How to update the organization structure of your arts organizations to be more productive, break down silos, and better do the work.

Hear from Julian Chender, an expert in organization design through his work at Accenture as well as his own company he founded. Together, Aubrey and Julian look at the challenges with the existing structure that's been in place at most arts organizations for the last 40+ years, and how to design the organization for goals that affect everyone going forward.

Links

·     Organization design article Julian and Aubrey co-authored.

·     See Julian’s slides on YouTube.

Maybe you think it's dry, maybe you think it's unnecessary. Or maybe like me, You have been personally fascinated with this topic and for myself at least, it's been, I would say a good two years now, maybe longer, that I've been just super interested in this idea of organizational structure and how it is this, call it foundation, but maybe more of through line is the better word for the work we have ahead.

But first, before we get into all that, as I was preparing for this episode, I was thinking through. What are my life updates to share? And you know what the honest answer to that is? My life update is I've been doing some online shopping. I gotta say, I don't know if anybody's with me on this, but I have Summer On the Mind.

I've got a beach vacation on the books at the very end of June and end of July, and a short weekend getaway to Napa coming up as I record this one country is totally my happy place, and it's almost always warm and sunny and wonderful. And, So I decided a few days ago that I need, need some summer dresses.

Like give me a cute sundress, give florals, gimme sandals. Like I said, summer, at least sunshine on the brain, so that's what I've been up to. The shop op sale got the best of me anyways. When I'm not dreaming of summer vacation, I am often thinking more and more about organizational structure. Yeah, that took a hard turn right back to our topic dujour, but it's true.

I said I've been fascinated the last few years, and so I wrote a blog post about a year ago. Or so in partnership with today's guest, Julian Gender, and that got a lot of traction in and of itself. So if you read that, this conversation is a good refresher. If not, this conversation is a great introduction to the topic of organizational structure.

So I'll include the article in the show notes in case you wanna reference that. And, I am also going to include the link to the original conversation I had with Julian over video as he has a deck that he shares with some visuals. So I think the conversation holds without those, but if you do want to access the deck that he shared, then uh, I'll drop that video link in the notes.

So back to this fascination. I think the fascination with organizational structure is because it does feel very fundamental and. For so long I've been very focused on our people and elements of company culture. Company culture was a previous episode already this season and just really obsessed with creating organizations that serve our audience and community.

I. And as my thinking continues to mature, develop, evolve, I now believe our structure plays a really big part in that. And I don't think it's dry. So you know, questions like, do we have the best organizational structure to do the work ahead? How do we build places of agility that can respond to this rapidly changing world around us?

And in terms of a changing narrative, I would say organizational structure used to not even be a thread of a thought. Now it's at least a question. I hear these questions like the ones I'm asking, so to put a finer point on it, I put a poll on LinkedIn a while back now, but this poll was asking about what in the classical music industry have you seen change the most over the past year or two?

And organizational structure was one of the answers, one of the possible multiple choice responses and org structure received the least number of votes in terms of its changed. Only 6% of respondents said that organizational structure has progressed, and I would say those people are not wrong. I would say it really hasn't changed a lot, but that's why we're here.

This also has to do with the number of performances that became more prolific. There's a whole lot that happened in those decades, and our administrative organizational structure followed and as I said, became more professional as a sub-discipline of management. Okay, now as we know, What's happened since the seventies and eighties in our world?

Well, about a bazillion things, right? Our world and our work has changed considerably in that time, in that 40 plus years. And so therefore, I now believe our organization chart, our organization structure needs to change too. It's part of adapting, it's part of just continuing the evolution of our industry.

So most businesses that have been around that long, 40, 50 years or longer, have at some point redesigned their structure. And I'll say, we are starting to see this again. The narrative is, Kind of changing, barely changing, beginning to change. We've got some new positions in different organizations, a few different titles.

So I would say we're really collectively dipping our toe in the water. But like I said, a few years ago, very few were talking about this at all. So there really is some movement on a macro level, and if you have been listening along this season, The last five episodes we have covered many ways. The narrative is changing for classical music, for the arts more broadly, and therefore, this episode now is to really underpin that to say that we need the best structure.

To execute this changing work going forward. All right, so we're gonna spend the next 20 minutes or so talking about this with somebody who really knows org design and strategy, and he knows the arts and how to bring all of these things together. You will also hear him, Julian Gender, say the biggest thing not to do in your org design in our conversation.

And I gotta say, it's something I've definitely seen at multiple organizations, so get ready for his wisdom and advice on that. So I'm gonna put on my big sun hat and sundress, and then we're gonna do this. Okay? Organizational design, why it matters, and what you can think about at your organizations too.

