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leadership Archives - ChangingMedia

Dec 13
0

If Not You, Who?

By | #SaveBmore, Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

This week has been an uplifting one for social and political activists and media hounds. The death of Nelson Mandela has brought together world leaders, pundits, politicians, and us common folk to celebrate the passage of a transformational leader.

I imagine that no one ever expected to see a Castro and a Bush standing together, yet the respect that people hold around the world for the life and works of Nelson Mandela brought them into the same room (or in this case, arena).

The power that is demonstrated in the aftermath of Mandela’s life — the celebration, the near universal belief in his goodness — is testament to the effect that a leader can have in engaging and motivating his or her people to do their own great things.

This week has also been a rewarding one for those in the ChangeEngine community. There has been great response to the weeklong campaign to discover what will “save” Baltimore, whether it needs to be saved, what that saving will look like to us, our neighbors, and the world, and how we as Baltimoreans might go about doing some saving ourselves.

My column here deals with issues related to public health on a macro scale with a micro focus, and so I meander from vaccination to food, from food to transport, to poverty, to pollution, to economics, and now to leadership.

One of my most psychologically taxing classes in public health school was centered around leadership. The professor brought in health care leaders and drilled us on the proper layout of a corporate leadership structure, including the role of board members and executives. I can speak from the authority of at least the upper left hand quadrant of the room that ‘bored’ members were what he had in front of him, and that the lesson was not sinking in. However, he was there to teach it, and so I was convinced that there was a reason.

Each of us has experienced a piece, a whiff of transformational leadership, perhaps on the job, in the classroom, on the playing field: A leader who transcends the role they are inhabiting and creates in each member of the team a desire to excel, as if some grand musical score is accompanying your every movement. This may happen for only a moment, or it may infuse your entire work experience (lucky you!), but the feelings and actions brought to the surface by this type of leadership allow us to be better than we are alone.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

 

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

 

 

 

 

 

How does this tie into public health, and more importantly this week, into saving Baltimore?

My sense is that Baltimore is a city that is reaching for success. The city government, neighborhood associations, the ChangeEngine bloggers, the urban gardeners, the foundations, the artists — everyone has a vision for a better Baltimore, and they each view it through their lens. Chris Merriam of Bikemore commented on the ChangeEngine Facebook page yesterday that what will save Baltimore is “Bike lanes. Lots and lots of bikelanes.” OK, so I agree with him, of course. See here, here, here, and here, oh, and here for evidence. But he (and I) are speaking from a cyclocentric point of view (although we would likely both agree that this has broad implications for health, wealth and society far beyond bikers). The Weinbergs, Stephanie Rollings Blake, Hasdai Westbrook (of ChangeEngine fame), and you all have different visions of a successful Baltimore.

Now despite the wealth inequalities, segregation, and disease burden here that I often write about, Baltimore is not South Africa. However, leadership that is empowering, vision-driven, and inclusive has the power to be transformative anywhere in the world, in any setting. I am not advocating for the ouster of the mayor; I think she’s probably doing fine. But is she a transformative leader? She has taken on a number of challenging projects that have great promise — more families in the city, a clean harbor, lower vacancy rates — but these efforts have not inspired a groundswell of concerted support and action. Perhaps that is not the role in this city for a transformational leader. “Bureaucrat” may sound like a dirty word, but bureaucracy is effective, reliable, and honest (when done correctly at least, Ms. Sheila Dixon, we’re looking at you…).

Perhaps instead the role needs to be taken up by others in that list I mentioned above, as Chris Merriam is doing in the biking community. His sheer force of will and passion drive others to work toward his cause, and to feel good about it.

Nominate a transformational leader, Baltimore (or wherever you are):

Who do you see bringing people together, challenging them to do their best and more by example? Who is using vision-driven empowerment to allow their colleagues to do more, do better, or with more grace? Who among your social or professional circles takes on that role? How can you emulate those techniques to generate even MORE positive growth in your particular arena?

Are you a champion of transformational change by leadership and example? If not you, who?

