Producing leaders, not followers

I’ve always felt leadership to be a problematic concept. I once heard Clare Short MP complain that we had been seduced by it as a fashionable idea that was indicative of an individualistic and greedy society.

With a background as a theatre maker, I have found it hard to envisage how a capacity that is often conceived as operational and organisational can have anything to do with art. Artistic processes are held to be intuitive and spontaneous by nature, often emerging in unpredictable ways. So is the preoccupation with leadership just more evidence of the neo-liberal agenda eating away at opposing values?

So is the preoccupation with leadership just more evidence of the neo-liberal agenda eating away at opposing values?

During the past 30 years, the arts have been gradually steered by government to accommodate business-like skills of entrepreneurialism and efficiency. The business world has been held up to the arts as a model for maximising public investment and undercutting reliance on subsidy as a source of income.

Seismic changes

The seismic changes that we have been living through in the past eight or more years – the financial crash, austerity, the collapse of trust in our public figures alongside the hollow politics of the mainstream, and now the departure from the EU – would give anybody reason to question where our leadership comes from and where it is going.

As they grow, many organisations amass more and more permanent administrative functions that are hard to divest in downtimes. Without realising it, their focus becomes about self-preservation and pre-eminence rather than artistic mission. Our ability to employ more, produce more, reach more, evidence more and turn over more is embedded.

But, in my view, many of the issues that trouble us so greatly – lack of diversity, lack of access, low fees, prioritisation of fixed costs over art and artists – are symptomatic of the fundamentally unequal, semi-corporate approaches that monopolise how we organise the arts.

Without a different view of the value of arts and culture and a different way of doing things, we are left to manage decline or, conversely, find new ways to harness our resources. One of the key features of this development is how organisations established on inflexible, top-down business models compare with fleet-footed models that are networked, hub-based, distributive and adaptive, and inspired by the digital economy.

In the face of this emergent scenario, new networks, institutions and approaches are urgently needed. Not least, it will require a new understanding and practice in cultural leadership.

Response to changing landscape

Culture lab, the Wales-based leadership development programme I manage, is a response to this changing landscape. It grew out of conversations I had with Richard Hawkins, based at the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) in mid-Wales.

I was inspired by his experience as a campaigner and PIRC’s work at the forefront of issues related to sustainable living, social justice and equal rights, especially a project he was working on called Campaign Lab. We quickly realised that many of the issues that individuals working with charities, pressure groups and campaigns experience, such as burnout, lack of capacity and mission drift, were common to the arts.

Moreover, we both shared the conviction that in the face of so many overwhelming challenges, we need the arts more than ever to help us imagine how we can live.

We envisaged Culture lab as a transformative project that would be founded in five key areas: knowledge, strategy, creativity, community and change. The aim was to work with our group of 21 participants to build a community within the cultural sector that had greater clarity about its objectives and a desire to manifest change.

Each programme day is facilitated around a significant question that we explore together with the help of leading thinkers, campaigners, policy makers and speakers. We allow time for challenge, analysis, inspiration, reflection and discussion.

Alongside the facilitated sessions, we support buddying between participants, mentoring and action learning groups. Connection with values is integral to the programme and we emphasise the building of community. Our aim is to frame culture within broader perspectives and to create a community that is better equipped and feels more empowered to advocate for its value.

Underpinning the learning, we encourage deeper, more systematic thinking around problems, rather than a linear, cause-and-effect approach. Implicit is a new kind of leadership that is generous, open, relational and values-driven, while being comfortable with complexity and uncertainty.

Systems leadership

Far too often, leadership is identified with the visionary in a commanding relationship over others, delivering excellence and direction from above. Systems leaders, on the other hand, have a deep understanding of the quality of their relationship with others. As such, they exhibit a range of skills that set them apart from traditional conceptions of what a leader is.

Why? Because the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Simon Harris is Director of Lucid Theatre and Co-lead on Culture lab.
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