Embodying Shared Leadership (EP.79)
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Updated
October 31, 2024
In this episode, host Tim Cynova dives back into the world of shared and distributed leadership with three leaders of Bridge Live Arts, a Bay Area-based nonprofit dedicated to equity-driven live art. He's joined by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Rebecca Fitton as they unpack the unique journey of implementing a distributed leadership model at BLA as it transitioned from Hope Mohr Dance.
The team shares the origins of the distributed leadership model, how their particular model works, how engaging with community informs and evolves the model, some of their “ahas” and lessons learned along the way, and where to from here.
Episode Highlights
03:50 Understanding Bridge Live Arts
05:27 The Journey to Shared Leadership
08:20 Implementing Distributed Leadership
14:45 Challenges and Assumptions in Shared Leadership
19:47 Exploring Dancing Distributed Leadership
20:35 Initial Phases and Learnings
22:47 Improvisation in Shared Leadership
24:26 Future Directions
26:47 Challenges and Reflections
30:36 Advice for Implementing Shared Leadership
Related Resources
The Dancing Distributed Leadership program
Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance by Hope Mohr
Check out the new book Artists On Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography featuring an in-depth case study of Bridge Live Arts.
Bios
Cherie Hill (she/her) is a curator, co-director, and the Director of Arts Leadership at Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.). She has co-curated Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, & Community; Anti-Racism in Dance; Money in the Arts; and Transforming the Arts: Shared Leadership in Action series. In 2023, she curated Liberating Bodies: dialogue and movement workshops with Black Diaspora dance artists. She co-presents on distributed leadership, advocates for equity and inclusion, and is a choreographer, dance educator, and Assistant Professor in Dance Studies at CSU San Marcos. Cherie collaborated with B.L.A. former co-directors Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero to lead HMD/the Bridge Project, an organization with a hierarchical model to Bridge Live Arts, a model based on Distributed Leadership. Cherie is a researcher and has published articles in Gender Forum, the Sacred Dance Guild Journal, Dance Education in Practice, Stance On Dance, In Dance, and most recently co-authored "Embodying Equity-Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership" for Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography. Cherie presents at national and international conferences and has held multiple residencies, including choreographic residencies with Footloose Productions, Milk Bar Richmond, the David Brower Center, and CounterPulse’s Performing Diaspora. She holds a BA degree in Dance and Performance Studies and African American Studies and an MFA in Dance, Performance, and Choreography with graduate certificates in Women and Gender Studies and Somatics. Cherie is a mother of two incredible sons and lives in Luiseño-speaking Payomkawichum homeland/Temecula Valley, CA, with her life-long partner.
Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts advocate. She has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, and writer. After a professional dance career with Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, she founded the nonprofit Hope Mohr Dance and its signature presenting program, The Bridge Project, which for over 15 years supported over 100 artists through commissions, residencies, workshops, and collaborative performance projects. In 2020, Mohr co-stewarded the organization’s transition to an equity-driven model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. Mohr’s book about cultural work as activism, "Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance," was published in 2020 by the National Center for Choreography, the inaugural book in their publication series. She is a contributor to the anthology "Artists on Creative Administration" (2024), edited by Tonya Lockyer and also published by the National Center for Choreography. A licensed California attorney and a working artist, Mohr works at the intersection of art and social change as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Movement Law, Mohr's solo law practice, is dedicated to supporting artists and changemakers. movementlaw.net and www.hopemohr.org
Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is a queer, mixed race asian american, disabled, and immigrant person. Their work as an artist, administrator, and advocate focuses on arts infrastructure, asian american identity, and disability justice. They currently serve as a Co-Director at Bridge Live Arts (CA) and as Director of Studio Rawls for choreographer Will Rawls (NY/CA). From 2017-2021, she coordinated community gatherings about local abolition and justice movements with DELIRIOUS Dances/Edisa Weeks (NY). She was a Dance/NYC’s Junior Committee member from 2018-2020 and participated in Dance/USA’s Institute for Leadership Training in 2021. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, the National Center for Choreography – Akron, SPACE 124 @ Project Artaud, Center, LEIMAY/CAVE, EMERGENYC, and The Croft. Their writing has been published by Triskelion Arts, Emergency Index, In Dance, The Dancer-Citizen, Etudes, Critical Correspondence, and Dance Research Journal. As an access practitioner, she narrates audio description for experimental dance and performance artists. They hold a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and an MA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin.
Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck a podcast about, well, that. Listeners of the podcast know that a frequent topic of conversation here is exploring shared and distributed leadership models and for those of you who are excited about those episodes, do I have another great one for you in that series? Today I'm joined by three leaders of the Bay Area based Bridge Live Arts, Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr and Rebecca Fitton. We'll be exploring their particular adventure in distributed leadership, how it started, how it's going, and where to from here. So let's get going. Cherie, Hope and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.
Cherie Hill:
Thank you Tim. We are so excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Tim Cynova:
As a way of grounding us in the conversation, might I invite you each to introduce yourself and the work you do?
Cherie Hill:
My name is Cherie Hill. My pronouns are she/her and I am zooming in from Luseno-speaking Payamkuichem Homeland, which is in the Temecula Valley of Southern California and I am a woman with brown cocoa skin and dark brown dreadlocks. My ancestry stems from Africa, the Caribbean, the UK and the US. And I am a mother, lifelong partner, spouse and forever learner. I dance, I choreograph, I write and I teach and I work as an independent artist and entrepreneur, a professor in dance studies and a co-director at Bridge Life Arts, which is a nonprofit organization based on the unceded lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples aka San Francisco, California. Our mission is to create and support equity-driven life arts that centers artists as agents of change.
Hope Mohr:
Hi everybody. Thanks Tim for having us. My name is Hope Moore. I use she/her pronouns and I'm zooming in from Ohlone territory, also known as the Bay Area. I am a white, queer, cis female. I am a multidisciplinary artist and an attorney with a practice focused on supporting artists and arts organizations. I am a former co-director at Bridge Live Arts. I founded Hope Mohr Dance in 2007 and beginning in 2019 I co-stewarded the organization's transition along with Cherie and Carla Clintero to a model of distributed leadership and its new name Bridge Live Arts and I transitioned out of co-directorship last year and I'll pass it to Rebecca.
Rebecca Fitton:
Hi everyone. I'm Rebecca Fitton. I use she they pronouns and I am on Chiqueno speaking Ohlone Lands, otherwise known as Oakland, California. I'm a mixed Asian-American person, queer. I'm an immigrant and I'm disabled. I have short brown hair and I'm currently wearing a black and white ginkgo pattern shirt. I'm an artist-administrator. I joyfully bounce back and forth between those two roles and I spend a lot of time researching and writing about the infrastructural shifts in the nonprofit dance ecosystem. So I'm a frequent listener of the podcast and I did cite some episodes in my recent research. I'm also the studio director of Choreographer Will Rawls, who I've been working with for the past eight years, which has been great and I'm the newest co-director at Bridge Life Arts. I joined in 2023 and now lead the organization alongside Cherie and I'm also a relatively new Bay Area resident, so I'm deep in the process of learning and being in the community here, which has been a joy.
Tim Cynova:
I'm so excited for this conversation. Thank you all for being here. For this one, maybe before we get into shared and distributed leadership, what's Bridge Live Arts? How do you explain what the organization is, what it does and then we can get into the leadership aspect of it.
Rebecca Fitton:
As Cherie said, Bridge Live Arts is a nonprofit arts organization based in the Bay and we present and support equity driven live art, so that mostly focuses in its current iteration on dance and movement artists in the Bay Area who have a commitment to social justice and other equity driven work. Our main program is our community engagement residency program, which supports artists who are looking to invest in their communities and strengthen programs that many in fact are already doing without institutional support. We offer them a year of both financial support but also thought partnership in how they can work best and within their community and basically just uplift what the work that they're already doing.
