On September 2, crews arrived at the Kennedy Center and took Joel Shapiro’s Blue off the lawn, where it had stood since 2019. The Center called the removal routine. Former curator Josef Palermo says Richard Grenell had told him a year earlier, in September 2025, to clear the outdoor art because President Trump wanted a new collection when the building reopened.

The next day, September 3, the public learned that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley had written to the Smithsonian on August 28. Federal agencies could stop lending artifacts, providing procurement help, and awarding discretionary grants. Agencies couldn’t support the Smithsonian “in good conscience,” they wrote, because of its “executive leadership and institutional ideology.”

Both are national cultural institutions in Washington. That distance protects you less than you think. The tools behind these events reach further. One binds any organization that takes a federal grant. Another would use tax-exempt status as a pressure point, and for most of us in this field that status is the whole basis of operating.

Read these as separate incidents and we lose. They are one campaign running one method: pressure the institution, and the work changes without anyone naming it.

The lesson of 1989

On May 18, 1989, Senator Alfonse D’Amato held up a reproduction of Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ on the Senate floor, called it “a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity,” and tore it up. Serrano had won a $15,000 fellowship, one of ten, from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, whose awards program the National Endowment for the Arts helped pay for.

Thirteen months later, NEA chairman John Frohnmayer vetoed four fellowships the agency’s own peer panels had approved. Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller. The debate over public money now had four names in it.

D’Amato had something to hold up. Audited financial statements from a regional theater gave him nothing to tear. Money had been moving toward organizations for years. After 1989 the argument hardened around them. Advocates made the public case for institutions, and more public money went through them.

In 1996, Congress cut the NEA from $162 million to $99 million and ended almost all direct grants to individual artists. Organizations remained eligible for project support. Congress also sent a larger share of the money through state and regional arts agencies.

After 1996, most artists seeking NEA support needed an organization or intermediary to approve the application first.

A survival strategy became a system

Through much of the 2000s, the NEA’s budget stayed below its early-1990s level, even before inflation. Arts advocates argued that public support strengthened communities and local economies. Those arguments helped preserve funding. They also made the organization the thing the field knew how to defend.

Many organizations expanded their fundraising teams and acquired or expanded facilities. That stability mattered. Buildings and collections serve the mission. The problem starts when organizations protect them year after year by cutting the people and programs that bring them to the public.

We had thirty years to notice. As institutions gained funding and visibility, an administration gained a short list of places to apply pressure. Nobody can review ten thousand artists working on their own terms. Institutions have addresses and boards.

We protect fixed costs and cut the work

Between 2023 and 2024, arts organizations reporting to DataArts cut personnel spending by 23 percent, artist payments by 11 percent, and the number of artists they paid by 18 percent. Staff counts reached a six-year low. The average organization went from 150 distinct programs to 83. Attendance ran the other way, up 13 percent for paid tickets and 22 percent for free.

DataArts notes that some organizations may have concentrated resources in fewer programs and fewer artists, paying higher rates. Defensible for one organization. Across the field, the totals still fell.

You can’t renegotiate debt service in March, and a lease runs its term. Artist fees and open positions move. Cut those for a few years and you have less ability to choose your own work or refuse when someone outside asks you to change it.

I cut what could move

When I couldn’t balance a budget, I went first to the costs I could actually change. Artist fees were among them, along with other program and personnel costs. Contracts and debt fixed much of the rest. I told myself the reductions would last one season. They lasted longer.

I thought I was protecting the organization. I was cutting the work public support exists to make possible.

The board and I called it prudent management. On the spreadsheet, artist fees and landscaping looked like the same kind of expense, and we treated them that way. We reviewed every budget line and never asked what the cuts did to the public purpose we described in every grant application I signed.

So I helped build this. I spent years cutting some of the people and programs that gave the organizations I led room to make independent choices.

Seventeen days

A public institution should explain how it spends taxpayer money. It should decide for itself how it presents history and culture. In March 2025, Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directed federal cultural sites to remove what it called improper ideology. That August, the White House opened a review of eight Smithsonian museums and ordered content changes within 120 days.

Every grantee should follow federal anti-discrimination law. Watch how far a condition reaches once someone attaches it.

The NEA certification covers DEI-related activity “regardless of its connection to your federal award,” in the agency’s own words. The August 28 letter uses the same body of law to challenge the Smithsonian’s leadership and ideology, and offers no public examples of the violations it alleges. On August 18, CBS reported that the IRS is weighing a new question on Form 990, the return every nonprofit files, asking whether any top official has a conviction from the past ten years for supporting terrorism, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, or theft. Nothing is final. Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University and former counsel to the Joint Committee on Taxation, said the change “goes directly to guilt by association,” and noted that no federal law stops a nonprofit from having a convicted felon on its board. Then on September 3 the Treasury Department proposed denying tax-exempt status to any school with a program the IRS finds racially discriminatory, reaching as many as 18,000 schools.

A grant condition already in force. Then, in seventeen days, a funding threat, a proposed disclosure question, and a challenge to tax-exempt status. Not one of them names a work of art.

Further down in the Times account, I.R.S. officials “have in recent weeks discussed creating a faster process for revoking tax-exempt status from nonprofits.” Not schools. Every one of us. Form 990 is our form too.

What independence requires

I’m writing to the people who run these organizations and to the boards that govern them. When one of these instruments reaches you, budgets you approved years ago will already have decided how much room you have to answer.

We called it a fight about free expression. The other side answered that nobody was censoring anyone, only declining to pay. That answer held. Then we argued that arts organizations mattered to their communities. That was true. It never decided anything. The fight was always about who decides. Frohnmayer overruled the agency’s own peer panels. Now the same question arrives at your board.

Many people in many places should be able to say yes to a piece of work. Markets shape what sells. Government controls appropriations, and private philanthropy concentrates power too. A democracy needs enough separate decisions that no single source of money or authority decides what the country gets to see.

Public policy should support artists directly, so they can work without first finding an institution to sponsor them. Congress largely removed that option from the NEA in 1996.

Individual grants drew the first attack, so restoring them rebuilds the target. That answers 1989. The four instruments in use now reach organizations. A certification binds whoever took the grant. You can’t revoke a tax exemption from someone who never had one, and an artist working on a fellowship files no Form 990.

Institutions still matter

Museums preserve collections across generations. Performing arts companies sustain repertoires by employing the people who know the work. That continuity requires institutions.

Stability that produces nothing has no claim on public money. Attendance and a balanced budget show that you survived the year. They say nothing about whether you can make the next thing, or refuse to change it when someone asks.

Put purpose next to the cut list

You can start now. The next time you balance a budget by cutting artist fees or program staff, put the mission statement next to the cut list. Have the minutes say what you cut and what you protected instead.

This budget reduces spending on artists and program work by X percent. The board chose to protect these fixed costs and will revisit whether that choice still serves the mission next year.

A hard year may require that decision. Writing it down puts the choice back in front of you twelve months later. If you make grants, ask what work this one makes possible and how widely it spreads the power to decide.

Americans for the Arts, the American Alliance of Museums, Theatre Communications Group, the League of American Orchestras, and every group that speaks for us should coordinate a response. These demands arrive one at a time, and we have agreed to answer them one at a time. That’s how they win a campaign one battle at a time. Fund a shared legal defense. Agree that no member signs a certification about its governance until every other member has seen it. Publish what the government asks each organization to change, every time.

I made those cuts for years. Put public money back in artists’ hands, and ask any institution that takes public support to show that its stability still produces work it chose itself.

A democracy needs a culture no single power can direct.

Over time, one employee can end up holding years of institutional knowledge, key relationships, and work that accumulated one budget cycle at a time. Their job can grow beyond what one replacement could reasonably do, and leaders can slip into denial, building every plan around the assumption that this person will still be there.

In my experience, most long-tenured employees share what they know and want the new leader to succeed. My own teams did that for my successor. They made the first six months easier than mine had been.

Arts consultant Tara Aesquivel inherited this when she became executive director of the American Youth Symphony. The senior employee had served as interim ED and held much of the organization’s work and access. Aesquivel spent her first months redistributing responsibilities and accounts, and the employee stayed long enough for the roles to be restructured. Aesquivel told me she was “terrified for those first six months or so.”

At first, you can’t always tell what you’ve inherited. The job may have become unreasonable. The employee may also have learned that being indispensable protects them from normal accountability. Often both are true.

Start making the organization less dependent on them. Their response will tell you more about what kind of problem you have.

Why leaders get trapped

The employee may have wanted your job or served as interim executive director. Or they may simply know people you don’t know yet, including board members and donors, and manage a team that has worked with them for years.

The other route into this is one you built yourself. Someone you hired five years ago was good at the job. They took on a little more each year, and now half the organization runs through them. The performance problems you’ve started noticing belong to the person you chose. Acting means explaining to a board that remembers you making the case for that hire.

In a university or another large parent institution, one employee may know how to move work through systems the leader is still learning. That knowledge is valuable. It can also make a leader afraid to act or delay building relationships themselves.

You can see the disruption before you’ve seen the cost of keeping the person: relationships that will need repair and work you don’t yet understand slowing down. That fear makes it easier to tolerate behavior you wouldn’t accept from someone you hired yourself.

Good managers earn loyalty, and their teams still understand that their responsibility is to the organization. The warning sign is when staff hear a decision from the executive director and check with their boss before acting. If that person disagrees, the decision stalls or gets reinterpreted. When that person is away for a week, the work waits.

If an employee teaches staff to treat the executive director’s decisions as provisional, they’ve created a second line of authority. The same is true when they undermine decisions after the fact. Once personal loyalty starts overriding responsibility to the organization, the workload has stopped being the whole explanation.

Constant resistance exhausts a new leader. Every proposed change draws another objection. The employee may tell you that you don’t understand the organization. Later, staff hear that your idea is naive. After enough of this, you can start doubting your own judgment.

The same person is often warm and helpful in public. Board members like them, and colleagues see the one who always knows how to solve the problem. You may be the only person who sees the rest of it.

You start managing around them. You give them less room to decide and share less information. They notice. Their resistance grows, and you pull back further.

The employee may deny a conversation you remember clearly or give staff a different account of a decision you already made. Soon you’re spending more time arguing about what happened than deciding what should happen next.

Young and first-time leaders have less room to make this call. Women and people of color in these jobs may face harsher judgments when they change an inherited team or remove someone long-tenured. That pressure can make waiting easier.

I waited five years

I kept a senior employee five years longer than I should have.

The workload was real. So were the performance problems. The person held relationships I didn’t want to lose and parts of the operation I was afraid we couldn’t replace quickly. Every time I considered acting, another season or deadline made the timing feel wrong.

So I called it a timing problem. Five years later, the timing was still bad.

The cost showed up in the rest of the staff. Good people became frustrated because they heard one thing from me and another from their boss. Some left. When I proposed changes, this person undermined them in conversations I wasn’t part of. Staff learned that a decision from me could still be reopened after the meeting.

My delay allowed two lines of authority to develop. When I raised a performance problem, the conversation quickly returned to how stretched the person was. The workload was real, and I let that fact end the discussion. I stopped separating an unreasonable job from missed deadlines and resistance to feedback.

By then the employee had good reason to believe I wasn’t going to fire them. They’d read me correctly. I’d taught a direct report that I was more afraid of losing them than they were of losing the job.

What waiting does

Waiting changes the organization around the employee.

People notice what you don’t enforce. Deadlines and feedback become negotiable, and your decisions lose force. I was so focused on what might break if this person left that I paid too little attention to what was already breaking because they stayed.

The employee becomes harder to replace. More relationships and knowledge stay with them because the organization keeps routing work through them. The transition you fear gets harder while you wait.

The organization helped create the dependence

Years of budget decisions often create this person. A vacant job disappears and the work goes to whoever can handle it. A system needs attention, so one employee learns it. Board members start calling that person directly because they answer quickly. The job can outgrow the title and pay, and the employee may have been passed over for promotion after doing pieces of a larger role for years.

Fix what’s unfair in the role or pay, and stop work that no longer needs to happen. Fair treatment doesn’t require accepting missed expectations or a second line of authority.

Make the organization less dependent

I never tried this. In five years I never moved one relationship out of that person’s hands. So I never found out how much of the behavior came from an unreasonable workload and how much came from something else. I argued about missed deadlines instead.

Start moving knowledge and relationships out of one person’s hands while they’re still there. Put donor history and key contacts into shared systems, and bring another staff member into important external relationships. Make sure passwords and administrative access belong to the institution.

If the organization is part of a larger parent institution, make sure more than one person knows how to move work through its internal systems. That knowledge can’t remain with one employee.

Move some responsibilities to other people. Someone else will probably do the work more slowly at first. That’s part of making the organization less dependent.

An employee who has been doing too much may welcome the change. That response tells you the job needs to be rebuilt. If the employee resists documenting what they know or sharing relationships and responsibilities after you’ve addressed the job itself, the workload is no longer the whole problem. The organization’s dependence has become part of their power.

Then decide whether they stay

If the behavior continues after you’ve fixed what is unfair about the job and reduced the dependency, the employee should not stay. Manage the person as you would any other direct report, with clear feedback, expectations, and the HR process your organization requires.

Work may slow and some relationships may need repair. The replacement job will cover only part of what the employee was doing; the rest will move to other staff or stop. Document it before the transition so you know which.

Once the organization can function without them, you can judge the behavior on its own.