Coming right up.

Hey everyone, I'm Aubrey Bergauer and welcome to my podcast. If we haven't met, I'm known in the arts world for being customer centric, data obsessed, and for growing revenue. The arts are my vehicle to make the change I wanna see in this world, like creating places of belonging, pursuing gender and racial equality.

Developing high performing teams and leaders and leveraging technology to elevate our work. In this season, I'm bringing you conversations with some of my favorite experts from both inside and outside the arts, all to help build the vibrant future we know is possible for our institutions and for ourselves as offstage administrators and leaders.

You are listening to the offstage mic.

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And we're back today on Top. Tunes. The music, is it just me or does this sound terrible? Wait, I think I heard of someone who might be able to help us. There's this company called Novo Music. They provide across the board audio solutions from recording repair, to audio editing, to original music and sound design and beyond.

Well, what are we waiting for today? On top tunes the music. Now that's better. Novo Music. Conducting your creative vision. Find out more@novomusic.co. I'm really excited to introduce to you today Julian Chander. Julian Chander is an award-winning consultant that is including work at Accenture plus his own company he founded, which I'll come back to that in just a second.

What's notable about Julian is that he takes a holistic approach to human systems design and development. The topic we're talking about today, and he looks at and studies. Beliefs, structures, systems and processes that underpin human interaction and organizational life. We're gonna unpack all that together.

At Accenture specifically, he worked in the C-suite with global companies to help leaders with the design of their organizations to make them more effective. And as I mentioned, he founded an organization, it's called 11, a Collaborative, to support all kinds of organizations and leaders in New York City to focus on creating better community and vibrance across all sectors.

That's arts, nonprofit, public sector, and community spaces. His work now spans individual coaching as well as team development, community engagement, strategic planning, organizational design and coalition building. And I said this at the top. He knows classical music. I have permission to share that his wife plays in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

So that means Julian sees firsthand. The inner workings of a true pillar institution, and I have found Julian so adept at talking about how these ideas and strategies that we're gonna talk about today scale up and scale down no matter the size of the organization, no matter the budget. I first heard Julian talk about all of this, this idea of org design when he was preparing for an Opera America talk a few years ago now, and he had reached out and asked if all of this made sense to me as somebody who had led an arts organization.

And not only did it make sense, everything he was sharing with me ignited my brain is the best way I can describe it. So ever since then, I said this in the opening. I am just fascinated. And want to apply everything I'm learning from him on this topic more broadly. So hopefully this conversation is helpful to you at your own organization, whether you are an org leader or someone who wants to understand how all the cogs in the machine work together.

I think this topic matters to all of us no matter where we are in the org chart. So we are going to start with Julian, sharing with us what it means to be an agile arts organization that can adapt to this rapidly changing world around us. Welcome, Julian. Take

We're here to talk about what does it mean to create an agile arts organization Providing good art or even great art isn't enough for an arts institution anymore. Now arts organizations need to be part of the social geopolitical and environmental conversations. They are part of culture, but culture writ large, not just the, the cultural aspects of a, of a city.

Like we talked about 50 years ago, the, the arts and culture that was, you know, reserved first among the highbrow people, but now it's about actually the culture of humanity. What does it mean to be a living, human breathing being. So as we do this, as we look to make these connections and respond to the changing environment, we have to be agile.

We have to be able to make big changes quickly. And there's a certain formula for doing this, and it is the alignment and the key here is alignment of strategy, design, culture, and leadership strategy. You could think about as the plot of land on which you might build your house, your institution, you know, you have to find the right plot of land.

Which is you're gonna be your vision, your mission, a business plan. How are you gonna survive? And investment decisions, where are you gonna put your money? And then once you have this plot of land, you need to find the building site. And that's gonna be where and how are we positioned in the larger conversation?

Only then can you design your organization and design here refers to structure management processes, business processes, and metrics. These are like the blueprint of a house. Where do the walls go? Where does the plumbing go? How's it all gonna be pieced together? And then the actual building of the organization, the building of the house is culture.

Organizations are made out of people. Without people. There is no organization. So that's the values of the organization, the way we manage people, people practices, communication, internal external team management and performance management. Then all of these organizations have leaders. And so leadership is the steering of the ship.

It's the the running of the household. It, how do we have the leader show up? How do we develop leaders in this organization? How do we grow people? And what kind of coaching strategy do we use to help people grow? So all of this has to be aligned in order for an organization to move quickly. And the way organizations in the arts are designed is what's called a functional organization structure.