So for example, an artist that we just announced, 7,000 Coils is based in East Oakland and they are a DJ and movement and sound healing group and they operate out of Black Yard and they're looking at increasing their public programming for Black and Brown artists, artists in their community. Other artists this year are Carla Florence who have a great street dance community workshop festival that happens and Alice Herr who's a cornerstone person in the San Jose whacking scene. So we get to uplift the work that they're already doing and place some institutional support there, which is really great. That's our core program.
Tim Cynova:
To set the scene for the conversation on this one and getting into the whole shared and distributed leadership model, how did it come about? What happened, what existed before, what was going on, why a distributed leadership model and let's go from there.
Hope Mohr:
I'll take that. This is Hope. Our transition to shared leadership began for several different reasons, sustainability reasons, racial equity reasons, and also commitment to collaboration. So I'll talk about each of those briefly.
The sustainability piece was as the founder of the organization after 15 years of running the organization, I was starting to experience real burnout. It's a challenge to balance arts administration and an art practice and so I was interested in shifting to a more sustainable leadership model, curious about what that might look like and I wanted to find more time for my work as an artist. So that was one of the impetuses. The second one was equity and anti-racism. As Rebecca just described, our public programming Bridge Live Arts community-based arts programs had become increasingly focused on equity, anti-racism and social justice work and most of the artists we partnered with were and continued to be artists of color. So I had been hearing the call from many of these artist partners for white arts leaders like myself to move back from power and to share power and I was really curious about what it might look like to apply that call to myself and to the organization.
Relatedly, there was also a real disconnect between the artists that we work with in community and the internal demographics of the organization. For example, the board was mostly white. And the last I would say river of inquiry that really drove the work is this commitment to collaboration. Collaboration is really integral to dance making. Like many choreographers, I had worked collaboratively in the studio for many years and I was really curious about what it would look like to apply that ethos to leadership, to the administrative side of the organization
Tim Cynova:
And that last piece is so fascinating to me. Having grown up, working in arts organizations, working for dance companies and often realizing there's so much creativity that happens on the stage, on the screen in galleries and public space and then everyone just uses the old book from 1980 about how you run your organization. People are checking their creativity at the door that they would otherwise be using in spaces, but when it comes to arts organizations or their organization, well that's just the way it's done. Which is why I'm so excited about organizations that are experimenting with different ways of organizing and making decisions and sharing power and not checking that part of their personality, that part of their brain, that part of their creativity when it comes to this. And so I'm curious from a practical experience, what kind of distributed leadership model is this? How does it work? Maybe beginning with the overarching and then we can get into more of the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, like how do you make decisions of consequence when there's more than one person doing that?
Cherie Hill:
Oh my gosh, Tim, Cherie here. I couldn't agree with you more. I've had that same question working in different arts nonprofits for about 20 years now of why as artists we bring so much creativity and passion and love to our work and our artistry and then we get in an office and it's like the same thing. I'm doing the same thing that my friends in corporate America, which they hate, almost are doing except I'm getting paid half the wages to do it. That is definitely something that drew me to the invitation from Hope when I started out as a community engagement coordinator for the organization in 2019 to join her and Carla Quintero to really create a model along with our board and community that could share leadership, could be more collaborative and could invest in artist and artist thought process. That is what I've been excited about at Bridge Live Arts and I think this question around how does it work is a great question and something that we're continuing to discover and explore. I can't say we've nailed it.
We recently talked to other leaders who are in the arts and dance who also have shared leadership practices that they're experimenting with and there's still a lot of questions which I think is really good. Our staff currently is comprised of five persons and each of us have a specific focus area within Bridge Live Arts and in our early stages of distributive leadership back more in 2020 to 2022, Hope, Carla and myself really worked on unpacking power within the organization and how we could delineate task from Hope as the founder, more of the executive artistic director, how that power could be shared and how Carla and I could then take on more leadership work.