I left before I made the decision, and my successor eventually fired the person. I still don’t know whether the employee would have behaved differently in a manageable job, because I never made it one. I regret leaving a new leader to make the decision I’d avoided.

This essay is mainly for boards and leaders of small and midsize nonprofits, where board member requests often land directly on the executive director or a small staff.

One of you sends an email. A friend’s daughter is graduating in May and thinking about arts management. Would your executive director have twenty minutes to talk with her? The note is warm and ends with a thank you.

Your executive director says yes. It takes a few tries to connect. The twenty-minute conversation runs much longer, and afterward she makes a couple of introductions.

Later you ask how it went. She tells you it was a pleasure.

To you it looked like a small favor, and she treated it that way too. You didn’t call it a personal favor, and neither did she, which is often part of the problem. You were trying to be generous. She did the work.

Now do it twenty times.

The arithmetic

Another board member wants four tickets to the Saturday performance, sold out since March, for a friend coming in from out of town. Someone needs a call before the meeting because the packet arrived Thursday and reading it felt like homework. A committee volunteer wants staff to draft the script for his agenda item. Somebody sends an article over and asks what the organization plans to do about it.

Each one makes sense by itself. Put twenty of them into one organization and you’ve built a second job.

The board never approved that job. It isn’t in the budget or in anyone’s contract. It can show up later in the executive director’s evaluation as work she didn’t finish.

Large institutions sometimes employ a board liaison, because the requests add up to real work. Smaller organizations rarely can, so the executive director, executive assistant, or development staff absorb those requests on top of the jobs they already have. The organization pays for it either way.

I see this often in longstanding cultural institutions: art museums, ballet and opera companies, symphony orchestras. Many have deep traditions of board involvement and personal access, and those traditions blur the line between governing the institution and expecting it to respond to you.

The power difference can be sharper in a small organization. Board members have direct access to a handful of people, with little structure in between, and a request from a board member can carry more weight than the person sending it realizes.

Some requests are part of the job. She should brief you before a donor call and hear your concern about a weak program while there’s still time to act. The test is whether a request moves the institution forward or moves your own errand onto staff.

Why she says yes

The board hires and evaluates the executive director as a body. Unless the board has formally delegated a role, an individual board member does not direct staff. You govern alongside your fellow board members. Supervising her one-on-one isn’t your role, and nobody on staff is your assistant.

You don’t feel like her supervisor when you ask for twenty minutes. You feel like a friend of the institution asking a small favor. She sees a request from someone who has a say in how the board evaluates her, and in what it pays her.

In my experience, most board members don’t believe they’re taking advantage. They believe the ask will help the organization, and that belief is part of the trouble because it makes the pressure and the staff time harder to see.

So she says yes. If she can’t do exactly what you asked, she offers another way. “No rush” or “only if it’s easy” still leaves her deciding whether a no is safe.

Sometimes a board member raises an idea with the chair or at a board meeting and doesn’t get support. Instead of letting it go, they take it to the executive director or the development director and press harder than they did with their peers.

A fellow board member can say no as a peer. A staff member has to say no to someone with power over the organization. If the board doesn’t support an idea, the board member shouldn’t take it to the executive director and ask her to do it anyway.

Board leaders often describe their work as volunteer service. They’re right. Board members choose when to volunteer. An executive director may feel she has to answer when a board member calls, because that board member may help decide how the board evaluates her and whether she keeps the job.

Young and first-time executive directors, women executive directors, and executive directors of color may face harsher judgments for setting the same boundary a predecessor set without comment.

I have been the executive director and the board member

At thirty-one, as president of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, I didn’t believe I could say no to any board member. The chair sometimes turned up without warning and expected me to clear my calendar and see him within ten minutes. When I didn’t, he got angry. I also thought I should be grateful to have the job at all.

Years later, on boards myself, I caught myself repeating the behavior I used to complain about.

One Sunday around ten at night I sent an executive director a thought I’d had earlier that day. It wasn’t urgent, and I said so in the note, as though that removed the pressure. She answered in four minutes, and I took that as proof she was responsive. I never asked what she’d put aside to answer me. The next morning I didn’t apologize. I sent her three more that month.

I’ve also led retreats where I urged board members to get involved without explaining the boundaries of that involvement.

Eight seats

A board member asks for eight gala seats for friends he calls prospective donors. The request arrives three days out, after staff finalized the seating chart and gave the caterer a headcount.

If the organization could have sold those eight seats at a thousand dollars each, the request put eight thousand dollars of revenue at risk, plus the catering. The board later evaluates the executive director on the gala’s net. A board member put that result at risk privately, then helped evaluate it.

Cultivation seats are real fundraising when development budgets for them and follows up with the guests. If the seats aren’t part of a cultivation plan, buy the table and make the ask yourself.

A studio

The same boundary applies to what the institution owns. At one arts organization I worked with, the board chair used free workspace the nonprofit had set aside for artists. Every month he used it, the organization had one less studio available for the artists the program was created to serve.

Protecting that resource was part of his responsibility as chair. He was using it himself.

Board members with greater means may also miss what smaller requests cost. “Book it and expense it” assumes an employee can put the charge on a personal card and wait six weeks for reimbursement, which a development coordinator two years out of school may not be able to do. A Saturday site visit that feels social to a board member can cost somebody part of a weekend.

The one time she declines

I watched an executive director decline a board member’s request kindly and offer an alternative. Months later, when the board discussed her contract, the same board member called her difficult.

He remembered the refusal. Every earlier yes had looked to him like part of the job. The board had no regular way to see everything else she had handled.

A board that remembers the refusal and forgets the requests teaches an executive director to keep saying yes.

What to do

Early on, the chair and the executive director should agree on where board member requests go, what counts as urgent, when evening and weekend contact is appropriate, and which staff members board members may reach directly. Individual board members don’t pick staff members and start assigning them work. If the board declines an idea, the board member shouldn’t take it to the executive director and ask her to do it anyway. The chair should address board members who ignore the process.

The chair and executive director should agree which requests need discussion before staff act, especially when they take significant staff time, spend the organization’s money, or use something it owns. In regular check-ins, the chair should ask how much time board member requests are taking and what work they’re displacing, while the executive director is still in the job. The board should hear the answer before it evaluates her.

Before you send a request, decide whether the institution benefits. Handle the personal ones yourself. Writing “no rush” doesn’t turn a private favor into board work.

If you want to help a young person into this field, give her your own hour. You know people too.

The young woman got a long conversation and two introductions. You never saw what the executive director set aside to make that happen.

I thought I was asking for a small favor when I emailed at ten on a Sunday night.

The board serves the institution. The institution does not exist to serve the needs of its board members.

How leadership fails

A leader can stop leading well long before anyone says so. Your boss puts off a decision, or changes it from one week to the next. They see a new funder and make it the default strategy by Friday. Sometimes they stop doing the job altogether, and the person or board responsible for dealing with it does nothing. Staff chase each new request because your boss keeps changing priorities and hasn’t said what matters most.

The person above you still has authority even when they aren’t leading well. Staff keep the work moving, and they still have choices to make.

Claiming agency

When you can’t rely on direction from the top, the decisions you can make matter more. That can mean a program officer keeping a grantee relationship alive through a year without an executive vice president, or an annual fund manager returning the calls a major gifts officer has stopped taking.

Your boss tables a decision once, then a second time. By the third month, the team leaves it off the agenda because they expect the boss to avoid it again.

The people I’ve watched handle this well narrowed their attention to the part of the work that was actually theirs. They stopped sending questions upward that they could settle themselves. When colleagues asked where things stood, they gave an answer instead of a status report. When the latest opportunity showed up, they restated the plan.

Working with an arts organization recently, I asked a group of staff what they wanted it to be known for in five years. Their answers didn’t match. Each one made sense on its own, but each person was making decisions from a different picture of the future. They could only decide well on their own if someone above them had said plainly where the place was going.

Managers also tell people to focus on what they control while leaving the larger problem untouched. That advice can protect the judgment of someone with little formal power. A leader who could actually fix it has a different responsibility.

Make the decisions you own and let colleagues know what you’ve decided so they aren’t guessing. Tell the person above you what the problem is at least once, in language they can’t file as a status update. We’ve changed direction four times since March. I can’t tell my team what we’re building, and two of them are interviewing elsewhere. Too many people skip that conversation, then spend years explaining to themselves why it wouldn’t have mattered.

Put commitments to people outside the organization in writing. When leadership becomes unreliable, organizations often break promises to artists and grantees first, and neither group has anyone inside to call.

The constraint is real

Plenty of people can’t act freely. Some stay because they need the paycheck. Others can’t put a medical procedure at risk to make a point about how the place is run. They don’t owe anyone an explanation.

A boss who sees initiative as a threat calls someone difficult for making a decision on their own, then passes them over. Some end up doing two jobs on one salary until they burn out. I’m not going to talk anyone out of weighing that.

People in nonprofit organizations often stay because they care about the mission. They keep programs running through years when there isn’t enough money. That same commitment can keep capable people in place long after they’ve stopped believing anything will change.

You spend a year telling yourself the situation is temporary, then another one. The skills you aren’t using go stale. If you can absorb the risk, use the authority you have.

I have also been the problem

I’d see an opportunity and convince myself we should pursue it. Sometimes that was the right call. Other times I wanted the opportunity first and came up with the reasons afterward. By the time I explained them to anyone else, I had usually convinced myself too.

What I failed to do was explain the decision to the people whose work I had just changed. The reasoning was clear in my head, so I assumed everyone else could see it. They couldn’t. From where they sat, I had shifted priorities again. I had whipsawed them.

I also believed I had to be the one setting the vision. I’d name the future and rally people around it. If they didn’t follow, I’d say it again and again until they did. Then I’d move on. Too much depended on my attention.

A vision only matters if other people can use it to make choices when you aren’t in the room. They’ll change it, sometimes beyond recognition.

The leaders I’ve worked with who trusted other people’s judgment gave them real decisions to make, including ones that could go badly. People get better at their work when they know what they can decide without asking. Leaders who make every important decision themselves teach everyone else to wait for them, then use that waiting as proof they were needed.

Leaders who keep changing direction teach the same lesson a different way. Staff start treating every new priority as temporary, and they stop trusting standards their bosses ignore without consequence.

People who spend enough time working that way can stop trusting their own judgment. Claiming agency means continuing to use your judgment and knowing which problems you can actually do something about.

When covering for your boss hides the problem

A capable deputy who quietly covers for an absent director can protect the staff from the immediate consequences. If the deputy keeps the arrangement working, the board has one more reason to postpone a conversation it already knows it needs to have. Eventually your competence protects the dysfunction.

Two questions tell me whether I’m helping the work or enabling the problem. Has anything you put in place over the last year lasted once your boss had a chance to change it? Is your competence making the dysfunction easier to live with?

I answered the second question wrong once, for about three years. I kept an arrangement working well enough that the board could avoid confronting it, and I told myself the staff were better off for it.

I could have kept the work moving and still let the board see the size of the gap. Every month I kept the arrangement working, the board ignored a staffing failure, and I never told them plainly how much I was covering. I’d have told anyone else to tell the board exactly how much they were covering.

When I was thirty-five, I waited for someone else to ask those questions. I should have asked them myself.

So board recruitment comes down to somebody’s address book, and the people doing the naming pull from their own lives: the couple from the country club, the woman two seats down who has had the same subscription for years, a wealthy neighbor who seems to like the arts, or maybe even a new corporate executive who moved into town. Then the board looks around three years later at roughly the same kind of person it started with and calls it a pipeline problem. Calling it a pipeline problem suggests the talent isn’t ready yet, that if you give the field another decade the candidates will be there. It’s a comfortable story because it puts the problem outside the organization and somewhere in the future. The candidates are here now. What we built is a search that can only find the ones we’ve already had dinner with.

I’m describing independent nonprofits with self-perpetuating boards, where sitting members choose the next members. Organizations whose seats get appointed by a city or a university work differently, and I’m leaving them out. The people who would most change your board sit outside the circles those names come from, and they aren’t being rejected. They never come up.

The problem is where we’re looking

Read the requirements out loud sometime. Someone with money, someone free in the middle of a weekday, someone with standing in the community who won’t make the meetings harder than they already are.

That’s a description of the people already serving.

If the same few address books keep producing the names, it shouldn’t surprise us when the same kinds of people keep coming up. We ask the same people to name candidates from the same circles, then treat the result as proof that nobody else is available. But count the people nearby who run a community organization, manage a real budget, sit on a school board, or have negotiated with the county and won, and even in a small town that list runs longer than anything your current board can produce from memory. Half the town knows the woman who runs the food pantry, and she has never once come up as a board candidate, because she doesn’t look like what comes to mind when the board pictures a board member.

This applies just as much to an organization with three board members and no candidates, where you don’t have a selectivity problem at all. You have the same visibility problem, and it’s why the list of people to ask ran out after eleven names.

And this matters because of what boards actually do. For most independent nonprofits the board hires the executive director, approves the budget, and decides how much risk the institution will take, and even where board members are also running the box office and stacking chairs after the show, they hold that authority. It gets handed to somebody in a phone call nobody thinks of as a decision, even though we understand perfectly well in the arts that the composition of an ensemble shapes what the ensemble can do. You wouldn’t program a season without asking who’s in the room to play it. Almost none of that care reaches the board.

Find where the names come from

The candidate list usually begins before the formal process does, when a chair and an executive director talk through who might be ready. On a larger board, several people pass those names along before a committee sees them, which makes a conversation look like a search. But where the meeting happens matters less than who gets to name people and whose life those names come out of. The people who think they’re choosing a slate are working from a list two people settled weeks earlier on the phone, which is why you can widen the committee and change nothing as long as the same people still supply the names.