And this means it's designed by function, the type of work that gets done. So this vertical org chart here where you have an executive director and different functions underneath should look familiar to most of you because it should look like the way your arts organizations are managed. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, nor does it really need to change.

The question is how do you do it rather than what is it? Because when you're dealing with a functional organization, functional organizations are good because they do product excellence. And that's what an arts organization needs to do. It needs to be really good at doing what it does. It needs to be really good at putting out artistic.

It needs to be really good at doing production operations. The development department has to be the best, et cetera, et cetera. That's all the vertical work, and that can be siloing. If artistic doesn't talk to production operations, if development has a campaign that doesn't deal with artistic, it's not joint.

It's disjointed and when that happens, you can't move agilely. The Met were completely disjointed, wouldn't have been able to put on that concert for Ukraine. In fact, the stories of what had to happen, the meetings, the cross-functional work, what would be called the horizontal work that had to happen across the functional structure of the Metropolitan Opera to make that concert for Ukraine happen in four days was phenomenal.

The amount of collaboration was intense. So we need both the vertical work where we're excellent in what we do, but we need the horizontal work where we can collaborate and work cross-functionally. A lot of times arts organizations, especially small ones, don't think about the collaboration because it happens so naturally people carry two or three jobs at once.

In some of these organizations, someone could be the director of development and be doing marketing in pr. So all of this is moving and weaving together, and people are making decisions as they go that that can be very agile. But as these organizations grow, they need to have very clear ways of linking across the horizontal work.

And there's a very particular problem that I think we need to think about why that's important. And these are the really what I see as the core needs for cross-functional collaboration in the arts. So, If we're going to be doing really, really, really good artistic production, we need to be doing it with an eye towards these fundamental issues.

So for instance, public safety, unanticipated events. We don't know what's gonna happen next. Now, we know unprecedented. Unprecedented is everything. Everything is unprecedented, not going forward. So we need to be ready for anything. Which means we need to be ready to move quickly, which means we need to be ready to have the cross-functional work, the new funding landscape.

We need to be able to manage that new audience development, digital transformation that happens to the whole organization. You can't digitally transform a DHR function without digitally transforming arts. So then the final one, and I think the most important one, and, and what I really want to talk about is social and racial justice inequity.

That this is something that. Goes across every part of an arts organization, and if the parts of the arts organization are not working together, then you cannot have a good production of social and racial justice. So how do we do this? This is called Jay's Ladder, and this is one of my favorite models, and it's a way of looking at how we build cross-functional collaboration in functional institutions.

And what this shows is that as you go up the ladder into higher structure, you get into very, very, very intense and detailed. And strict ways of working lower on the bottom are looser ways of working. And what I would say is there's a time and place for all of these, but you need to start at the bottom to get to the top.

You can't form a matrix structure of an organization. Without everything below that. So communities of interest. What happens at your organization? Who's talking about what? What are the topics of interest and who is getting together outside of the regular work they're doing across functions to discuss issues?

For instance, the Met has a racial justice task force, so that would be a community of interest. Then the management processes, digital tools and routines. How is the work actually done? How do we manage it? The business processes, very similar metrics. How are we measuring our success? Are you measuring it based on ticket sales?

Because if you're measuring it based on ticket sales, that's going to show you and lead to certain type of work. It's going to lead to work that produces full house, but then you have to think about what are all the things below that that are gonna lead to a full house? How do we build that in? That goes back to the strategy, formal networks and teams.

You need to have a bit of a large organization to have this here, where you're really forming cross-functional teams that work on specific issues and integrator roles I think is something that. Arts organizations could really, really leverage. And an integrator role is someone who works in between two functions that someone who is meant to work across an in between two places.

So they sit maybe on two teams, or they sit separately and attend two teams meetings. And this is something that I see a little bit happening more and more in the arts as people start to see that the musicians need to be talking to management. At the Met. There's a couple roles here that I would highlight, but I, I don't wanna call anyone out, so this is really where we can go and I think this is a much deeper conversation, but I wanted to show you this model because it is one of my favorites.

More of a broad goal, like we wanna incorporate streaming and digital content as we're in a hybrid world going forward. Like what does strategy mean, I guess is the question in this context.

The MET Opera does Grand Opera. That's their thing. Their strategy is to put on the best grand opera they can. So their structure has to be designed in order to do that.

Because it's a mind shift, I think, from what we're so used to, because the way we've done it has been in place for so long. So how do we set these parameters?