At that time it was us three as co-directors. There weren't any other staff on board as far as running the organization, and so a lot of our discussions happened between the three of us and as we became more accustomed to what this model could look like for what became Bridge Life Arts, we found that all three of us or everyone on staff doing everything at the same time all the time was pretty taxing.
In this next stage, in 2022, we decided to really focus on our internal structures and we consulted with authentic arts and media to help us create a more solid organizational infrastructure that allowed staff to have more clarity on how and when they should be involved with organizational discussions and decision making so that not everyone was in the kitchen a hundred percent of the time, which, if you've experienced that, can be overwhelming. From that work, we currently really utilize two documents. One is the MOCA and the other one is a decision-making matrix, and this evolved out of our work in the last year or so where we really focused internally. MOCA, the way we've done it is we've broken it into three main categories that really sorts out the leadership task and responsibilities that employees have to do for the organization and those three categories are executive, strategic and creative.
Each year we review what we're doing and we utilize the MOCA to really decide who's the manager, who's the owner, who's consulted, who's the helper or who's the approver of each of these responsibilities. And we found that documenting leadership in this way has helped us understand better what our organizational responsibilities are as well as acknowledge that all those staff may not have co-director titles, because we do have staff that are assistants, managers and coordinators now in addition to two co-directors, that they are sharing leadership and they're doing executive strategic and creative roles.
The other document we created is a decision-making matrix and it's divided into four parts that identify who's responsible for each project or part of the organization, the term of that part. Is it short-term or is it long-term? And the type of decisions that are being made such as is this a routine day-to-day operational decision or is it more strategic, more creative and long-term? And that has really helped us have a blueprint for how it works, right? The nuts and bolts of the workload, the tasks that we're doing, who's doing it and how they fall into these categories of being executive strategic or creative. That's been a huge help for our organization.
Tim Cynova:
I love that teasing a part of decision-making and how the thought and intentionality goes into that. It's one of the things I find so exciting thinking about shared and distributed leadership models is because in the words of my colleague Katrina Donald, it offers moments to pause. You had to pause and reflect on what is leadership? What is a CEO? What does that function do? How might we do that in different ways? And whether you have a distributed leadership model or not, your organization is still making decisions and it can be thoughtful and intentional about is this a strategic decision? How many people or how few should be involved in this one?
I love when it comes down to how do you just do that thing? And what can other people take from that and then kind of retrofit it into their organization or iterate on these experiments that most people aren't going to do? They aren't going to say, "Well, we had one leader and now we have three," or whatever it is. I'm curious, as you went through this process, how did your assumptions meet reality and what you thought was going to happen and then what actually happened throughout the organization? What went well and what was like, all right, well that's our learning edge. We need to spend some more time iterating on that one.
Rebecca Fitton:
The assumptions are a tricky place to go because sometimes you don't quite realize you have an assumption until you start parsing apart what Cherie was just saying about the various matrix fees that we use to make decision making. I think an assumption as the newest co-director that came in is that I assume that this work would be slow and I would say that one is true. It takes us time to make decisions. We are also all part-time. Even I, who have the most hours currently within the organization, don't work 20 hours a week. And so we just work at a pace that is slower than most people expect, but we want to align ourselves with the true pace of creation and art making, especially for the bike walk and disabled artists that we work with whose reality is that work is slower. The assumption that we come up against is perhaps from other stakeholders who say, "Why isn't this happening quicker than we think that it should be happening?"