Founder boards show this most clearly. One person started the organization and recruited every director personally, so if you ask who generates names the answer is one word. She isn’t hoarding anything; she’s the only one who was ever asked. It works for years, and because nothing breaks, nobody notices there is no naming process at all.

People we know arrive already vouched for, while people we don’t know have to prove themselves in a room that has already decided what a board member looks like. There’s also a preference nobody says out loud, which is that most of us would rather serve alongside someone we expect to get along with, or at least someone already vetted by a person we trust. That’s an ordinary thing to want, and it’s part of why the pull toward the familiar is so hard to argue with in the room. Social circles sort by income, race, neighborhood, school, and generations of habit about where people live and who they know. Recruit inside them and you reproduce them. Most boards don’t set out to create a homogeneous room; they inherit one from the address books they started with.

I’ve watched nominating committees spend two full meetings on a candidate’s giving history and eleven minutes on what the person actually thinks, and on a small board that imbalance fits inside a single phone call. We ask for bios but rarely ask what someone believes about what we do. Plenty of boards already know the room is too narrow, but coming up with names is genuinely hard and the usual advice is to run a search they can’t afford or expand a network they don’t know how to expand.

The job description nobody wrote

Board service comes with requirements that appear in no document. Be retired, self-employed, or senior enough that the meeting hour is yours to give away. Get yourself to a building forty minutes away and absorb the cost and carry enough disposable income that the expected gift is a decision rather than an impossibility. Nobody wrote that down, but boards enforce it anyway through the meeting calendar, the give-or-get that appears in no bylaw, committee work that assumes a flexible job, and the absence of compensation for time, childcare, or travel. Those conditions narrow who can serve before any recruitment strategy has a chance to matter, which is how an organization spends four years talking earnestly about who’s missing from the table while the composition barely moves.

The giving expectation deserves particular honesty, because undercapitalized organizations recruit wealth for a reason. The alternative is a June deficit and a July layoff, and for many small organizations board giving is one of the few sources of unrestricted money in the building. That calculation is real. But if wealth is a requirement, name it as one, or separate the fundraising expectation from the qualifications for a governing seat. The capacity to write a large check is valuable to the institution, and it tells you close to nothing about someone’s judgment.

Stop first

Most of what follows costs nothing and can start at the next meeting. The first change is to open up how the list gets made, before sitting members have effectively chosen their successors or two people have already settled the candidates. The profile still matters, but it only tells you what the board needs; it cannot produce the people who might meet it.

Change who generates the names

The usual reforms aim at the search: post the openings, build a matrix, hold listening sessions, partner with community organizations. It’s all worth doing, and it all costs money and staff time, which is why organizations with neither fall back on the circles they already have. The cheaper move happens earlier, and it’s to widen who gets to generate names before you widen the board. Your bylaws still govern who formally nominates and elects directors, but that doesn’t mean directors have to be the only people generating names.

On a board of four, one outside person can change the whole list, and on a board of forty it takes several people or a standing group, but the test is the same at both ends. Does the process now reach people the current board could not have produced on its own? That might mean a community leader or a staff member close to the daily work. It could also be someone who has lived with the consequences of the board’s decisions, whether as a participant, parent, or artist. Bring them into the naming itself, knowing that the first meeting will be uncomfortable because names will surface that half the table doesn’t recognize. That’s the point. Once unfamiliar names are in serious contention, the circle has already widened.

None of that helps if there is nowhere to put anyone. A wider search with no open seats produces a longer list of people you still can’t appoint. On large boards, rotation and term limits make recruitment routine; on tiny or founder-led boards, succession has to start much earlier. And once someone joins, give them real authority, because widening the invitation while leaving power with the people who always had it defeats the point.

What this doesn’t fix

Widening the search improves visibility, and availability is a separate problem. You can surface a candidate the old process would never have found and still lose her, because the board meets at an hour that suits the people already on it, expects a gift she can’t make, or assumes unpaid hours she doesn’t have. The name existed. The conditions of service ruled her out. Meeting times, giving expectations, childcare, transportation, and uncompensated labor still narrow who can say yes, and finding people is one problem while building conditions where they can serve is another.

We ask people to name candidates and they do the only thing anyone can do, which is look through their own lives. Whatever those lives look like, that’s what the board will look like. Change who’s doing the naming and different people become visible.

Tasks tell you what happened. They rarely tell you why people made the choices that produced it. An engagement manager starts a community partner conversation months before there’s anything to ask for, because asking first has cost the organization trust before. A producer moves an artist’s dates because the residency falls apart otherwise. The front-of-house manager rewrites the accessibility plan after watching a disabled visitor give up and leave.

Each one contains a judgment about what the institution should protect, change, or become. These judgments are made close to the work, usually after somebody hits a problem nobody planned for. A program is the answer written on the page. Underneath it are the assumptions, trade-offs, and values that produced it. Much of that reasoning is never written down. It stays in people’s heads, shaping the work where no one else can examine it.

And it’s nobody’s job to go get it.

So those decisions are rarely compared. Nobody sets them side by side and decides which ones the place will keep on purpose. Something else decides instead. A grant agreement decides what gets done. A meeting’s end time decides what stays unfinished. Anyone who cannot see the reasoning will supply an explanation of their own.

How it goes missing

I did this from the top of an organization for years.

I programmed seasons and rarely explained how. Staff, board, audiences filled in the blank with the easiest answer available: this is what Emil likes.

We often programmed hard contemporary work. Some of it lost money on purpose, and I never said that out loud. Because I did not explain why a commission mattered, others could see only vanity and the possibility of a New York Times review. What I had not said was that a commission gave an artist time and support to pursue an idea before anyone knew whether it would hold. The losses read as bad judgment. A half-full house at a world premiere looked like no demand, even when it was the right outcome. I spent years defending individual performances instead of explaining what the programming was trying to accomplish.

Every year I was balancing artistic ambition against ticket income and trying to make the season hold together well enough that it meant more than a calendar of performances. The thinking was real. For years I didn’t write any of it down.

The organization had a programming strategy anyway. The working version was my taste, described by people who had never seen the decisions behind it. Staff learned to guess what I would approve instead of knowing what the season was for. The board argued about individual choices without seeing the shape they belonged to.

I used to ask staff how we could move from a culture organized around tasks to one organized around intentions. Instead of your to-do list, I would say, bring me your why-and-what-for list. I never brought mine.

Strategy? We don’t have time for that

I’ve spent years on the funding side too, which is where you hear the version nobody writes down.

Small organizations, barely staffed, tell me one of two things. Either strategy is a document produced for a funder with little connection to the work. Or they say it plainly: we don’t have the time or the capacity for that.

So I ask something smaller. How does your marketing assistant decide which communities to engage for a performance? How does whoever runs your social accounts decide what to post about next month’s exhibition?

The answer is usually some version of: I’m not sure. It seems to work.

It probably does work, which is why nobody has had to examine it. Somebody has a working theory about who shows up and why, and it produces decisions every week, but it has no named author, no record, and no way to be questioned or handed to the next person.

In a three-person organization the raw material is the same, and all of it can disappear with one departure. That organization does not need a smaller version of a large institution’s planning process. It needs a simple way to capture why its people make decisions.

Where this pays off

The first audience for this reasoning is the staff doing the work. Making it visible shows what the organization has been protecting and what it has been trying to change. Staff who can see one another’s reasoning are more likely to make decisions that fit together. It also answers something most staff carry quietly. How does what I do all day connect to what this place says it is for? A mission statement rarely answers that on its own. The reasoning between the mission and the daily work is what closes the gap.

Leaders get a basis for what to fund and what to measure. Boards and funders have less reason to guess at intention when the organization explains it clearly. This is a habit rather than an event. Planning is one place it gets used, and not the most frequent one.

A practice nobody owned

In one museum planning process, I asked staff and board to name what the place already does, and what they’d changed about it over time.

Several people described the same practice without comparing notes. The museum gave artists an early institutional platform and trusted emerging curators with substantial opportunities, supporting them closely through the process. The reasoning was already in the room and had been for years. The task was to put it into shared language and give the institution a chance to choose it deliberately. When I put that language back in front of them, everyone recognized it.

Then the room moved on. No one was assigned responsibility for protecting the practice or the conditions it required. It stayed inside the judgments of the people already doing it. The room could see it now. That did not protect it.

That same museum had built up a lot of work outside its own area. In one conversation, the reach was the mission, proof of who they meant to serve. In another, it was where the funding was, tied to particular communities. Both were honest. Nobody had put them side by side.

A mission statement says what matters, broadly. A grant agreement says where you’ll be, what it pays for, and when the report is due. The specific one usually wins.

What it costs

When budgets tighten, work nobody can explain becomes easy to cut. A program with audience numbers and a funder attached will usually prevail over a practice that lives in somebody’s judgment, without anyone having to argue against that practice out loud. The reasoning also leaves with the person carrying it. Whoever comes next gets a list of shows and partnerships with no account of the decisions behind them, and starts rebuilding what the place already knew.

Then there’s the money. Boards approve what they can describe, and donors give to whatever version makes sense to them. When the clearest account of an institution lives in a grant report, that is what gets funded. You can end up funded for the version you can describe and underfunded where the organization is learning. A budget can only protect what leaders can name and explain.

Measurement goes the same way. When the intended change stays private, the easiest numbers become the measures by default. Attendance and revenue may matter, but they cannot tell you whether an artist took a real risk, a partnership gained trust, or a visitor left thinking differently. An organization ends up judging itself by whatever its ticketing system happens to count.

The deeper damage begins when an outside explanation comes back into the organization and starts changing decisions. A trustee dismisses a program as personal taste. A funder reads a change in geography as mission drift. Leadership changes the language to answer the criticism. Over time, the priorities can move too. A place can spend years being steered by a version of itself nobody inside recognizes.

Why it stays unwritten

Time, mostly. An exhibition opens and the next installation starts. Development goes from the event to the report to the next grant deadline without a break. A deadline says exactly when. Reflection says whenever there is room. The one with the date on it wins.

The other reason is less comfortable. Once you write an intention down, somebody can check it. A board can ask whether the work did what you said it would. Put the mission explanation next to the money explanation and you’ve forced a conversation everybody can avoid by keeping them in separate rooms.

Ask a different question

Start from what’s already there.

In planning work I ask staff to name their own practices, the things the organization already does and would do again next year without anyone assigning them.

This changes how mission and values are used. Most planning treats them as the starting point and works down to priorities and tactics. Put them next to what the organization actually does and they become a test that runs both ways. Where practice contradicts stated purpose, the organization has to decide which one changes. Where practice reveals something the purpose never claimed, the purpose may be too small. Neither tells the organization enough until it has been checked against the other.

Ask what staff changed this year and why. A change has a cause and a date, which is why people answer right away. Ask the same person to describe the strategy and you will get the mission statement recited back. It also helps that a change is something that happened rather than a choice they might be asked to defend. Put the answers next to each other.

When people in different parts of the organization describe the same choice in different words, the place has learned something without naming it. When two people close to the work have made opposite choices, the institution has been living with the contradiction, and the unmade choice has been running things.

There is a real objection. Starting from existing practice can become a way to avoid choosing. Collecting reasoning is pleasant work. Ending a program people believe in is not. A process that stops at collection may produce understanding, but it has not yet produced a choice.

I am not the first to argue that strategy grows from repeated practice. In Emergent Strategy (2017), adrienne maree brown writes that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. Henry Mintzberg made a related argument in “Crafting Strategy” (1987), where strategies grow like weeds in a garden and a leader has to recognize the ones that have taken root. But practice alone does not reveal why people made those choices or whether the institution should keep them. The reasoning still has to be made visible, and someone has to decide what to keep.

Once the practices are visible, ask what the organization is trying to protect or change. Otherwise, people can rank activities but cannot say what any of them are for.

Somebody still has to choose

You’ll turn up more than you can fund. Agreement won’t sort it, because organizations agree on habits too. Ask: If it stopped, would the organization be diminished or simply less busy? Some activities could end without changing what the organization fundamentally is. Others are so central that the organization would rebuild them if they disappeared.

Someone with authority has to decide which practices will guide the organization, which need correcting, and which should end. The decision has to land in the budget and on the calendar, and it has to stick the first time honoring it is inconvenient.

Be careful how you claim it. Funding a practice and formalizing it are different moves. Some valuable work depends on discretion and enough room to make mistakes alongside an artist, and deliverables can destroy exactly those conditions. Sometimes the better choice is to fund the time, trust, and discretion that let the practice continue rather than turning it into a formal program.

A small record that people maintain can be more useful than a strategic plan nobody revisits. For many organizations, the lightest workable method is one paragraph before the work and one after it. Before a major program, write what you expect it to change and why you chose this approach. Afterward, write what actually changed and what you would do differently. Give one person responsibility for keeping those accounts available across departments and leadership transitions.

Something has to give way in a full week. An understaffed organization has to decide that preserving its reasoning matters more than one more task. That decision is part of the strategy.

Say it until you’re sick of it

Deciding is the middle of the job. The last part is saying it the same way long enough that it lands.

This is where it usually comes apart. An organization arrives at something true about itself, puts it in the plan, then writes a different sentence in the next grant application because the guidelines seemed to want one. The board hears one version and the funder gets another, and everybody outside goes back to guessing, which is where this started.

