Our Institutions are More Than Just Our Leaders

I have had the pleasure of spending the past few days brainstorming with colleagues from across North America on some of the really big questions facing ballet and the arts today. One topic that has come up in several small group conversations is how we define our institutions. I was fortunate enough to have this conversation with people that I consider to be some of the top thinkers in my field and it seemed that there was a split opinion. Some felt that our leaders define our institutions and are tasked with setting the vision for the company. Others felt as though it is the institution itself and its mission, vision, values that define who we are and all of us leaders work to further those goals in our communities. I heard some great comments on both sides, but as you can tell from the title of this post, I tend to fall into the institutional camp.

Institutions are often founded by individuals with the vision, dedication, and sheer willpower to just make things happen. These leaders are nothing short of inspirational and have gone on to create institutions that have defined industries and communities. But what happens when they are gone? When leaders are brought in with the mandate to define or redefine an organization with their vision, what happens to the infrastructure left from the previous work? In the best-case scenario, the new leader pays careful attention to the legacy and the mission and builds on those foundations to pivot the organization into a new era. In the worst-case scenario, they scrap the whole thing and start anew. As with most things, the reality often lies somewhere in the middle. I have heard and seen situations in which certain parts of the foundation are built upon while others are dismissed and still other parts tend to exist in some unattended limbo without direction or purpose. If we operate under the mandate that leaders are tasked with defining their organizations, we don’t really know what we will get. It could be measured growth that continues building a community around a well-known and established mission – or it could be chaos. Our Boards, search committees, and executive recruiting firms do a painstaking amount of work to “get it right” in this model because once their work is done, the rest is left to the individual. This is an enormous amount of pressure, and we, as human beings, often “get it wrong”.

Now think of a model in which mission, vision, value guides above all else. In that model, all leaders have a clear north star and communities can feel confident in the fact that, regardless of leadership, this institution will continue to provide the same services to the community that it has been tasked to do in the past. These principles offer guideposts during transition and make succession planning more structured. In addition, it gives the organization an identity beyond any one individual and allows strategic and long-term planning to be relevant over multiple iterations of leadership. It also provides insurance against the hypothetical, “got hit by a bus” scenario that we should all ask ourselves about from time-to-time. In addition, this model also allows for scale. When an institution IS an individual, it is bound by the capacity of the persona of that individual. When an institution is a set of mission, vision, values, the possibilities for growth and presence are much greater. A mission can stand for much more than any single individual.

What happens when we need a change to mission, vision, or values? Organizations are constantly reevaluating their place, purpose, and offerings to their communities. If there are signs that a change is needed to best continue to serve the community, or even redefine the community served, we, as an institution need to do grassroots community research to find out what those changes should be. This process should involve all current stakeholders and as many groups as possible that are not considered stakeholders. A change of any core vision for the organization should not be an individual task. I have heard stakeholders describe concern about a leadership change by saying something along the lines of, “I am not sure I like where they are taking the organization.” My point is that the organization should be going where the community wants it to go and the job of the leader should be to make sure that it gets there.

Like I said at the beginning, there are at least two camps on this and no one has the "right" answer. Many people feel that without a leader setting the vision, institutions will stagnate or lose their creative edge. That's a valid perspective and one that has played out in reality. That said, I feel that in a perfect world, our leaders are passionate, dedicated, and uncompromising stewards of a set of ideals – defined and redefined by our communities – that are embodied in our missions. This allows our institutions to project a message of long-term stability to our communities and create buy-in over generations. In order to build new audiences and stay relevant over time, it is our institutions that need to represent our communities, and our leaders need to represent those institutions.