And it's because it takes us a long time to make decision even with clarity around who's making what decision. There's a deep patience required for shared leadership. Then the other assumption is around the fact that shared leadership and distributed leadership can often get conflated with non-hierarchical labor. We've been pretty clear, especially over these past two years when we shifted out of three co-directors to two co-directors with staff that we are not in a non-hierarchical model anymore. There is hierarchy now within the organization and we still have shared leadership and this leadership is distributed amongst the staff and staff who, as Sheri said, don't have director in their titles are compensated for that task as much as possible. And so in the community conversations often will be called to speak on horizontal leadership or non-hierarchical leadership models and we have to always put the asterisks there saying we are not quite doing that. It's not to say that the ethics of that reason why you have reached out to us are not there, but let's be clear about we don't operate in the full consensus model. We divvy up. Yes, there's certain consensus among certain stakeholders, but we aren't in the more consensus model of the '90s perhaps, which is everybody sit in the same room and we hash it out until everybody is exactly in agreement. We don't work that way.
And so those have been the two frequently asked questions and it's coming out of this assumption, but it's been exciting and people are really receptive to hearing how we are thinking about this differently and the ways in which their expectations don't meet reality. It's always been met with a positive reaction which is life.
Hope Mohr:
As Rebecca just said, I think the leadership model at Bridge Lab Arts has been truly emergent and really done in a spirit of experimentation. So those moments of pause that you're talking about Tim, have happened really all along the way. And I remember one moment at the very beginning of the process we were working in partnership with Safi Jarreau at LeaderSpring as a consultant and one of the first things we did was pull a couple of community meetings about what distributed leadership could look like for the organization. And I remember that moment really cracked the work open for me because I realized that the work wasn't just beholden to staff and board. It has been beholden to a wider community, which has meant that all along the way there's been a real process of listening and dialogue about what the work has needed instead of relying on cookie cutter or default models
Tim Cynova:
That decisions take time and what exactly is hierarchy were some of the things that came up a lot for us at Fractured Atlas when we moved from a single CEO to a four-person co-CEO model and we got a lot of questions about, and we heard a lot of critique about "Your decisions take longer as four people." And I often reflected that they might take longer, but usually they were better decisions. You don't factor into decision with a single person, the fact that you need to come back because it wasn't a great decision or there wasn't buy-in around the decision. Maybe take a more holistic look at the arc of a decision and its impacts reframes what goes into a decision process and that not all hierarchy is bad. It can be troublesome when you don't question why there's hierarchy or when there shouldn't be, especially as those systems of white supremacy culture are baked into many organizations. But recognizing when do we lean more toward hierarchy, when do we lean more toward consensus and what type of decision is this? I think it's really exciting and unusual.
You're talking about community and when I was on the Bridge Live Arts website, I saw that you had sessions called Dancing Distributed Leadership where you took the concept of distributed leadership into the studio and moved in space. I'm so fascinated by this. Can you describe what you did and maybe what resonated from embodying this concept that might not have translated if you didn't do that with community?
Hope Mohr:
This is Hope. A big question in this work has been how shared leadership on the administrative side might translate into art making. In other words, when an artist is an organizational founder, what happens to the art when the founder moves back and dancing? Distributed leadership I think has been responding to those questions. Dancing Distributed Leadership began a couple years ago and in the first phase of the project, the three of us as co-directors, the time made new dance works in parallel and we also began a conversation about what shared leadership might look like in the context of making performance and in the context of studio practice. I think we learned a lot about how getting in the studio is really a whole new level of intimacy and vulnerability than doing administration together. And I'll pass it to Rebecca and Cherie to talk about more recent developments in the project.
Cherie Hill:
This is Cherie. I feel that the Dancing Distributive Leadership project was really different and really experimental and really exciting for an organization, an arts organization and for Bridge Life Arts and a lot was learned and there's still a lot more to do with it, which we hope will continue. And it was also very supported. We, for the first time as a staff, were able to have a retreat. We also had a residency at NCC Akron, much thanks to Kristi and Erin for really helping us think through before that residency what this project could look like and how it could apply to our administrative aspects. We also had the opportunity through NCC Akron to work with two mentors, Bibi Miller and Paloma McGregor, which was such a gift and such a blessing to have outside perspective, which continues to be quite an asset for the organization.