Consistency is boring from the inside. You will be tired of the reasoning before most people outside have heard it twice. Repeating the calendar communicates activity. It does not explain why one program follows another or what the organization is trying to accomplish across them. Use the same explanation with the board, funders, artists, and staff. The wording can change across audiences as long as the reasoning and values stay recognizable. Over time, that consistency creates fluency. Staff, trustees, funders, artists, and partners begin to understand how the organization makes choices rather than judging every program as an isolated event. Then people can hold the organization to what it said.

What I missed

I got this wrong for most of my career running arts organizations, and then I got half of it right.

Later I started writing the season down before it existed. My season plans had been budgets with a calendar attached. The new plans said what we were trying to accomplish and named the throughline, sometimes a single question the programming was pursuing. Staff could see it, and the board could argue with it. A season became a position I had taken.

That fixed the front end. Nobody ever went back. We wrote what we meant to do and never wrote what happened to it, where the throughline held and where it snapped, which artist changed the question halfway through. The plan sat in a file, accurate about the intention and silent about everything the intention ran into. The learning stayed in my head the way it always had, and it left when I did. A plan records what leaders intended to do. The institution also needs a record of what the work taught it.

When the reasoning stays private, other explanations move into that space. Funders, deadlines, and outside interpretations arrive in specific language, with money and dates attached.

Make the reasoning behind the work visible, or someone else will decide what the work means.

Dear Mr. Taylor,

This week the President ordered signs placed on the sidewalk outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. A class on a school trip will read a government warning about the building before they walk into it. The order directs the signs to warn of “ideological capture” and point visitors toward sources the White House considers accurate. Two people familiar with your work in Washington told The Times that they heard you say you were involved. The White House denied that you wrote the report. The Times still reports that you consulted on it, and that is reason enough to write to you.

In 2018 you stood in front of a room of political consultants and explained your method. “To sell a candidate is simply to sell a concept,” you said. You compared politicians to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, manufactured objects that gained new meaning when Duchamp put them in a gallery and called them art. “We sell ideas by reassigning thoughts,” you told them. I have spent my life around art. Duchamp asked who gets to decide what counts as art. You turned that question into a method for selling a candidate. Your standing as an artist lets an administration’s opinion pass as a curator’s.

The method is now pointed at a museum. Name a museum as a political operation, and every object inside it can be read as evidence for the charge. The report says “extreme ideological activism” has taken over the National Museum of American History and calls its programming “anti-white” and “pro-abortion.” The Smithsonian replied that its work rests on scholarship and accuracy and tells the whole story of America. The order followed. The signs are vandalism with a permit. The government will stand on the sidewalk and instruct visitors to doubt a building they paid for.

The administration bears responsibility for the order. Your current roles place you inside its cultural agenda. You are a senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities and a presidential appointee to the Commission of Fine Arts. The Times describes the commission as rubber-stamping the president’s building projects, among them the White House ballroom and the world’s tallest triumphal arch. According to The Times, you also oversee a planned garden of 250 statues.

Your earlier political work includes the windsurfing ad against John Kerry and Hillary: The Movie. You directed The Creepy Line, which The Verge called a “conspiratorial playbook for right-wing tech backlash.” After the administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, it labeled your films “Extraordinary Cinema.”

Steve Bannon has called you “an artist first and then a conservative.” You have a degree in sculpture, and your Duchamp documentary earned critical praise. Those credentials got a political strategist inside cultural institutions. You know what happens to an ordinary object when someone with standing gives it a name.

A curator answers for every word. A claim on that museum’s wall carries its source with it, and a label comes down when the evidence thins. The sign presents no evidence of its own and stands there with the government behind it. Museums across the country will understand the warning. It tells curators that this administration will override their evidence whenever the history is inconvenient. The next exhibition will be planned by people who watched this happen, and nobody will have to tell them what to leave out.

Republican members of a House subcommittee called the museum’s director to testify and questioned whether she should keep her job. Her staff’s work remains open to public and professional scrutiny. The report’s authors were not called before that subcommittee to defend their methods.

Museums outlast presidents. That is what they are for. A museum has to be independent enough to tell American history honestly, including the parts the White House dislikes. The report on which The Times says you consulted has become part of a political attack on that independence. You once called a candidate “a set of conceptual principles elevated above all to be a pure belief.” You were describing how to turn a person into an idea that can carry whatever meaning a campaign requires.

You accepted these roles after publicly explaining that method. The signs do the same work. They ask visitors to take the administration’s word over the museum’s.

A bus of eighth graders will pull up to that curb and read the government’s opinion of the building before they see one object inside it. You sit on a federal commission and advise a federal endowment. Those roles give you a room where this can be challenged. Use it. Say the signs are wrong.

The signs are quiet by design. The former leader keeps the old lunches on the calendar, especially the ones with the trustees who mattered. They ask how things are going in a tone that invites disappointment. When the new executive director makes a decision they wouldn’t have made, word travels back, and the reaction is a silence that says the obvious. They don’t need to attack the new leader. They only need to remain available as an alternative source of judgment and sympathy. Each exchange seems harmless. Together, those exchanges let people keep treating the former leader as a competing authority.

It can look like concern for the institution, which is what makes the behavior hard to name. The former leader may genuinely be grieving. Missing a job is human. The problem begins when that grief becomes a private court of appeals for people who dislike the new leader’s decisions. At that point, the former leader is participating in the weakening of the person who replaced them. Calling it loyalty doesn’t change the effect. Trustees may create the opening, but the former leader decides whether the back channel remains useful.

Underneath the behavior is often a fear that has little to do with the institution: the fear of becoming former. You can feel it coming almost at once. The first weeks after you leave are the loudest, full of tributes and farewell dinners, and then the quiet arrives. The conference that once invited you to give the keynote now invites you as a guest. Your successor sits on the panel you would have chaired. The decisions that once couldn’t go out without your name reach you now through a press release, the same day they reach everyone else. The calendar that ran your life for twenty years has white space in it, and the white space is the thing you’re actually afraid of.

More than anything else in the early years, a new leader needs room. They need to make a decision that turns out to be wrong and correct it without an audience of ghosts. They need to earn the trust of the people who work for them, and that trust can’t take hold while influential people are still checking their decisions with the person who left. Every time the former leader takes the worried call and doesn’t end it, the new leader loses a little of the authority the job requires. It never looks like sabotage. The damage accumulates anyway.

The damage is especially severe when the successor is younger or taking on a top job for the first time. It can be worse for a leader of color, who is already granted less benefit of the doubt than the person who left. A former leader who stays available as a competing authority gives that doubt somewhere to go.

The cost lands on the new leader, who inherits the job along with the influence you’ve retained. Every stumble comes with a ready interpretation, because the trustees still loyal to you are waiting to be proved right. You get to stand for steadiness without having to produce the next budget or answer for the next crisis. The living leader must govern. The ghost does not. The ghost doesn’t have a bad fiscal year.

We should stop being surprised when the new leader doesn’t last. A celebrated leader retires to applause, hands the institution to a carefully chosen successor, and two or three years later the successor is gone, said to have left because of differences with the board over vision or a better fit elsewhere. One explanation often goes unnamed: the predecessor never fully left, and the successor never received uncontested authority. A leader who can’t bear to be replaced can make the replacement’s success far less likely, whether they intend it or not.

A departed leader doesn’t have to vanish into witness protection. Answer when the new executive director calls. Provide history when the current leader or board chair asks for it. Attend the gala and be visibly, boringly supportive. When a trustee calls to complain, stop the conversation and send the concern where it belongs. The test is simple: does a trustee leave a conversation with you more committed to the person in the chair, or less? Everything you do after you leave can be measured against that question.

Leaving well requires you to want the institution to outgrow you. You let the calls go to someone else and accept the quiet that follows. You make yourself unnecessary to the place you gave your working life to, even when every instinct tells you to remain needed. This is the final work of leadership, and no one claps for it, because when it’s done well there’s almost nothing to see. The building fills with someone else’s decisions. Your name goes on a wall. The clearest proof that you left well is that no one needs your permission.

The absence of funding can slowly become the reason for never naming what the organization hopes to do. Naming that ambition is where vision begins.

How scarcity becomes a habit

Money is a real constraint. Plenty of organizations have no reserves and keep programs running with overworked staff after years of receiving less than the work requires. But over time, “we don’t have the funding” can turn into a habit. Decisions begin with the belief that there will never be enough. That belief shapes what an organization allows itself to want.

I saw it again and again. An executive director sits down to build the budget for a project she’s wanted to develop for years. She begins entering the costs. The number rises, and she starts cutting before the budget is finished. She’s already decided the project will cost too much. The second staff position becomes a contractor. The three-year plan becomes a one-year pilot. The number at the bottom is the one she thinks a funder will accept, and the project is now smaller than the one she wanted. No one told her to do this. The organization negotiates against itself before anyone else is involved.

At some point the lack of money stops limiting the work and becomes the work itself. A program no one believes in keeps running because the funding that supports it has become the reason to keep it alive.

The same fear can send an organization in the other direction. It pursues whatever money appears. A foundation announces a new priority, and the plans change to match it. Partnerships created for one purpose are described as serving another. A leader may call this resourcefulness. Staff experience it as whiplash: work they were told was urgent six months ago is pushed aside, and urgency now follows the money.

After years of shaping itself around available funding, an organization may find that it can’t say what it would choose on its own. The funding is the strategy now. It stops asking what’s worth doing and asks what someone might pay for.

Naming the vision

Vision can be simple and concrete, and having one is different from being visionary. It’s the change the work is meant to make possible. It must be named before the budget sets the direction. Only then can a leader tell the difference between a compromise that protects the work and one that alters what the organization becomes.

Vision doesn’t belong to the executive director alone. It has to be developed with the people responsible for the work and the people the organization exists to serve. When it lives in one person, it leaves when that person does, and it rarely survives a hard budget year.

What surprised me was how often organizations struggled to name it. Ask a leader to describe the place and you may hear its budget size, its programming this season, and who funds it. None of that explains what the organization exists to do. Often the description begins with the limits: We are small. We do what we can with what we have. When a place introduces itself by what it lacks, scarcity has become its identity.

Impact is used loosely. In funding, it usually means attendance numbers and percentages chosen for a final report. The question of vision is plainer: What change should this work make possible? What would remain unfinished if the work disappeared?

A new grant can support a direction the organization already wanted or open a possibility it had not imagined. The test is whether the organization can explain why the work belongs to the vision without mentioning the money. If it can’t, the grant is setting the direction.

Caution mistaken for wisdom

Reducing ambition in a bad year may be good judgment. Do it for five years and it becomes standard practice. A smaller plan gets called realistic. Sustainable and lean become terms of praise even when they describe the steady reduction of what the organization can do. Once caution becomes proof of competence, challenging it sounds irresponsible.

That caution gets passed on. The executive director who once gave up the idea she wanted most now sits across from a newer colleague and, meaning well, tells her to be realistic. She repeats the advice she once resented because it kept her employed. Nobody has to enforce a rule once everyone believes it protects them.

The cost is hard to see. No one holds a press conference for the show that was never proposed or the artist who stopped bringing her biggest ideas because she already knew the answer. You can’t count what never got made. Without a vision of its own, an organization keeps remaking its last success. The loss can appear as a balanced budget. A board reads that budget and sees a well-run organization. In a narrow sense, the board is right. The organization is doing exactly what it learned to do.

What we taught

Here is the part I had to admit: funders built this habit. The small, safe step is easier to measure, so we reward it. We ask whether a project can be sustained forever as a condition of a single grant, which trains organizations to propose only what they can already afford. We restrict money so tightly that they can’t build reserves or pay for the staff and tools the work requires. Then we read the resulting weakness as evidence that they’re not ready for larger support. We ask for certainty before a new idea has had the chance to become clear.

Boards teach the same lesson from inside. They ask for growth while resisting what growth requires. They praise leaders for making too little look like enough, then blame them when staff are exhausted.

Where the “no” belongs

The shortage is still real, and not every idea deserves funding. Some ideas are too vague to budget responsibly. Some leaders confuse a big budget with a big vision. An organization that pursues every ambition without asking what it costs won’t last long enough to make anything.

Financial discipline remains essential. Vision keeps hard decisions connected to what matters and why the organization exists.

The question is when the “no” comes and who decides. There’s a difference between an idea the organization can’t afford and one it never examined. A real limit follows a full description of the work and an honest calculation of its cost. A premature no comes before either. A leader protecting exhausted staff from another unfunded project is doing her job.

“We can’t afford it” ends the conversation before anyone says what would have to be given up. The phrase hides a choice inside what sounds like a fact, and once an idea is dismissed as unaffordable, there’s no record of what it was or what it would have taken. An honest number guarantees nothing, and the full budget may be rejected, sometimes rightly. But it makes the choice visible. The board sees which costs staff would otherwise absorb through unpaid labor and overwork. A full budget can show other funders what remains unfunded. The organization can delay the work, seek the money later, or decide that something else matters more. A reduced request, repeated long enough, becomes the accepted account of what the work costs, and every later decision begins from that diminished number.

One question comes before every budget: What does this organization believe is worth doing? Name the work and its real cost before deciding whether it can happen. Scarcity may determine what an organization can do this year. It shouldn’t determine what the organization is willing to want or ask for. Funding can support a vision, but it can’t supply one. Vision comes first because it gives the money purpose.

