee, if I’ve got an apprentice, if I’ve got somebody in my space who’s learning and growing, I want to be able to throw them a ball, I want them to catch the ball and I want them to throw it back when it’s done. And I want our conversation to be like that. I want questions to be like that. I’m interested in dialogue. I also want competency. But, you know, like one of the greatest kind of skills I think is completion, right? Being able to take a project and say, I’ve done it, great, what’s next? And so, I don’t want to be chasing you to return the volley. I don’t want to wonder if you ever got the ball. Like, I want to know that there’s a back-and-forth thing. – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

…folks in these leadership positions are really there probably because they know the art and they know the form and they know how to put a show together and build a tour and you know. So all the legal implications, the contracts, the HR, the risk management. You know, in all of that. Honestly, budgeting is an obvious skill to me and probably the least of a priority; probably the budgeting skills are what get them producing, and planning skills get them into the work. Well, I don’t want to scare anybody from it, because it really is rewarding. But, you know, either on the board or having it outside the organization, just knowing where the expertise lies and having access to it. I’m not necessarily saying everybody has to have all of the skills, but knowing where to access it, knowing that it’s important when you step into this role is probably something that I think I knew, but for me, with some of the building implications that, you know, where, Western Canada Theatre managed a building on behalf of the city and the school district and just having clarity over what exactly that meant. And where the expertise lay to deal with issues as they arose. – Lori Marchand, Managing Director, NAC’s Indigenous Theatre, Ottawa, ON

Challenges

12 years in, anyone would assume that there was an efficiency to the work, but I don’t find the gig is getting any easier. I sometimes think back to what this job must have been like in the eighties or nineties. And I think wow, there was a different level of community engagement at the time – no social media, no email.  The person who did do my job before me for many years worked every hour God made, I promise you. But the role was different. For them, the balancing act was, put on the plays, balance the bottom line, keep the board engaged. Those were the three great pillars of the GM job for many years.

But these are not the only pillars that the position is held accountable today, not by boards, communities or funders. The goalposts are evolving. And the hamster wheel spins faster every year. The profound and required reckoning of theatres with the systemic issues that we have inherited and embodied for many years takes time to address. COVID and audience return challenges; coupled with the great resignation across the cultural work force; plus profound changes about what it takes to make a play in a safe and respectful and empathetic way; added to the supply chain issues, which are still a thing, to be clear. I’m still waiting on a furnace that was ordered 9 months ago. Right? Plus the inflationary piece, which in all arts organizations causes stress because as people’s discretionary income goes down and our costs go up, there’s a delta that we’re trying to address, and government support that has been largely stagnant for years to many organizations. It’s a lot. You have to have an enormous capacity for finding joy in and amongst a sea of turmoil. – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

Most of what has been outlined thus far in this chapter, demonstrates the inherent challenges. From lack of financial resources, to dealing with human resources. There is a need for a broad skill set and yet in-depth knowledge in areas of budgeting, planning, and leadership. The art could not happen without the arts managers, yet they do not receive a lot of recognition for incredibly difficult work. Understanding and appreciating the challenges is crucial but so is celebrating the important contribution.

Resources/Advice

You know, I think that the best counsel I give to people who take on leadership roles is twofold. First, it’s to try really learn quickly and understand what you can ignore and what you can’t ignore. It’s like cooking on a stove. You know, we’re all very comfortable cooking on four burners and kind of putting out the meals that you can do on a four burner stove. So imagine if suddenly you’ve got ten burners, right. And you’re trying to manage ten burners, as you know, in a restaurant context. Like, you have to know what sauces you can leave bubbling happily and what you actually know, there’s a lobster in the front who’s not going to do so well if you leave them on too long. When new leaders get these leadership jobs, I think they often run through that sort of fight or flight piece. I certainly did. You don’t actually want to ask anybody any question that reveals your weaknesses, but you do need to. Leaders today are constantly putting out fires. You just have to know which ones have the potential to flame up into forest blazes, and focus on those, without entirely neglecting the other things, which are simmering away.

Second, you also have to know what your values are, individually. Yes, your organization has values, that’s great. But, what do you care about? What can you do in this role to leave the organization and the role in a better state than when you inherited it? Leaders are caretakers, entrusted with the broad health of their organizations. We balance the 200 emails a day and the lack of work life balance because at the core, we are trying to do the right thing for all, while we have the responsibility and opportunity to do so. – Camilla Holland, Executive Director, RMTC, Winnipeg, MB

A few sites worth exploring are:

International Association of Theatre Leaders

Artistic Leadership Residency | National Theatre School of Canada (ent-nts.ca)

International Journal of Arts Management

Cultural Human Resources Council – HR Management Toolkit

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The Business of Theatre: Pathways to a Career in Theatre Copyright © 2023 by Hope McIntyre. All Rights Reserved.

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