Having consultants, having artists, mentors, community members be able to pour into us and help us see from an outside perspective what we're doing both in affirming way and in questioning way I think has been very powerful and has really helped the organization grow into what it is. Just chiming in on what hope was saying earlier is that I don't feel like I can take credit for Bridge Life Arts as a co-director because so many voices have been a part of it and it really has been a community project though US three as well as other staff members have taken the lead on that. Something that was an "aha!" Moment for me during Dancing Distributed Leadership was how improvisational shared leadership is and the skills that are needed from improvisation in order to be able to share leadership, to make decisions, collaborate with others, to shift into different spaces, both head spaces, physical spaces.
I was like, wow, this is an improvisational practice in itself that made me think about who we're working with and who wants to do that kind of work because in the dance world, I have dance friends who resist improvisation. They're not interested in it, they want to be told what steps to do, they want to do the choreography and they're very happy doing that and it's a beautiful part of our art form. And then you have people who are way into improvisation and are on the opposite side. And then you have people in the middle of the spectrum, which I tend to be. I do both. I go both ways. And so it was so enlightening to me because I was like, wow, I do think that someone coming into leadership in a shared process and in this type of structure probably needs to want to improvise and if they don't want to improvise, this could be a very challenging structure to work in. And so that was a huge aha moment for me.
Rebecca Fitton:
I'll echo that. I would say all staff right now have a really strong and propositional practice, which is exciting. I'll also add that out of DDL, there's kind of two branches into the future that are happening. The first is that we, three of us, developed a curriculum called Embodying Shared Leadership, which we were able to, last January, teach one session on Zoom and one session in person in which we asked and invited other leaders in the community to play around with some scores that we had developed for an improvising body that related to our shared leadership work, maybe some basic improvisational scores. But in this context, such as sharing weight or finding distance and passing certain movements among each other, we practice those with groups of people and then ask them, "How does this relate to your experience of shared leadership?" Or, "How might this change your leadership experience?"
And so we are currently working right now to further share that curriculum and expand it into the community because so many of the administrators who we are community with are also movers and we so rarely get the chance to move with each other. And so that's a core piece of curriculum we want to hold onto to. And then the second branch, which the other two have alluded to is this question around how presenting choreography continues to exist in the organization. And the next experiment of that will be we are inviting Primera Generacion Dance Collective, which is a Southern California based dance group to present their new work nostalgia pop in January 2025. And it's a quartet that collaboratively choreographs and offer their work and they're going to come to the bay and present that newest work about being first generation immigrants. So we're super excited about that. And also to extend the DDL question to other groups who are in collaborative choreographic practices,
Tim Cynova:
I really love that there is a solid practice around improvisation and considering it in the frame of leadership and better understanding how each of us calibrates differently with regards to uncertainty and ambiguity. Then how do we take that thing from over there and explore it over here in that frame and what do we learn along the way from that exploration. And speaking of learning, I'm curious, what do you think are the gems of learning here in your own distributed leadership exploration? When you distill down what you've done, what's the important learning for people to know and take away from it?
Rebecca Fitton:
Trying to figure out why in the studio dance collaboration looks a certain way, why that feeling is often so different than the way the administration of the dance field is done and trying to bridge those two chasms sometimes. How do we make those two things more equitable and more similar so that the ethos around both administration and choreography and making and being are more sympathetic and better support our ecosystem? There's something there that we're trying to get at.
Cherie Hill:
This is Cherie. I'll also add a learning moment for me is that our society doesn't necessarily support models like this. It doesn't necessarily support sharing leadership or collaboration in the way that it needs to be supported. And we've talked a little bit about how it's slower, our work is slower than the average pace of maybe a non-profit organization or company. And also it takes time to work through decisions. It takes time to work through planning things because there are more voices and we feel that's important. That means that we're spending more money as well because more people are getting paid to be a part of these conversations and these decisions, which also budgetarily I haven't seen be super supported yet in our field or in our society, unfortunately shared leadership, there's a lot that goes into it and I think people are attracted to the concept of it and maybe the outcomes of it, but we're still in a place where the funding for it needs to increase.