Heather Ewing, Civitella’s director, invited me as a director’s guest, one of several the place hosts alongside the fellows. I could only stay ten days. The fellows stay for six weeks. I didn’t have to win a fellowship, take six weeks from work and family, or arrange care at home. Nobody treated me as a guest, only a writer with a deadline.

The place is as beautiful as everyone says. It is a fifteenth-century castle on a hill in Umbria for starters. But the staff is what makes it work. They know who eats what and what your studio needs, and they clear the small problems out of a dozen working lives before anyone notices. For ten days nobody had a claim on my time. After a career of rooms where everyone wanted something from me, that took getting used to.

I arrived owing revisions on Brentwood Lane, a memoir I have been working on for two years. Consulting work had pushed it aside for months. About a week in, the other artists got me past the block. They asked about the book the way they asked about each other’s work, as though it already existed and was worth taking seriously. One night I fell into a long talk with another fellow about the language of silence, about how much silence differs from absence. My book is about my father’s silence, and until then I had written it as absence, unsure whether I was telling the story or hiding behind it. The next morning I wrote a chapter I hadn’t known was missing. The quiet gave me the time, and the others helped me use it.

Dinner was the center of it every night, one long table under a gazebo. The talk started with the wine or somebody’s studio problem and turned into arguments about art that carried over to the next evening. The exchange ran both ways. I learned from the others, and I had something to offer in return: a career spent around artists and institutions. Curiosity ran the room. People with first books sat beside people with major prizes and spoke as peers. Somewhere in there I stopped wondering whether I belonged.

I had heard for years that important artistic collaborations came out of Civitella. Seeing them form up close was what stayed with me. One artist could change how another thought and worked, and most of it happened in ordinary conversation over dinner.

Some residencies exist to move a particular work toward production. Civitella does something quieter. It gives artists time and company, the first things to go when a budget tightens. I know, because for most of my career I might have been the one cutting them. An artist would tell me she had six weeks to write a new symphony, and I would nod as though I knew what that meant. I defended residencies for years without grasping what the weeks did. Running the budgets taught me less than ten days at that table did.

The words we reach for, networking and convening, make it sound more transactional than it is. The friendships and working relationships start before anybody wants anything from anybody, and they bear fruit late and sideways: a collaboration five years later on another continent, an influence no grant report would catch. The field sees the finished work and rarely the relationships under it, and it benefits from them anyway. I’ve sat in the meetings where the work that cannot be counted is the first thing cut.

The conditions are simple to name and expensive to provide. Artists need unstructured time and staff who guard it, and a shared table where they can find one another. From MacDowell to Skowhegan, people step out of their normal lives into a room full of others who have done the same.

Residencies and the artists themselves pay for the riskiest stretch, the part before there is anything to show, and the system has never found a steady way to fund it. A book revised at a residency lands at a publisher that gave nothing to those weeks. A performance built over six weeks premieres at a venue that funded none of them. Galleries sell work made on someone else’s land. None of it is unusual, and that is the whole problem. Meanwhile the artist absorbs the lost income and the care arranged at home, and the institutions that program the finished work arrive after the risk has passed. The relationship is already there; the field just doesn’t count it. My own book is better because Civitella gave me ten days in which it could come first.

None of this runs for free. A residency covers room and board, studio space, the staff who hold it together, often a travel stipend or childcare so an artist can afford to say yes. It can charge the artist nothing and still be costly to run. The Artist Communities Alliance counts more than four hundred member organizations across fifty states and some twenty countries, a network that works as infrastructure and is rarely funded as one. The field treats these places as a perk rather than something the whole enterprise leans on.

Over the last ten years the gap widened as institutions pulled back from developing new work. In the budget rooms I sat in, commissioning was the easy cut, producing departments thinned, in-house residencies rarely came back once they were gone. It happened slowly enough to look inevitable. It was a run of choices by a field that called itself an ecosystem and behaved like a market.

A few institutions do show up early. The Studio Museum in Harlem made a residency one of its founding programs in 1969, and Jacob’s Pillow gives dance artists room to research through its Pillow Lab. The more telling pattern is the artists who stopped waiting. The painter Julie Mehretu helped start Denniston Hill in the Catskills. The novelist Jacqueline Woodson built Baldwin for the Arts in the Hudson Valley for artists of color. In Portland, the bassist esperanza spalding helped found PRISMID Sanctuary, where making art sits beside growing food and tending land. The field has left its artists to build the infrastructure it depends on.

Because that value can’t be traced, the money should follow the places rather than the transactions. Funders can give unrestricted operating money to the residencies carrying the earliest risk. A group of presenters can pool a multi-year fund for the places they all draw from. Publishers, museums, and performing arts organizations can treat residency time as a real cost of the work they later acquire or present, built into a budget the way any other line is. A single commission setting aside a share for the residency where a piece took shape helps as far as it goes, but past a point the bookkeeping fails and the money has to reach the residency anyway.

Whatever form it takes, the support has to protect what makes the place work. Don’t demand a finished product from every artist, or a report the week they get home. The value begins with keeping everyone else’s claims off an artist’s time, and the company that helps them use it.

On my last morning I took my coffee back to the garden before anyone was up. Somewhere on my phone are two photos of empty blue sky from an afternoon I spent trying to catch swifts in flight. They are small dark birds that live on the wing, and they never once held still for the frame. The photos might be the truest pictures I brought home. By the end, the castle and the quiet had receded behind something I had not planned on. I flew home with a finished revision and a dozen people whose work I will follow for the rest of my life. That is what these places make.

I pass by it most weeks. New Haven, Providence, Boston, the Acela pulls me up and down the same Northeast Corridor and the sign is always there. It is also the name for something I have spent thirty-five years getting good at, and I am not sure the people who hung that sign understood they were describing my professional life.

The Irish exit is the art of leaving without saying goodbye. You don’t announce it or make the rounds, you’re there one moment and gone the next. You learn to leave without being seen to go, so that nobody can say when you left, only that they remember you being there. Only lately did I stop treating it as harmless.

These days people talk about the five-to-nine, the hours after work that belong to you.

In the performing arts that line was never drawn. My five-to-nine was the reception at six, the curtain at eight, the dinner that ran past midnight, and every hour of it belonged to the same institution that owned my nine-to-five. A second shift. Same employer. The hours other people spend becoming someone besides their work were the hours my work wanted most. The day just changed rooms.

We all know this. The people who run these theaters know it. The people who fund them know it. We keep hiring people into it anyway. The job postings name the evening and weekend attendance. It just never offers comp time or added leave to go with it. And then we count none of the hours unless it’s for non-exempt, hourly workers.

I’ve written before about burnout and exhaustion. I never said the cause plainly. The hours past forty come every week, and the salary covers forty. The Irish exit is the skill you build when that’s the deal and no one will change it. I got good at leaving because leaving was the only part of the night I controlled.

There are three honest ways to handle hours like these. Pay for them. Shorten the week they land on, so the comp is real. Or even count them the way we count a donor’s in-kind gift, as contributed value with a name on it and the credit that implies. We do none of them.

I arrive before the performance because the pre-show is where the job is. There is a donor reception in a side room with a name like the Founders Lounge. I go. I’m warm, I’m present, I ask about the grandchildren, the knee that finally got replaced, the cruise they just returned from. Then I find the artists, wherever they have been put, usually somewhere with worse light and no wine, and I shake their hands and tell them the house looks strong tonight. Then the lights flash, and the crowd moves toward the theater, and I move with them as far as the lobby, and then I go home.

What that evening came to is less flattering than I let on. By eight I’d worked an eleven-hour day and wanted to go home, and home was the one thing the evening would not forgive. A leader who left early was a leader who hadn’t given enough, and everyone in that building knew how to read an empty seat. Mine was easy to read. It was the same seat every night.

The technique got sharper over the years, but only at the receptions. A performance gives you no crowd to cross and no clock to beat, just the choice to stay or leave at the start. The cocktail receptions were where I learned the rule. Arrive twenty late, stay twenty, leave twenty before the end, ahead of the coat line. On a bad night, three events deep, you give one the full twenty and the next ten, and you move through the city like a man making deliveries.

The exit was the other half. I come in the front so I’m seen, then work my way toward the back, slowly, shaking hands. It looks like circulation. It’s migration. Three encounters and I’m at the back door, gone. When I was moving slowly, I didn’t look like I was leaving. Getting caught meant someone now held a fact about me, that I hadn’t stayed, and could carry it back inside.

It was a competence, and I was proud of it the way you’re proud of any skill you’ve honed without anyone teaching you. Nearly every senior person I know has a version of it. Most of us learned it from someone who taught us the job. Nobody ever called it training.

A few weeks ago there was an event for Korean artists, at a restaurant, a celebration. I didn’t want to go. I was tired. I had every reason to stay home. People I cared about would be there. So I went, and I ran the drill. Twenty late. Twenty there. I made sure two specific people saw me, because seeing them was the reason I went. Then I left.

There was a gift bag by the door. The kind of thing they hand you, branded, a small token of the evening. I walked past it. I didn’t pick it up.

I’ve thought about that gift bag more than I expected to. It cost nothing to take, and there was no efficiency in skipping it. I think I left it because taking it would have meant carrying the evidence home, the small proof that I had been to a celebration of Korean artists and given it the same twenty minutes I would have given a tedious donor cocktail hour. Some part of me didn’t want to be the person holding that bag. The drill ran clean that night. My hands did not entirely cooperate.

At some point you stop choosing it. It becomes the thing you do, and it runs on nights you should be home, on the nights that were supposed to be different, and you find out it’s been running without you only when some small part of you flinches and you have to ask why.

There was a different night, not long ago. I’d done the reception, found the artists, told them I couldn’t stay, the line was already out of my mouth, the exit already in motion. Then a patron caught me. She wasn’t aggressive about it; she just said come sit with us, and gestured at an empty seat, and there was no version of the next thirty seconds in which I could decline without it being a thing. So I sat. And the lights went down, and I stayed.

I stayed for the whole performance. I had not planned a single minute of it. And it was the reason any of us are in this, the actual thing, happening in front of me because a stranger had blocked my escape.

And then the patron invited me to the dinner, because there is always the dinner, and somebody from the institution has to host. A few of us took the guest artist to a place nearby, and she talked about the piece the way artists talk when the donors have gone home, and I asked questions because I wanted the answers. I got home past midnight. I was at my desk at nine.

It was also the best evening I’d had in years, which is exactly why the field gets away with this. We call the night work a privilege, and it often is, and nobody pays you for a privilege. The field has depended on that ambiguity for as long as I’ve been in it.

Count an evening like that one. During the season, some version of this happens two or three nights a week, stacked on a full week at the desk, and nothing in the building records it. The field calls it part of the job. This is about the hours themselves, and who can afford to keep giving them away.

I should be exact about who this lands on, because it isn’t the executives. For the people running the large institutions, the major orchestras, operas and ballets, the nights are the job. The title comes with them, the salary is set in plain view of them, and the bargain, whatever else is wrong with it, was struck with open eyes. The nights go with the territory, and I had that territory. I could skip the parts I dodged, which is a privilege the territory hands you and hands almost no one below you. The argument was never about people like me. It was about the people who inherit the expectations without inheriting the authority.

It lands on the people who never struck that bargain. The salaried twenty-six-year-old hired into what reads on paper like a desk job with a few evenings and weekends. The technical staff a rung or three down, salaried, exempt, for whom the same evening is pure extraction. I could leave because I was senior enough to. When I left at eight, people assumed I had another reception or commitment to get to. The staff can’t leave because the performance doesn’t happen without them. Someone stage manages, someone attends to the artist backstage, someone else hosts the donor room, someone drives the soprano back to her hotel at one in the morning, and someone runs the load-out until the truck is sealed, then comes back at seven when the next load-in begins. Some of that wears a blazer and some of it ends with a mop in a dressing room, and the field calls the better-dressed half opportunity, which is exactly how it avoids paying for the rest.

The body keeps the count even when the building won’t. The young staffer who cleaned the dressing room and locked the theater behind her gets home by midnight, never before, and she’s at her desk by nine, because the morning doesn’t move for what the evening took. Run that through a season and the exhaustion stops looking like exhaustion. It starts looking like attitude. And somewhere in year three the math arrives on whether a person can keep loving the work.

And the field is built this way on purpose. The attendance expectation screens people out, quietly, because they don’t complain. They just leave, or never apply. We end up keeping the people who can live this way, and we call them the ones who were passionate enough to stay. I built some of those expectations. I’m not writing this from outside them.

A question for whoever runs the place, and I ran one for fifteen years. Have you ever added up the hours your exempt staff actually work in a week, once the performances, receptions, errands, and dinners are counted? I never did. And do you wish more of your staff attended the performances, the hourly crew included, the ones you’d owe wages if their seats were ever on the clock? We wish exactly that, we keep the clock off, and then we say the people who stop coming were never committed to begin with.

The blindness starts at the top. Board chairs booked me for seven-thirty breakfasts and never once asked whether there had been a show the night before. Sitting through those came with my title, so I absorbed them. But if the people who governed the place couldn’t see the night behind a morning that was mine, the staff three rungs down were never visible at all.

One of our largest donors once called the office the morning after a late concert and got no one. When the phone went unanswered he pulled up our website and read the staff list, exempt and non-exempt and the students we paid by the hour, and decided it was too long. Then he called my boss, the university provost, to say he didn’t know what we all did, that the staff was bloated, and that unless the provost could prove we needed every name on that page, he’d pull his money from the entire university.

