Every person in your organization is a work of art

Imagine that your company was an Art Gallery and each of your staff members was a piece of art in that gallery …

When you first come across a piece of art, you see its potential … “people will come to my gallery to see it” … so you acquire it. If you just put it out on the floor somewhere it’s probably not going to draw people to the gallery so you must prepare it, get it into its best possible shape and place it in the location where it will be noticed. Then you need to let your customers know it’s there and see what happens. You keep on fine tuning its presentation, location etc. until it delivers on the potential you imagined … usually more.

It makes you lots of money but over time it begins to fade and lose its luster. It is no longer the draw card that it once was … so what do you do? You could remove it from the display and replace it with something new. You could move it to a space in your gallery that experiences less traffic and put something else in its place. You could do a bit of maintenance on it, add some lights and a modern app that tells visitors its history; after all it is still a brilliant piece of art that deserves to be enjoyed by your gallery patrons. If you move it elsewhere, your regulars will miss it and you may lose them or if you replace it with something new, your patrons may not like the new piece. So you decide to do the maintenance and soon it is drawing crowds like it used to.

At some point, you find yourself at a conference about art galleries and you meet an amazing art restorer and decide to hire them. You’ve had some pieces of art for years that you didn’t think were very valuable and wondered if this person could do something with them. When they join your gallery they are immediately excited about these neglected pieces of art and start working on them. The next time you see the pieces you are blown away by their beauty … a beauty that you had never seen before. Soon they take pride of place in your gallery and are drawing crowds. You cannot believe that they had languished in the unseen depths of your gallery for so long.

One day the owner of a rival art gallery pays you a visit and notices a piece of art that was in a part of the gallery that very few people visited. They ask you if you would be willing to sell it and they offer a very low price. Since you don’t see that the piece is of any value, you agree and sell it. Turns out it was a hidden gem and the other gallery owner had a good eye for hidden gems. Soon the piece has pride of place in the rival gallery and is drawing huge crowds. You realize you lost out on that one and decide to have a closer look at every other piece of art that is hidden in your gallery … you find quite a few and with a bit of work, they become star attractions.

You have a favorite piece of art in your gallery, you really love it but it doesn’t really suit the theme of your gallery and you know it would get a lot more attention in a rival gallery which has a theme and clientele that are better suited … so you decide to sell it to that gallery and as expected, it shines. You are very proud as you realize that you’ve shared this brilliant piece with the world in a much better way than if you had kept it to yourself. Turns out that gallery owner had a similar piece that better suited your gallery too!

On a fateful winter morning you get to your gallery and you find that it had been broken into and one of your premier pieces had been stolen. The impact on your gallery would be enormous as many of your regular patron only visited to see that piece. Getting a replacement piece and polishing it to the point where it would add the same value as the old piece would take months, if not years. You realize that you should have taken better care of the stolen piece … protected it more, spent the extra money to keep it safe but now it’s too late.

Covid lockdown hits and nobody is able to visit your gallery … and even when the lockdown is lifted, visitor numbers are really bad. You need to do something or the gallery will have to close. You could sell some of your pieces and close part of your gallery as that would reduce maintenance costs, but you cannot bring yourself to do that, you love your art too much. So you change a few things … you arrange for the pieces to be cleaned less often thereby reducing costs. You fit lighting that is motion activated so that only the parts of the gallery that have people in them, are lit and airconditioned. You create a podcast to share the pieces of art in your gallery, online. Soon you have a massive following and you’re earning revenue on YouTube. It becomes so popular that you decide to buy a rival gallery that is closing down due to the reduction in gallery visitors and grow your online gallery even more. Soon the physical gallery visitor numbers start to pick up again and because you maintained your space and your pieces of art … and even extended your collection through the acquisition of a rival gallery, you are now making significantly more money than you did before. You realize that if you sold your pieces of art when times were tough, you would not have a gallery now.

Obviously this article is written a little tongue-in-cheek but hopefully you get the idea. If not … drop me a note and I’d be happy to explain.