I'm the Chair of the board for a theatre school with a management issue

December 15, 2021 2:47 PM

We are a small theatre company that teaches acting. We used to have an artistic director who ran the operations, but he left. The school has stopped classes because of covid. We decided to have four people who were interested in keeping the theatre company going become a leadership team to take on the task of reopening. Since we are not getting any revenue, they are volunteers. From a recent note they sent to the Board, they believe that the Board is not giving them sufficient leeway to operate. This comes as a surprise.

We've been holding most of our meetings via Zoom and email. It's possible our signals and expectations are not clear because of communication gaps.

If this is not a communication issue, what else could it be? If it is a communication issue, how best to ensure that we do communicate both ways effectively so that we're on the same page?

posted by flannelpants to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

This feels kind of hard to answer without more info (one would think the note laid out some examples of how they are not given enough leeway), but . . .

what else could it be?

The first thing that springs to my mind would be micromanaging and/or money.

They may be donating their time, but getting any performance org up and running requires cash outlay, even if there's no revenue coming in. If the company doesn't have any money in the kitty at all there's only so much they can do - and I feel like board members of performance orgs, especially non-profits (if that's what you are) are expected to be at least the "rainy-day" source of funding, if not major financial contributors.

And if EVERY idea - whether financial or other - they come up with or task they have to complete requires approval from the board or certain members of the board, then that's a big roadblock to them accomplishing anything. Thus, they don't have enough leeway.

Do the board members have actual theater experience? If not, this could be a big source of the communication problem - the board members don't know how practical or impractical their plans are, and the volunteers can't clearly explain if the boards' ideas are workable or not and why.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:05 PM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Do they want to do something new that the theater has never done before?

Do they want to exclude or include something or someone?

You really have to be more specific here...
posted by amtho at 3:10 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

If they're saying they don't have enough leeway, and you don't know what they mean by that, there's no way we could do a better job of answering your question than they could. You have to get everyone together in a call and talk this out. You have to ask them what they're trying to do, what difficulties are they facing and how can you better facilitate that, what barriers exist that you can remove, what tools they need that they don't have, etc.
posted by bleep at 3:14 PM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Yes, we definitely are going to have a phone call discussion. I asked the question as a way of helping me prep for it. The strange thing is that the letter did not mention what in particular was bugging them.

The board members do indeed have theater experience, soundguy99, but your point about money is well taken.

@amtho - we are asking them to look at the existing curricula to weed out bias in lesson plans and so forth so that we can do our part for diversity and inclusion. Other than that nothing else exclusionary.
posted by flannelpants at 4:23 PM on December 15, 2021

If they think that the _only_ thing you're asking them to do is remove/improve items from the existing curricula, that could explain the reaction.

They probably are realizing that _everything_ needs to change -- whatever staff, eliminating teachers / re-training teachers, implementing some kind of safe reporter strategy, adding entire courses, creating orientation, cultivating new playwrights and other talent from entire swathes of society that are completely unrepresented in not only theater degree programs but also those "inexpensive" classes taught at local arts centers and all the children's theater programs that are full of upper-middle-class children, bringing plays and innovative performance pieces to totally new places, collaborating with who knows who -- they probably realize that a revolution is needed, of some sort [not just my vague guesses], so anything is going to be hard.

Good luck. Exciting times.
posted by amtho at 8:00 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

The genders and races and classes and languages and ages of all folks involved might be something to think about here.
posted by miles1972 at 12:53 AM on December 16, 2021

As well as sexual identities and physical and mental abilities.
posted by miles1972 at 12:58 AM on December 16, 2021

Prior to the meeting you need to set an agenda for what will be discussed. The step now is to acknowledge their letter and thank them for raising the point, then ask them to be specific about what they feel the issues are so that you can work together to:

a) Identify the scope of each issue (ie what is the risk/opportunity it poses)
b) Establish priorities (do you all agree on what issues can and should be tackled now, and in what order?)
c) Identify a plan of action - ie who is responsible for either doing a thing you've all agreed will help now, OR collating options for solving a more complex issue issue and bringing it back to the group to agree next steps
d) Set a timeframe for the next meeting to follow up on progress

Note that the above DOES NOT include getting to a full solution now, and you may need a sequence of meetings to cover each element, depending on the scale of the problem.

For now it's fine to discuss ideas but at this stage the most important thing is working out whether everyone agrees that the percieved issues are real and what steps need to be taken to make progress against them.
posted by freya_lamb at 3:18 AM on December 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

And another point - for the first step it's important that you just listen, don't be defensive, don't tell them it's not an issue, just get everything out there. You can then start to discuss how much of an impact each has on your org's overall mission/goals. Some things may seem huge but actually have limited impact, whereas others may be the reverse. The important thing is to acknowledge feelings and motivations without allowing individual bugbears to derail the broader mission. This is particulrly important when working with volunteers (spoken as a veteran of twenty years working in non-profit Arts orgs!).
posted by freya_lamb at 3:27 AM on December 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Um... it occurs to me that anyone who is a) in charge of any aspect of any organization, and b) sending messages this vague, is sorely in need of some kind of communication training.

So, that -- SOME kind of management / communication training or training-as-consulting/assisting -- would be a truly awesome thing you could just GIVE them for free, up front. Lead with that, and make it sound like what it is, a wonderful free gift that will change them from employees-who-are-a-commodity to manager-types who will be able to get much higher-paying day jobs, or really great directors of their own theater companies in the future, if they want that.
posted by amtho at 6:00 AM on December 16, 2021

It's impossible to say if this is the case without more info, but my immediate suspicion is that there is one (or more) individual board members who are micromanaging the work of these volunteers, and this is a relatively neutral way for them to let the whole board know about this behind-the-scenes dynamic.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:57 AM on December 16, 2021

The most likely thing is, as Rock Steady says, they feel the board is stepping outside its remit and trying to manage the organisation too closely. The role of a board is to guide management, be a sounding board for them and to set strategic goals. It's very common for a board or, more often, a member of the board to get too involved in day-to-day operations and decision-making, which is innapropriate. The board has to trust the management team to make operational decisions within the strategic framework the board has set.

It may be that the management team are also feeling a little unsure of what the board should be doing for them and there's some mismatch of expectations. It sounds like what is needed is a frank exchange of what each side expects from the other and working towards each side having those expectations met, or expectations changed to where they should be.
posted by dg at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2021