He had called three people on our staff but all three had worked his concert the night before and were still recovering. He read the list as too many people. The same morning, the staff he was counting was too thin to answer him. We commissioned a study and proved, position by position, that the staff was necessary. We lost two FTEs anyway. Then I decided to take the staff page off the website, to spare a man the inconvenience of a quiet office the morning after a concert he’d sat through. These are people we pay too little, and a title on a public page was one of the few things the work ever gave back. We solved his bad morning by erasing the people who’d produced his good night.

Taking that page down is the choice I regret most.

I felt I owed that donor an answer that morning. I don’t think so anymore. The people he couldn’t reach had given him his evening and needed the morning to recover from it, and the honest reply to his call was to say so, instead of apologizing and deleting names. He isn’t unusual. He simply said out loud what many people quietly assume. A great many funders and board members look at an arts staff and see an expense to trim, and none of them has been told what the work takes after dark. The people who pay for that always have the least power to explain it.

The fix starts in the budget. We hired two for a night that needed six. One exempt staff member attends the dinner, drives the soprano home, and might come back to clean the dressing room, while the only other exempt staff member runs the load-out. The field funds the art and treats the labor the art requires as something that sorts itself out after dark, on salary, for free. It doesn’t. You staff the evening with enough hands that nobody closes the building alone, and you put the cost of those hands in the price of the season instead of pulling it out of one young salary in hours no one logs. A properly staffed evening sends people home as a matter of course, with no one having to earn it and no one having to be grateful.

The morning-off helps, and the good managers already give it, but it’s a favor, and a favor is the first thing to go when the budget tightens. If the evening is part of the job, the recovery from it has to be part of the job too. Better employers already write comp time into the offer, an hour back for every hour past forty or a morning off after a late night. Better still, those hours would go onto the person’s yearly paid time off, where all of it rolls over and pays out the day they leave, so years of uncounted evenings turn into something they own and can finally cash.

Most places can’t write that check yet, and I know it. I ran a budget that couldn’t, and I never named the cost anyway. What every place can do now is stop keeping it a secret. The cost is real whether or not it shows up on a line, and the people who could eventually pay for it have never been told it’s there. Put it in front of them. Name the second shift the way we name every other cost we ask them to cover, and let them understand it before the money exists to fix it. Understanding costs nothing, and it is where better structures start.

I took the train home last week and the bar was there, The Irish Exit, and I chuckled at the thought that I might never apologize for leaving early again. Then I apologized twice this week.

But I understand it differently now. From the outside the twenty-twenty-twenty rule looks like cynicism, and for years I let it. I would side-eye this explanation from anyone else, and I know it. I still think it’s true. It was a private labor negotiation, run by one employee who could afford to leave, because the field still will not hold one. Every Irish exit I made, twenty minutes at a time, was me taking back hours nobody else was counting.

The twenty-twenty-twenty rule was a calculation. Here’s the one I should have run instead. Forty hours at the desk, the job as it’s posted. Then three nights a week in season, a reception and a curtain and a dinner past midnight, five hours no one counts, and a morning that starts at nine no matter when the truck left the loading dock or the artist left for the airport. The week comes to sixty. The twenty hours over forty are the second shift, handed each season to the person who can’t refuse them. Build the week the other way, the evenings counted inside a real forty, enough people hired that forty holds, and the youngest person on the payroll finally gets to go home and call it a full day.

The field built the second shift, never put it on a paycheck, and called it devotion. I would like the Irish exit to become a useless skill.

The audience included undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students preparing to enter very different chapters of musical life. The question underneath the address, however, was the same for all of them, and it’s a question that sits beneath many of the essays I’ve written here: what do we owe the systems we inherit, and when are we obligated to remake them?

The graduates in front of me are entering a music field built for a career model that has changed. In that sense, they’re not very different from the arts leaders, board members, and cultural workers who make up much of this readership. All of us spend part of our lives navigating institutions we did not build and deciding which assumptions deserve to survive us.

The speech below was delivered to musicians at different stages of their professional journeys, but I think the question belongs to anyone working inside an arts system they did not design. The argument underneath it is one I’ve been making to students, artists, boards, donors, and leaders for most of my working life.

The text below has been lightly edited from the delivered version for readability.

Thank you, Dean Holland. And a very good afternoon to you, Class of 2026.

Congratulations. You’ve earned this day, and everyone in this room knows what it took to get here.

The last time I stood in this hall was roughly thirty years ago, for the School of Music’s centennial. I was an Orchestra Management Fellow assigned to the Grand Rapids Symphony, and I made the trip down to hear Adolphus Hailstork’s American Guernica. I’d gotten to know Adolphus a few years earlier at the American Composers Orchestra, where I was the receptionist. The ACO is also where I met your Dean. He was a young composer on one of our new music reading sessions. He and I were both in our early twenties.

We both looked twelve.

Times were different. We figured things out mostly alone.

We met again ten years later. I was president of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Dean Holland was on the faculty at Berklee and a prolific composer, and we commissioned him to write Motor City Dance Mix for the opening of our new hall, the Max M. Fisher Music Center.

And here we are now. Three meetings, thirty years. The threads of this field run longer than anyone tells you. The room I first walked into as a stranger is the room I’m standing in today.

I’m here to share what I learned over those thirty years. About this field. About what it asks of musicians. About what I wish I’d known when I was sitting where you are.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing the music field from a lot of institutional vantage points. Orchestras, universities, foundations, government. And now I work in the messy space where artists and institutions are trying to build models the old system never imagined. The view changes from each angle, and each chapter showed me how this field works and how it fails. Some things only become visible when you look back across the rooms you’ve stood in.

Here’s what I see clearly. The field you’re walking into was built for generations past. Built on old assumptions, old audiences, old definitions of what a career was supposed to be.

Careers for musicians have changed shape. They look less like the careers your teachers built. The thirty-year position that ends with a retirement party and a pension still matters, and it’s worthy. But it was never the only measure of a serious musical life.

We don’t say this clearly enough: your opportunity is to envision the career no one has built yet. The one made from what only you can do, not bounded by the constraints and expectations the field already has names for.

That’s what I came to tell you. Don’t accept what we give you. The music is yours. The limits are what I want you to question.

Many of us made it. Too often, making it meant staying quiet when the people in charge got it wrong. We thought being grateful meant being quiet. We deferred to the people in the room with the most money because we’d been trained to, and we told ourselves it was just how the field worked. I accepted rooms I should have questioned, because being invited in felt like victory. I don’t want that for you.

Which brings me to my friend Anthony Roth Costanzo. As many of you know, Anthony is a countertenor and the general director of Opera Philadelphia, among other things. His career matters here because he didn’t wait for the field to make room for him. He built the room.

He doesn’t put one thing down to pick up another. It all lives in one life. The breadth isn’t an accident. The repertoire for a countertenor is narrow, and so was his available path. He had a choice: accept a smaller career, or treat the constraint as a starting point and build something around the instrument he actually had.

So in 2018 Anthony produced his own opera at the Barnes Foundation. He conceived it, raised the money, and built the thing no institution would have built for him. When the pandemic hit, he spent that first summer with a handful of New York Philharmonic musicians bringing music to street corners and parks across the five boroughs out of a pickup truck. The Philharmonic still runs the program.

Then he took over Opera Philadelphia at a moment of real financial danger. He didn’t cut the season. He cut the price of a ticket to as little as eleven dollars. Sold-out houses followed, filled with people new to opera. He didn’t save the company by protecting the old model. He saved the company by refusing it.

He also refused to mistake the labels other people gave him for his own ambitions. As Imani Perry wrote to her sons: never mistake the shorthand the world gives you for your whole self.

Here’s what I want you to take from this. Your musical practice isn’t the end of the journey. It’s the means. It gets you into the room. What you do once you’re in that room is the life you’ll lead. Who you reach, what you change, how far the work travels.

You’ve given years to mastering your instrument or your field, and that mastery is real, and it’s yours. It isn’t the only destination. Dean Holland understands that. Anthony understands it. Now it belongs to you.

Finding your voice is bigger than how you interpret a piece. It’s bigger than your sound, your score, your book. Your voice is the answer to a deeper question. Why this music. Why these people, why now.

Music changes lives through the people brave enough to carry it. Whether you compose, perform, teach, or build community around music, the calling is the same. To be the channel through which the beauty and power of music reaches a human soul. That’s what music does, and you’re how it gets there.

I learned this on the presenting side. When we celebrated the centenary of The Rite of Spring at Carolina Performing Arts, I stopped trying to explain serialism and structure. I started talking about why the piece moved me, my own love of modernism, why the unknown can be hard, why I believe discovery has to be practiced, why the Paris audience rioted in 1913, and how long it often takes for excellence to be recognized.

The audience didn’t need a teacher. They needed me to bring them inside something I already loved.

Here’s why this matters to me. I’ve spent my whole career making one argument, to audiences and donors and students and anyone who’ll listen. There is joy in discovery. Everything else is validation. Understanding matters, but feeling is where the work finally arrives.

I’ve stood in lobbies after concerts and watched audiences try to describe what they just heard. The most honest ones stop talking about the music and start talking about themselves. A memory they hadn’t visited in years. A grief they didn’t know was still in them. That’s when I know the music reached them.

My answer is built from those moments. Yours will be different, and you’ll need one of your own.

Some of you are thrilled. Some of you are anxious. Some are both. That’s not a failure of confidence. It’s what it feels like when the map ends. Music is what you carry. Where will you take it?

I’m guessing most of you aren’t countertenors. Many of you can already see the path, and I’d encourage you to question it. When the path is clear, the assumption is that you should walk it, so many of you will. You’ll audition for the positions that exist. You’ll apply to the programs that exist. Some of you will be selected.

Take the seat. And then question why the seat looks the way it does. The audition system, the teaching post, the freelance life, the new artistic enterprise: none of it is permanent. People built it, which means people can build it differently.

Anthony faced a different constraint than yours. But you can make the same move he did. Decide the shape of your career on purpose, even when your training doesn’t force the decision. When many doors are open, the familiar ones are usually the loudest.

So here’s the work. Pay attention to the specific shape of who you are and what you value, your gifts and your beliefs. Pay attention to the questions the standard career path won’t answer for you. Build outward from there, and the career will follow.

The career you build won’t belong only to you. It’ll shape your life. It’ll also help decide what kind of cultural life the rest of us get to have.

We’re watching the Kennedy Center become a public example of how fast a cultural commons can be narrowed by power. For more than fifty years it stood as a national stage. Now it’s being treated as territory. The stakes go well past a season or two.

When power consolidates, artists are often the first people it tries to control, because they are the chroniclers of our humanity. They let a society see what it’s living through. They let people imagine things could be otherwise. They wouldn’t bother trying to erase the arts if the arts didn’t matter.

So let this moment sharpen you. You’re inheriting a field with more doors than we ever had and less scaffolding holding any of them up. That’s harder. It’s also freer. And it makes one thing matter more than ever: protect your curiosity the way you protect your instrument.

A word to the rest of this room. To the parents, the families, the partners and grandparents and siblings and friends. Who sat through the early years, when the practicing wasn’t yet beautiful. Who drove to lessons in weather no one should have had to drive in. Who held the door open for an art form that promises no one a steady paycheck.

I’ve spent my whole career around this field. Nothing in it happens without the people who said yes when there was no obvious reason to. The graduates in front of you are here because you believed in them when your belief was the entire infrastructure. Thank you.

So, graduates, don’t inherit the limits. Reimagine them. Build the music field you want, the one this moment requires, the one only you can hear and envision.

And when someone tells you you’re inexperienced, too idealistic, that you don’t understand how things work, remember this: your Dean and I heard that too. We just didn’t have anyone at a podium telling us that the future often begins with the people who aren’t yet trusted to build it.

So let me say it plainly.

Trust the music that brought you here. Trust the questions that won’t leave you alone. Trust the voice you’ve been given. Your Dean and I figured it out as we went. You will too.

Your place in this field is only the beginning.

Class of 2026, now it belongs to you.

A handful. The landing Fairchild stepped into was hers to arrange, and most dancers have neither the means nor the platform to arrange anything like it.

Dancers retire young, often around thirty-five, frequently with injuries that trail them for decades and savings that wouldn’t cover a semester of retraining. Most started serious training before adolescence and spent a decade or more getting to a professional stage they may hold for only fifteen years. The field has known this for as long as it has had dancers, and knowing it has never once obligated us to act. Dancers expect to dance until around forty-one, the surveys say, and leave closer to thirty-four. We’ve grown comfortable in the gap.

Sara Mearns has spent close to two decades as a principal at New York City Ballet, and the title has never been big enough to hold her ambitions. She’s danced Isadora Duncan’s solos and Merce Cunningham’s centennial, taken on downtown premieres most ballet stars would never risk. For more than ten years she’s been making new work with the choreographer Jodi Melnick, and she commissions and curates pieces of her own besides. She’s already proven she can build a life out of more than steps. And still nothing around her is organized to carry that into whatever follows the last performance. Last fall she told a reporter she fills her entire unpaid layoff with outside gigs to cover the rent, which is a fair measure of what gets banked for the years when there’s no stage at all.

A modern dancer whose company just lost the grant that paid her has nowhere to be carried to. Many tap and jazz artists never had a company or long-term contract to lose. Most of the time it’s quieter than any of that: a corps member isn’t renewed, a few names simply fail to reappear on the spring roster, no announcement, no farewell program, the people who watched them dance for years left to wonder where they went.

