Abe Flores

Resilient Arts Leadership from the Inside Out: The Arts Leaders Showing Us How

Posted by Abe Flores, Apr 25, 2016 0 comments


Abe Flores

Welcome to the annual Emerging Arts Leaders Blog Salon!  We asked over a dozen emerging leaders to reflect and respond to this year’s Arts Leadership Preconference theme: “Impact without Burnout: Resilient Arts Leadership from the Inside Out”. In the coming days you will read about the work of some of these leaders and their advice to the field.

To kick things off, I asked Beth Kanter, the lead facilitator and curator for this year’s Arts Leadership Preconference, four questions to help us define and better understand the concepts behind resilient leadership.

How do you define resilient leadership?

Leadership has been a topic of academic research and business school curriculum and executive education for over a century. There are as many definitions of leadership as those who are trying to define it. Definitions are continuously evolving and there are different styles, almost like religions.

I like to define the term “resilient leadership” as leaders understanding the difference between top down, command and control style of leadership and shared leadership styles. (Here’s an example of the different styles)

These two different styles are described as command and shared. Command is more top down. Shared is more participatory. You may need different styles in different situations, but shared models had positive impact on results and culture. When we share leadership, we’re all a heck of a lot smarter, more nimble and more capable in the long run, especially when that future is fraught with unknown and unforeseen challenges.  

What are the skills and qualities needed to become a resilient leader?

Resilient leaders possess a high degree of what Daniel Goldman calls “Emotional Intelligence.” Emotional Intelligence is made up four skills based on what you see and what you do with yourself and others:

Self-Awareness: Your ability to accurately perceive your own emotions and stay aware of them as they happen. This includes keeping on top of how you tend to respond to specific situations and people. 

Self-Management: Your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior. This means managing your emotional reactions to situations and people.

The last two skills focus more on your contact with other people:

Social Awareness: Your ability to pick up on emotions in other people and get what is really going. This often means understanding what other people are thinking and feeling even if you don’t feel the same way. 

Relationship Management: Your ability to use your awareness of your emotions and the emotions of others to manage interactions successfully. This includes clear communication and handling conflicts. 

In your new book, The Happy Healthy Non-Profit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout, you write about “self-care”, why should arts leaders be mindful of practicing self-care?

In the book, my co-author and I interviewed hundreds of leaders who work in the nonprofit sector, including arts leaders. We heard horror stories of people ending up in the hospital because of overwork and stress. This is not a sustainable work strategy–and that we have to shift our thinking and understand that taking care of self-cares is part of getting the work done.

A major step to avoiding the damage caused by stress is to take care of yourself first. A common analogy that highlights the importance of prioritizing self-care is the instruction you hear from flight attendants when you travel: “Put your oxygen mask on first, then help others.”

Translation: You’re no good to anyone–not your family, not your friends or community, not even your employer, co-workers or the people you want to serve–if you are depleted of energy and unable to function at your optimal levels.

Self-care is about revitalization, and it requires that you take a more holistic view of who you are and how you are, from head to toe, inside and out, to gauge where you’re lacking and where you’re full. You are more than your resume or work, more than your passions and mission. You bring far more to your organization than simply your knowledge, skills and abilities. You need to acknowledge and honor all aspects of yourself-Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual–and understand how ignoring yourself and failing to care for yourself opens the door to dysfunction and disease within you and within your organization. Self-care gives you the sustainable energy you need to do your mission-driven work.

You will be leading this year’s Arts Leadership Pre-convention, in addition to discussing self-care and burnout, there will be a focus on self-awareness and social-awareness, why are they important traits in a leader?

Self-awareness is your ability to accurately recognize your emotions as they happen and to understand your general tendencies for responding to different people and situations. Seeing ourselves as others see us and knowing what pushes our buttons. Our past and self-image play a large role in how we choose to interpret other people’s behavior and how we react. 

So, if we lead with a great deal of self-awareness than our emotions are not making decisions–we are being intentional and making the right choices.

The ability to recognize and understand the moods of other individuals and entire groups of people is what we call social awareness. This is done by asking questions, observing and understanding body language, using reflective listening skills and getting feedback. With strong social awareness skills, we can get people to rally behind an idea or get alignment.

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