So it was a political office and they had just gotten elected and they said, you know, we wanna make the best impact we can make on the borough of Manhattan. So we did a strategic planning process where we interviewed a bunch of people, community members, staff members, advisors, People in the government, and we found out that there were really three priorities that fit what this candidate really could do, Mark Levine, and it was social and economic justice, environmental justice, and public health.

So now we've designed his organization where those three strategies have actual teams. Mm-hmm. So those have the cross-functional teams. So he has this functional organization where he has to do land use, he has to do all of the constituent services, all of the things that the office has to do. But across that, are these cross-cutting, really matrixed points of view that are based on these strategic priorities, which means that every conversation about land use.

Is talking about social justice, environmental justice, and public health.

Like, well, lemme just leave it at that. How do we do better at this integrator

So if the marketing department wants to do A, B, and C, but the development department wants to do X, Y, and Z, who gets to decide? Mm-hmm. How those fit together? And does the decision right lie with the integrator, with the head of marketing or with the head of development?

Formalize it every, is everything okay. You can tell me if this is a not fair question, but what is the biggest thing you see, whether it's arts organizations or organizations in general doing wrong or inefficiently in their approach to organizational

We're gonna make a role for them and we're gonna make a team around them. That is the worst thing you can

And we need to find a way to work around that. I mean, do you see it both ways, high performer and somebody that maybe should be managed

Now, if they're a high performer, there will be a role for them. Yes. You just don't know what that role is yet because you haven't designed it right for the organization.

Is

And that's where consultants come in. You know, we're the ones who have the expertise in the strategy and design and development, and can actually guide you through the process. And when we do it, we don't tell you what to do because we don't know your organization. We know good organization design. So we create a process by which we work together by sharing our expertise in organization design, with your expertise at your organization and your field in order to share a good outcome.

And I always say the pain, the pain has to be great enough that that readiness is there. We know we can't do it that old way anymore. So yeah, the pain point for sure. Are there good proxy measures for success beyond butts and seats or revenue? In other words, if an orchestra is doing social justice, climate change, et cetera, the outputs are fairly clear with concerts and programming.

But impacts are harder to put a finger on. I think that's a good question. Can

Then the other thing is each of those programs are gonna have their own metrics. So if you have an environmental point of view and you wanna have programming based on that, You could talk about doing digital programs for concerts instead of having paper programs, you know, Hey, scan this QR code at your seat and read the program on your phone.

You didn't actually count how much paper you're saving. I

Yeah. So I really, I appreciate that. And I'll say one more thing that's in my head in response to this is I always say when I'm talking about marketing communications that, like you said, media narrative that's out there. We know that we're starting to have success when messages we are putting out there as a brand.

Are coming back to us when we start seeing things in press clippings, online articles, blogs, social media of others, et cetera. When we start seeing those things come back to us, it's like, okay, it's resonated so much so that somebody else has articulated it besides me, besides the brand. So I, I always like looking for that as well.

So I could talk about this all day. Cause I think it's fascinating and I have said this to Julian offline. I'm gonna say it publicly, mark my words someday when I'm running an orchestra again or an the arts organization I'm calling you, we are talking org structure and org design. And I can't wait for that day cause it is gonna rock.

So that is my way of saying thank you so much Julian. I'm so glad you're here and able to bring this information to us.

Have a good one. Take care. Hey, off Stagers. One of the top things I hear from individuals all over, something people are increasingly wanting is people who say, I want more connection with like-minded colleagues. If that resonates, I created a new community and you're invited to join. It's an online gathering place for arts and culture professionals wanting a different, stronger paradigm for the industry.

It's a place for those not satisfied with the status quo for arts and culture who believe there is a better way forward, and that the future of the field doesn't have to be all doom and gloom. It's a place of people trying to navigate the ins and outs of careers in the arts and want smart growth mindset type people alongside them.

It's a place called the changing the narrative community. I'm so excited by the folks who've already joined, and no matter your artistic discipline, geographic location, role, or years in the field, you are welcome and invited as well. Visit aubrey Bergauer dot com slash community. The narrative is changing, and I hope to see you there soon.

That's all for today, folks. Thanks so much for listening and keep up with more content like this by following me on LinkedIn or Instagram at Aubrey Bergauer. Definitely hit that follow button to subscribe to this podcast and. If you like what you heard here, will you consider leaving a review or rating?

I'd be so grateful for your help and support in that. Thanks again. See you next time on the Offstage Mic. The Offstage Mic was produced by me, Aubrey Bergauer and edited by Novo Music, a studio of all women, audio engineers and musicians. The narrative is changing for arts and culture, and I'm so glad you're here to be a part of it.

This is a production of changing the narrative.