And something that came up in our conversation yesterday in a panel we had is that the labor is different. When you're working with multiple people the labor is different than just working isolated by yourself. There's a question around how do we compensate that labor? How do we make sure our staff and us as leaders that we are being taken care of, knowing that we are being asked to do more than the average person in a non-profit because of this model. I also feel like for Bridge Life Arts shared leadership, because we're very diverse, all of us are coming from different places and our values have to do with equity and anti-racism, is that we need to be involved in furthering our knowledge and training around equity and anti-racism, which is a whole other thing and whole other workshops and a whole other type of labor.
So you add that on top of what we're doing. This is a very expensive project. It's a very expensive experimentation and not just financially, but emotionally, mentally, and even physically at times. And so how can we as artists advocates and funders who want to create a better sustainable ecosystem for dance and for the arts, make sure that these type of experiments are well funded and supported so that we can continue doing this type of work.
Hope Mohr:
This is Hope. I think some folks think that implementing a shared leadership model, it's just a matter of you hire a consultant, you adjust a few job descriptions, you make some structural changes in the organization and boom, you're there. As Cherie was just describing, it's not just structural work, it's organizational culture work. It's very much about relationships, it's about values. It's a process. It takes a long time.
Tim Cynova:
I wrote a number of pieces while we were going through the shared leadership experiment at Fractured Atlas and I'm working on one that's reflecting on it a few years now looking back and having been asked by countless organizations about, "How do you do shared leadership?" My response these days is usually, "You probably shouldn't." And to unpack that just a little bit, usually I get a call when a CEO's leaving and there's three people on staff who want to propose a co-CEO model to the board. And I'm like, if you've never talked about and explored how power and decision-making and leadership show up in your organization, you probably shouldn't start with a co-CEO model. It likely won't be successful. Maybe you should explore decision-making processes like MOCA and Darcy or maybe think about building leader full organizations because starting with the CEO function right out of the gate is a complicated and often fraught way of approaching how do you share power in decision-making and leadership? Something I believe that more organizations should be doing.
In the recently published anthology "Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography" with editor Tonya Lockyer, Cherie and Hope, you along with your colleague Carla Quintero offered reflections in an essay titled "Embodying Equity Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership". That essay has been in the can for a bit at this point. So I'm curious, when organizations come to you and ask you about shared leadership these days, what do you typically advise them to do and how to think about it?
Rebecca Fitton:
This is Rebecca. I think my experience so far in the organization of folks coming to us is that it's been the folks in our community engagement residency. We, through that program, have a year long relationship with them. Most of the alumni of that program we are still in relationship with. And so we have this precedent of long-term relationship. And so when even new artists who come to the meetings with us and say, "Can we learn more about how you're doing these models?" There's already a precedent knowing that it's going to be durational and that they know because they've applied to be in the program and we've accepted them, and there's already been conversation there that there's already a buy-in, there's willingness to go in it for the long term. And so we tend to share at first the very simple MOCA manager, owner, consultant, helper, approver, or also Darcy, those are I think the first two spreadsheets that we share, but it is only after already having multiple conversations with artists and asking about their current infrastructural models.
I think the other two may be able to speak better to folks who are reaching out to us who don't have an existing relationship with the organization. But I will say with the CER artists, I can name several groups who are now alumni of the program who continue to reach out and say, "Hey, what's the latest update on this?" Or the panel that we had yesterday about navigating shared leadership, there were several alumni in the Zoom room who were still listening and still interested in how it's being evolved across organizations. So that's been nice. We kind of already have a built in process of relational durational work.