A painter keeps painting at seventy. A novelist often does her strongest work past sixty, a composer later still, an actor ages into a fresh supply of roles. The dancer’s instrument is the body itself, and it wears out on a schedule the other arts never have to obey. Other trades break the body too, and plenty pay worse. What’s particular here is the collision: a craft that takes longer to build than almost any other and ends sooner than all of them.

Few dancers reach the end of a performing career with anything saved because the pay stayed thin the whole way through. A principal at one of the few major American ballet companies earns somewhere above a hundred thousand dollars, and almost no one climbs that high. Everyone underneath is improvising, the corps on seasonal contracts and the freelance world of modern, contemporary, tap, and jazz dancers living gig to gig with no company behind them at all. Most professional dancers in this country never see a salaried position, let alone health coverage.

The body sends its bills late. Years of jumps and hard landings wear the joints out early, and dancers turn up in orthopedic offices in their forties with hips and knees that read decades older than they are. Some are scheduled for joint replacements before fifty. The cartilage is gone, old stress fractures ache when the weather turns, and the pain that started as something to dance through becomes the baseline they live with. All of it outlasts the career by decades, and the institutions that filled their seasons on these bodies count none of it as theirs to carry.

Whatever thin support exists is the first thing to go when budgets tighten. Public money for the arts gets cut, companies trim rehearsals and shorten contracts, and the least protected people in the building take the first hit, every time.

The odds of reaching the top rival professional sports. Maybe fifty principal positions exist across the major companies. The NBA names around two dozen All-Stars a year. A benched NBA player still clears a million dollars and retires into an apparatus built to catch him: pensions, alumni networks, a players’ union, a whole culture that treats his retirement as a known problem with known fixes. The dancer trained as long and sacrificed more, then retired into nothing, with almost none of what stands ready for the athlete when his career ends. The union dancers do have a floor, AGMA minimums and some exit pay at the major companies. It covers a sliver of the field and ends the day a dancer leaves a salaried contract, which most never hold.

Every dancer who leaves carries skills most employers spend years trying to teach. They show up early and take correction without flinching. Pressure that would flatten most executives barely registers. Learning new material fast and making it look effortless is exactly what organizations claim to want from their leaders. Copeland said as much when she stepped away from ABT, calling what a dancer builds “so transferable into so many different fields.” Then the dancer walks out the studio door in June and no one tracks where she goes.

I spent years presenting and commissioning work, engaging and working with dancers across forms, watching them carry pieces I’d helped support. I always asked what came after the last show. Then the season ended and I moved to the next one. I heard the answers. I never built anything that could change them.

Some of them I can still see. A dancer I presented year after year, gone from the field now, and I couldn’t tell you where she went. The one who was teaching Pilates between contracts. A man working out his health insurance from the couch while an injury healed and the next season got cast without him. I filed each of those away as private bad luck, one person’s hard year, and only later understood I was looking at the same failure three times.

The people running our institutions, me among them, have treated dancer transition as somebody else’s job, when it was no one’s. Dance may be the clearest case. The question underneath it reaches much further: what obligations do cultural institutions have to the people whose working lives make them possible?

The pushback usually comes from people who transitioned without help. They figured it out, they say, and dancers today have more options than they did. The claim holds only because we hear from the ones who landed. For every dancer who built a second life alone, others left the field and stopped answering the phone. The ones who made it often had something they rarely mention: family money, a working spouse, a contact who opened a door, the luck of living in the right city. From the inside, all of that is easy to remember as grit. The braver answer would be to say we got through it without support and we’ll make sure the next ones don’t have to.

Other countries decided this was a public question. They treat a dance career the way it actually behaves, as salaried work that happens to be finite and project-based, and they build the supports around that fact instead of leaving each dancer to gamble alone.

France folds dancers into its intermittents du spectacle system, which has covered performing artists since the 1930s. Work enough qualifying hours across a year and you draw benefits between contracts, with healthcare and pension contributions carrying on through the gaps. The system treats artistic work as what it actually is, a string of projects with stretches of nothing between them, and it keeps those stretches from bankrupting the artist. It was never built to carry a dancer into a new career. Underneath it sits an idea we’ve never fully accepted: artistic labor is labor even when the work arrives in fragments.

Germany goes further. Dancers at state theaters hold something close to civil-service standing, with pensions figured on a whole career rather than a few peak years. Stiftung TANZ, founded in 2010, handles the transition: counseling and coaching, plus scholarships that help cover the cost of retraining for a second career. The workshops begin mid-career, while a dancer is still performing, so the next chapter isn’t a scramble after the body quits.

The Netherlands has done this longest, since 1986, through a fund built jointly by employers and dancers themselves. It starts working with dancers around twenty-five, a full decade before most will retire, on the theory that people who plan early land better. By the fund’s own accounting, they do.

Britain’s Dancers’ Career Development has been at it since 1973, offering retraining grants and counseling from a dancer’s first professional contract through the years after the last performance. None of these programs sorts dancers by genre. A contemporary dancer draws on the same system a ballerina does, and so does a tap artist, because the countries that built them grasped that the trouble lives in the shape of the career.

The case these countries make is economic, start to finish. A dancer supported through a transition leans on public services less and pays back into the system sooner, and a good number go on to employ other people. Their governments concluded the investment paid for itself.

We have pieces of this already, starving. Career Transition for Dancers, founded in 1985, merged into the Actors Fund a decade ago, now the Entertainment Community Fund, which holds deep experience and nothing close to the budget the need demands. Fordham educates New York City Ballet dancers who earn degrees while they perform. ABT’s incubator develops choreographers inside the company. The National Center for Choreography in Akron, under Christy Bolingbroke, helps dancers build creative practices that outlast their bodies. Good programs, all of them, reaching a fraction of the dancers who need them.

What’s missing is scale, and the connection between the pieces. Start with three-year fellowships that pay dancers a living while they retrain. One drawn to physical therapy could train inside a sports-medicine clinic; someone else could learn arts administration at a working institution, or take seed money toward a business built on movement. Pair that with portable healthcare that follows a dancer from her first contract through the years after the last one, served by clinics that actually understand dance injuries and counselors who understand that losing the stage is its own kind of grief. And put the universities to work, treating a performing career as the leadership training it plainly is, crediting a dancer’s anatomical knowledge toward a physical-therapy doctorate, making the degree available to any dancer under contract, and dropping the pretense that a thirty-four-year-old belongs in a freshman seminar. The labor protections every other worker takes for granted, from a wage floor to benefits that move with you, already sit within a legislator’s reach.

None of it should wait until the dancing stops. A dancer in her late twenties should already be banking tuition credits and meeting a counselor, a retirement account filling since her first contract, so that by the time she leaves the stage she’s been walking toward the next thing for years. We keep building the exit ramp after the crash.

All of it runs on money, so name the number. A national fund on the order of a hundred million dollars, pointed straight at this: education grants, seed capital, emergency medical help, living stipends, multi-year and unrestricted, saying out loud that a person’s contribution to the culture doesn’t expire when the performing does. Employers could meet it halfway and recruit dancers on purpose, the way they recruit veterans and athletes, once someone teaches the dancers to name what they do well and teaches the companies to see it.

We only hear about the ones who got out. Hundreds of thousands have trained for this life and left it with no headline and no one tracking where they went. The names that reach us are the exceptions. A few run the institutions they once danced for, Woetzel at Juilliard, Whelan back at City Ballet, Graf Mack back at Ailey, the big chairs going to the dancers the audience already knew. Others left the art entirely, for medicine or a company of their own, and built a working life out of nothing the field handed them.

Dormeshia, a Doris Duke Artist and the most exacting rhythm tap dancer of her generation, spent her career building the thing no one built for her. At Jacob’s Pillow she co-directs the tap program, and the conference she started gathers the women coming up in tap and keeps them in the room. What she made for the dancers behind her is the support system this essay is asking institutions to build. She made it alone, inside tap, without a dollar. Every one of them is a triumph, and every one of them is an indictment. We shouldn’t ask dancers to be extraordinary a second time just to land softly once.

None of this needs inventing. It needs money and coordination, and a decision to treat the problem as a problem. Several European countries made the decision we have avoided: to call a dancer a worker and build systems from that premise. We’ve simply decided, year after year, that it isn’t ours to fix. The most credible voice in this argument belongs to the dancers still on stage, and it carries furthest while they still have one.

The stage goes dark around thirty-five and the life keeps going for another fifty years. The question was never whether dancers deserve a hand across that gap. They do. The question is whether we’ll build the thing that gives it to them or keep applauding the few who climb out alone and calling that a system. Dancers spend their bodies making something the rest of us can’t. The least we owe them is somewhere to stand when it’s over.

I felt terrible. I still do. But feeling terrible doesn’t fix anything.

The artists shouldn’t have had to discover the terms on their own. Until compensation comes attached to the invitation, nobody should feel guilty about asking what the fee is. Empowered is the right answer. Gratitude is what institutions count on to avoid putting a number on the table.

When I was a funder, a dancer once asked if she was being rude. A local dance company had invited her to lead class, and she was thinking of saying yes only if they paid her in advance, because her credit card didn’t have room for her to float the gap between teaching the class and the check landing thirty or sixty days later. Her rent was due before their check run. Years of these requests had trained her to wonder whether asking to be paid before doing the work made her difficult. She was the one apologizing on the phone. Nobody at the dance company was.

I told her she wasn’t being rude. What I should have said is that the company asking a working dancer to lead class and then expecting her to float two months of unpaid labor against her credit card is the one that owes the apology. Her question to me was downstream of a decades-long campaign to teach artists that asking to be paid like a professional is something to feel guilty about.

The lesson reached past artists. It lands on anyone an institution can make wait, which usually means whoever has the least leverage to insist on better. The artist is just the clearest case.

The first problem is asking artists to work for nothing, or for honoraria that don’t cover their costs, with the unspoken understanding that they should feel grateful and afraid to say no. The second problem is what happens after the work ends. A thirty-to-sixty-day wait, while the institution holds the money and the artist floats the gap. The field should call both what they are in practice: wage theft. Organized labor uses the term. The Department of Labor uses it in enforcement contexts. The arts version doesn’t always meet that legal threshold. The moral mechanism is the same: the labor has been provided, the money is owed, and the institution decides when, or whether, it arrives. Working Artists and the Greater Economy was founded in 2008 to organize artists around payment. W.A.G.E. Certification launched in 2014 to recognize institutions that meet artist-fee standards. More than $24 million has been paid to artists through certified institutions since then. W.A.G.E. publishes a fee floor by institutional budget tier. Paying below that floor is legal. The institution still takes the difference from the artist.

A teaching artist who ran an after-school residency in May and gets paid in late July is doing the institution a favor. She’s floating two months of payroll for an organization whose grant came in nine months ago. The money sits in the institution’s account while she chooses between her electric bill and her car insurance. A proposal reviewer who reads fifty applications across two weekends and waits until the next quarterly check run is inside the same arrangement. The institution is borrowing from her, interest-free, because it can.

A young choreographer gets invited to set a short work on a professional company. The invitation lands as the career-defining opportunity it actually is. Nothing in it advances her expenses. The paltry fee will arrive sixty or ninety days after the residency ends. She puts the flight, the rental, and the meals on her credit card. The math says she can’t afford this. The career says she can’t afford not to.

A junior staff member once asked me whether she could take PTO to serve on a small grants panel at another organization. She also wanted to know whether it would be okay for her to keep the small honorarium, since technically she’d be on PTO and not on the clock. I told her she shouldn’t be using PTO. It was professional work, on work time. Read that question slowly. She was asking permission to burn her vacation days to provide expert labor for a peer institution, and then asking permission to keep the small honorarium. The institution that invited her had asked her, a salaried 24-year-old, to do review work it would otherwise have paid a senior consultant several thousand dollars for. Then it set the honorarium so low that the question wasn’t whether she was being underpaid. The question was whether she was allowed to be paid at all.

Both the dancer and the junior staff member were trained into the asking by people like me, who ran institutions where the answer to “can you do this for less than it costs you” had been yes for so long that artists and junior staff stopped expecting any other answer.

Nobody calls it borrowing or theft. The institution calls it “our payment cycle.” When the number’s small enough that calling it a fee would be embarrassing, “honorarium” gets dusted off. The rest of the time the framing is “this is just how nonprofits work.”

It isn’t. I ran a program inside a major national arts philanthropy that paid up front. Checks often went out before the work began. Accounting wasn’t complicated. The cash was there, and releasing it early instead of late was a one-line procedural decision, made by someone with the authority to make it.

Once we changed the policy, artists who’d spent years floating receivables from other funders told us what it meant to know the money would arrive when the work did. They could plan. Rent got paid on the first.

Institutions ten times our size refused to do the same thing. They could’ve. They chose not to, because the alternative was easier on their cash management and because nobody important was making them.

Everyone in the field knew this was happening. At the foundation, we’d frown on it whenever we heard about it and raise it with grantees, but we never conditioned a grant on it. It still happens in plenty of places.

Unpaid internships at major institutions were the norm twenty years ago. Most of them are gone now, eradicated by a decade of organizing and slow internal pressure from a field that got tired of explaining why a $5 billion museum couldn’t afford to pay a 22-year-old while working them to the bone. Some unpaid internships still exist, and the institutions still doing it know they’re behind. The same logic applies to late payment and free labor. We’ve run out of excuses there too.