Feb 28
0

Avant-Garde Femmes

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | One Comment

When I opened my copy of The Baltimore Sun last week and saw the front-page headline “Walters Art Museum names new director,” I may have been the only subscriber to skip inside her home and announce a new wave of grrrl power.

The Walters, you see, has selected Julia Marciari-Alexander to replace Gary Vikan as its new executive director. When she starts on April 1st, she will be joining Charm City’s art sisterhood of Doreen Bolger (who has been the Baltimore Museum of Art’s director since 1998) and Rebecca A. Hoffberger (founder and director of the city’s American Visionary Art Museum). Which is to say, Baltimore’s three major art museums will be run by women, which I found to be rather remarkable. As in so many other fields and leadership roles, it’s not always been so.

It’s not even been two decades since art critic Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The glass in the glass ceiling for women in the museum profession remains stubbornly thick.”

Knight was writing in response to the news that Seattle Art Museum had named a female director, Mary Gardner Neill, and noted that she was “one of just three women currently holding the job of director in a major art museum in the United States” in 1994. (The other two were the sorely missed Anne d’Harnoncourt at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the outstanding Kathy Halbreich at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; d’Harnoncourt died in 2008 and Halbreich is now an associate director at the Museum of Modern Art. Neill married into the Gates family and resigned from her position at SAM in 2009.)

In 2006, the outlook was significantly more positive and Tyler Green wrote in the same paper,

Although women rarely ascend to the top of corporate America—just 1.9% of Fortune 1000 companies have female chief executives, according to Fortune magazine—female art museum directors have become commonplace.

That’s twelve years to go from a mere three directors at major art institutions to being “commonplace.”

And just earlier this year, the Association of Art Museum Directors announced that 43% of its member directors are now women. (It’s worth noting, however, that AAMD is a membership organization and therefore not representative of all art museums nationwide; it also has a strong women’s group which may inspire women directors, in particular, to seek membership.)

It is, still, however, relatively rare for women to be so strongly represented in a city’s major arts organizations. Seattle and Minneapolis remain avant-garde; in the former, the Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery are now all run by women and, in the latter, the same is true at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. Santa Fe’s art and cultural institutions are also strong in this light (New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of International Folk Art and Palace of the Governors are all run by women, but the city’s museum honoring the work and legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe is not).

I can’t say yet what the addition of Marciari-Alexander to the city’s art scene will mean (although John Lewis has some interesting thoughts on why she is a brave pick for the Walters), but I am inspired given the huge changes Vikan made at the Walters and the impact of Hoffberger (as the founder of AVAM) and Bolger (I can’t be the only one who misses her art blog!). I’m proud to see Baltimore join the ranks of Minneapolis and Seattle; I see the former as particularly inspirational given its innovative and wacky arts scene.

On a final note, I had to cut my grrl power parade short—and not just because the neighbors complained. In Green’s 2006 LAT piece, he also wrote:

That said, not one of the three flagship art museums in the United States—the Met, America’s greatest encyclopedic museum; the National Gallery of Art, the national art museum; or MoMA, the world’s greatest museum of 20th century art—has ever had a woman at the helm.

He wrote those words seven years ago, and they’re still true today.

IMAGE CREDIT. CC photo via Flickr.
Nov 08
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A Four Point Plan for the Next Four Years of Education Policy

By | Education | No Comments
  1. Decentralize Funding – Bloated bureaucracy and red tape at the district level creates unnecessary logjams at the school and classroom levels. As teachers and students move increasingly towards individualized and highly personalized teaching and learning, the system must decentralize decision-making about curriculum, funding, hiring, technology, professional development, and evaluation to the school and classroom level so that education professionals can make decisions that are appropriate for their school and students. In Baltimore, CEO of Public Schools Andres Alonso decentralized school funding and gave principals full autonomy over their school budgets. This allows principals to collaborate with teachers and the community to assess the needs of the school and prioritize funding dollars to provide the appropriate resources. Furthermore, by valuing every teacher salary in the budget at the mean cost to the district, this budgeting structure has completed eliminated Last-In-First-Out hiring practices.
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