Cherie Hill:
Yeah, absolutely. This is Cherie. I'll also add, we have had organizations come to us and we have done just conversations with them or helps them think about our process in distributive leadership and shared leadership. And something that we continue to emphasize is we are not experts in this work. It is experimentational, we are learning and we are planning on being more structural around how we can assist organizations or artists in thinking about ways that they might implement some of the tools or strategies that we have in Bridge Life Arts. For us, it's not about us being experts and consultants. It's about us sharing our story. It's about us sharing our experience and saying, "This might be something that can help you. This is how it helped us," or "This is how it did not help us." To me, that's more about building community relationships and working together collaboratively to help versus us telling people, this is how you should do it, or this is the model that will work for you. Because we are all just in the experimentation process and I feel that is what we honestly can share with others.
Hope Mohr:
Since transitioning out of co-directorship about a year ago, I've been practicing as an attorney and my practice focuses on helping artists and arts organizations. And when I talk to folks who are interested in this kind of leadership shift, I think the most important thing I can do is simply listen to where the people are at. Because as Cherie and Rebecca have said the model needs to be emergent. It can't be imported from outside. The model needs to come from the people and the mission and the values of the organization. And so I listened to how much buy-in there is, what the capacity of the organization is, and then go from there. I really don't know any other way to do it.
Rebecca Fitton:
I'll just add briefly, maybe the place we also start is in that embodying shared leadership curriculum in which we invite others to move with us. Let's dance together. Especially because we mostly work with arts organizations. Those are the people in our community, and we say, "Have you moved the score of your organization? If you embody these questions, what emerges? Are you ready to truly share weight?" So I think that's been the joy of the curriculum too, and we hope to further share that in the future.
Tim Cynova:
Amazing and no surprise here, our time has flown by today and there's so much more we haven't even gotten to yet. Things that are really juicy, like board relations, equitable compensation, there's so much on this topic, and as we bring the plane, if we're landing on our conversation today, where do you each want to land it?
Rebecca Fitton:
Yes, to board and equitable compensation. We are in the middle of a year and maybe longer of figuring out how boards relate to our shared leadership model. That's maybe the last piece of this current cycle of figuring out shared leadership is really aligning the board's leadership model with the organization while also still, of course, maintaining the certain legal compliance structures that we have. So we have a lot of questions around can boards receive a form of compensation, whether that is financial or a resource share. We're looking at Recess, which is a arts organization in New York City that has recently been experimenting with that. We're wondering about the value of sticking with Robert's Roles, which is a decision-making process that doesn't align with our current staff and also comes from a military background. And so we're exploring different decision-making models that relate to that. And our pay equity, which is related to our MOCA and our decision-making matrix is a big point of conversation. What does it mean to compensate staff members who have leadership roles in their title or who don't, but still take on leadership roles? So there's a lot of work still to be done. We are going to go slow and we're going to keep talking about it. I'm excited to see what comes next.
Hope Mohr:
Thank you so much, Tim. This has been a really great conversation. I'll end just by uplifting that this work is a form of creative practice. I think framing it in that way has been really helpful for me in sticking with it and in feeling like it's sustainable and related to my humanness as an artist. And I think that framing encourages experimentation and fluid roles, both of which, I think, are conditions that support the practice of shared leadership. I just want to thank Cherie and Rebecca and Tim, it's been a great conversation and I'll pass it to Cherie.
Cherie Hill:
Thank you, Hope. And also I echo that. Thank you so much, Tim, for having us on. And I just want to invite anyone listening, if you are doing this type of work to reach out and connect, something that we talked about in our panel with other leaders in this model yesterday is that it can feel very isolating because it's still rare within our field to work in such deep collaboration and to recreate models like this. So please reach out to Bridge Life Arts, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to chat more and let's work on supporting each other to recreate a type of ecosystem that we really want to see.
Tim Cynova:
Cherie, Hope and Rebecca, thank you so much for all you've offered today. Thank you for your brilliance in this work. Thank you for your sharing orientation, and thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Rebecca Fitton:
Thanks so much for having us.
Hope Mohr:
Thank you.
Cherie Hill:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
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