Almost every time I’ve raised faster payment with an ED or a CFO, I get a version of the same response. The auditor needs documentation first. Then there’s the 1099. The finance committee only meets quarterly. Some of those answers describe a real process. Most do not explain the delay. Auditors don’t flag a same-day disbursement made against a signed agreement and an invoice. A 1099 governs reporting after payment. It isn’t a reason to make an artist wait thirty or sixty days for money the institution already owes. Finance committees aren’t regulatory bodies. They’re calendars. The check run is a choice. Fast payment infrastructure is widely available. Wire transfers settle the same day. Same Day ACH has been live since 2016. Universities know how to move money quickly when the vendor has leverage. The reason this sector hasn’t done it for artists is that institutions have faced too few consequences for making them wait. W.A.G.E.’s certification is one piece of that organizing infrastructure. The next is consequence.

Stop asking artists, junior staff, freelancers, and anyone who can’t comfortably float the expense to work for nothing or near-nothing. If the budget doesn’t have a line for the work, don’t ask for the work. You wouldn’t ask a lawyer to draft a brief for “exposure.” Don’t ask an artist to sit on a panel for it. When your honorarium doesn’t cover the travel, what you’re paying isn’t an honorarium. It’s a fee you’re charging the artist for the privilege of showing up.

Late payment hides behind procedure. Write payment terms into the contract before the work starts. Payment within seven days should become the floor. Advance payment should become the norm when the artist is expected to travel. Honoraria paid for participation, not just deliverables. If the deliverable is a panel appearance, the honorarium is in the artist’s account before the panel begins.

Some institutions can’t write checks the way a private foundation can. Public universities operate inside regulations that often don’t allow per diem advances. And the system is slow even when it’s willing. An artist has to be set up as a vendor before any payment can route, which by itself can take weeks. Small community-based organizations are running cash flow so tight that next quarter’s grant funds this quarter’s payroll. The constraint is real, and direct booking solves part of it. Institutions book the travel and accommodation in their own names, paying the vendors directly. The artist doesn’t front a dollar. The honorarium follows the work as fast as the institution’s actual cash position allows, and the contract says so up front. It’s the same for the junior employee on her first work trip. Expecting a 24-year-old development associate to put $1,800 on her credit card and wait three weeks for the reimbursement check is absurd. The institution books the flight and the hotel and registers her for the conference. She shows up ready to do the work.

Some of this may eventually require new infrastructure, including an intermediary that advances artist payments against institutional receivables. But most of it already falls inside the authority of the person about to make the call.

Before anyone asks an artist or junior staff member for time, one question should come first.

Is the money already on the table, and will it land in their account before the work begins?

If the answer’s no, don’t make the call. Find the budget first and move the check run. Stop transferring the institution’s cash management problem onto the people who can least afford to absorb it.

I owe the two artists I called an apology. Taking them to lunch afterward isn’t one. Lunch is the gesture institutions use to paper over both practices: the invitation that came with no honorarium and the check that arrives a month after the work ends. The apology that means anything puts the money in their accounts, in full, with expenses. That work is still in front of me.

The dancer from the funder call has had a standing arrangement with me for years now: any engagement I’m part of brings her in on advance terms. The junior staff member is the harder case. She doesn’t work for me anymore and I can’t fix what I should have fixed when she did. The best I can do is name what was done to her, and to a generation of others like her, where she might read it and understand that the institution had trained her to ask the wrong question.

We built institutions on this. The free labor and the late check are inside the model. The artist is not the lender. Calling the practice by its right name is the first move in stopping it.

She had reason to. Weeks earlier, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb told the Associated Press he would step down in 2030, when his contract ends. He has since walked that back, telling the New York Times he has no real wish to leave in 2030 and calling the earlier comment an errant remark. He has run the Met since 2006. By 2030 that will be twenty-four years, one of the longest tenures any general manager has had at the company. His contract was renewed through 2030 last September, during a stretch in which the Met drew its endowment down by more than a hundred million dollars, announced layoffs and salary cuts, and scheduled its smallest mainstage season in six decades. The departure he announced, then unannounced, was reported, naturally, as a retirement. That word matters.

I’m not arguing that every woman in these cases was wronged or that every man left under ideal circumstances. Leadership is complicated. Some departures are warranted. People are sometimes wrong for the job and the board has to act. I’ve been on both sides of that. No single case here proves anything, and a few of them are genuinely contested. “Fired,” here, means more than formal termination. It covers pressured resignation, a role quietly restructured, authority curtailed until the job stops being the job, and exits managed without the dignity men in the same seats are more often shown.

The ambiguity around these departures is itself the subject here. Resignation, restructuring, transition, nonrenewal, and “not a good fit” are the words institutions use to make leadership endings legible without making them fully knowable.

In November 2025, the Philadelphia Art Museum fired its director and CEO, Sasha Suda, three years into a five-year contract. The board voted 12-0. Within three weeks, the museum had named Daniel Weiss, the former CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as her replacement. Suda has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit alleging that a faction of the board opposed her modernization efforts and manufactured a pretext for her dismissal. The museum has denied this and countered with claims of misappropriated funds. I’m not trying to adjudicate the case here. The sequence remains hard to ignore: a woman brought in during a period of institutional change says she ran into resistance from parts of the board, was terminated, and was replaced within weeks by a man already familiar to the board, a man who had served the museum as a governance consultant and who, according to Suda’s lawsuit, had called it “a very dysfunctional board.” Whether Suda’s claims prevail or not, the public shape of the ending fits the question Pasternak raised.

In February 2025, Sandra Jackson-Dumont departed the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art after five years as its inaugural director and CEO. Jackson-Dumont had helped build the institution from scratch, grown the collection, hired senior leadership, and shepherded a billion-dollar construction project through years of delay. Then the founders split her role. Lucas took over content direction. Jim Gianopulos, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, became interim CEO. The official statement thanked her for her “transformative leadership.” At the same forum, Jackson-Dumont pointed to the attrition of women she had hired into senior roles.

In June 2025, Kim Sajet resigned as director of the National Portrait Gallery after twelve years. She was the first woman to hold the position. Her departure came two weeks after President Trump announced on social media that he had fired her, calling her “highly partisan” and a “strong supporter of DEI.” He did not appear to have the legal authority to do so; the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents governs personnel decisions. Sajet kept showing up for work. The board met twice. Then she resigned, framing the decision as putting the institution first.

In February 2026, Laurence des Cars resigned as director of the Louvre after months of pressure following a $102 million jewel heist that exposed security failures. She had been the Louvre’s first female director in its 230-year history. A report years earlier had flagged serious vulnerabilities at the museum, well before des Cars took the job. The weakness was already there.

The consequences landed on her. Her replacement was named within twenty-four hours: Christophe Leribault, who had already replaced her once before when she left the Musée d’Orsay.

Outside museums, the question carries over. Nataki Garrett was hired in 2019 as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s first Black artistic director, and she inherited the pandemic, wildfires, and a financial crisis that predated her arrival. Over the next four years she raised $19 million, faced death threats, and saw executive responsibilities added to and removed from her role in rapid succession. She resigned during an emergency fundraising drive.

Men more often leave differently.

Daniel Weiss left the Met after eight years for a professorship at Johns Hopkins, then was pulled back into museum leadership to replace Suda in Philadelphia. Thomas Campbell resigned from the Met under pressure in 2017, but even that departure was managed as a resignation. He then landed as Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Peter Gelb, whatever the institutional weather around him, sets his own clock. A handful of names isn’t a finding. It’s a prompt to go look.

Pasternak was not making a claim about any one case. She was naming something larger, a recurring difference in how the sector handles endings. Race almost certainly shapes some of these departures too. Gender is the pattern I’m pulling at here, and it deserves its own accounting.

The individual stories are contested, some of them sharply. Sajet resigned. Des Cars resigned. Jackson-Dumont was “restructured.” Those categories are also what keep the pattern from being proven one case at a time. Each departure has a defensible institutional account. Read alone, none of them is bias. Read together, they start to look like something. And there’s no way to know which reading is right, because nobody has done the work that would settle it. There’s no longitudinal study of how cultural sector leaders leave their positions, disaggregated by gender. We don’t know whether women are more likely to be fired in their first five years, whether men receive longer runways, or how often women are restructured out of roles in ways that avoid the appearance of termination. That absence is not neutral. It is part of the condition that allows every case to be explained away alone.

Helen Lewis has the June 2026 Atlantic cover story on the men who say openly that women should hold less power and vote less. The loud version of misogyny is easier to recognize because it announces itself. The version at issue here rarely does. It runs through board votes, search notices, contract language, and the word “transition.” It barely gets counted.

The departure data may be missing, but the surrounding leadership data is not. The AAMD’s 2017 gender gap study found that female art museum directors earned 73 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned; at encyclopedic museums, the figure dropped to 69 cents. That same study showed men dominating director seats at the largest and best-funded museums, while women clustered lower on the budget ladder, and it noted that search consultants saw board members favoring candidates who looked like them. The 2024 AAM Museum Board Leadership report points the same way: women lead many museums, but disproportionately the smallest-budget ones. AAMD has not, as far as I can tell, published a comparable update to that gender gap report.

The performing arts do not offer much comfort. In nonprofit theater, women have never held more than 27 percent of leadership positions at LORT member theaters. OPERA America has reported that while women hold more administrative roles than men overall in opera companies, they’re not being advanced into senior leadership. Women account for 73 percent of the entire nonprofit arts labor force, yet at the top of the largest institutions they remain the exception. There’s also research suggesting that when women do reach those roles, they’re disproportionately appointed during periods of institutional crisis, what researchers call the “glass cliff,” when organizations promote women into jobs already structured for failure.

The Burns Halperin Report documents representation in the art world, and Museums Moving Forward is collecting data on workplace equity. The specific work Pasternak called for still hasn’t been done: a systematic look across the cultural sector at who leaves, how they leave, and whether gender helps predict the manner of departure. You can’t seriously address a recurring structural problem that nobody is measuring clearly.

Some of this starts in evaluation language. Research on gender and leadership evaluation has repeatedly found that women receive more personality-based criticism than men: abrasive, aggressive, difficult, bossy. The same assertiveness that gets a male director described as decisive or demanding can get a female director described as difficult. Boards absorb that language. It shapes how they read conflict, how they assess leadership, and eventually whether they decide to back their director or move on from her. When a board tells itself that the director “isn’t a good fit” or “doesn’t work well with the team,” that judgment deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.

Whatever these departures turn out to mean, the board is where the pattern becomes action. Boards hire and fire. They restructure roles. Boards decide whether to protect a leader from political pressure or let her resign to “put the institution first.” They decide whether a director gets a graceful exit, a 12-0 vote, a lawsuit, a runway, a farewell, or a renewed contract during difficult years. If gender shapes how cultural leaders leave, it shapes it through board judgment. That makes the board the place the question has to be asked. When a departure fractures a board or prompts a city’s civic groups to demand an explanation, governance is no longer a background issue.

Some of the most consequential governance failures don’t arrive looking dramatic. A director leaves. A statement gets issued. The institution keeps moving. What often goes unasked is whether the process was fair, whether the standards were consistent, and whether that chain of events would have unfolded the same way if the person in the role had been a man. Right now, the sector doesn’t really have a way to answer that with confidence.

In the meantime, every board in the cultural sector ought to be asking itself a question that doesn’t appear on most governance checklists: when we evaluate a leader, and when we decide whether to support or replace that person, are we applying the same standards regardless of who is in the chair?

That question alone would surface more than most boards want to admit.

Pasternak said this with reporters in the room, and didn’t soften it.

“I’m petrified about what’s happening to leadership in our country, and particularly in our field. I think that if we were to take a look at the people — the museum leaders — who have lost their jobs, curators and directors in recent years, we would find that men retire and women get fired. And I’m not seeing any data on this. If anybody is in the press here, I’d like for you to study it.”

Her request for a systematic study has gone unanswered. Recently, The New York Times ran another long feature on Peter Gelb, under the headline “Does This Man Have the ‘Most Difficult Job on Earth’?” Inside it, Gelb sets his own timeline, revisits the part he regrets, and is taken at his word. The board, by the account of its own chairman, very much wants him to stay. A man twenty years into the job reconsiders his exit, and the coverage treats the reconsidering as a story worth telling at length. He runs an institution that has drawn its endowment down by more than a third, lost a Saudi deal worth a reported $200 million, and weighed selling the Chagall murals in its own lobby to cover the gap. The hardest job on Earth, the headline wonders. Garrett ran a festival through overlapping crises and answered death threats while she did it. Des Cars ran the Louvre, the most-visited museum in the world, and inherited a security failure she had not created. Sajet kept working through a president publicly demanding her removal. I haven’t seen a headline like that over any of them. The women in these cases appear as departures to be managed. Gelb appears as a leader whose difficulty deserves interpretation. The departures are there to be counted. Someone has to decide to count them.

Pasternak said it out loud. The program moved on.

The study still hasn’t been done.

The essay is wrong. It’s also careful, well informed, and completely representative of how the field has been taught to think, which is why it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. A version of it could have been written by any number of experienced people in Berry’s position.

Here’s what he proposes. Opera should appeal to the tech sector’s appetite for disruption. Break the fourth wall, push the stage into the audience, borrow the methods of commercial theater. Give wealthy donors latitude and access, bring them into rehearsals, let them feel the scale of the room. Show them measurable public value, the kind of social return that can be documented and proven out with data. Open board seats to tech billionaires from abroad. Learn marketing from the people best in the world at capturing attention. Move what goes onstage toward musicals and crossover work, toward programming that might pique a modern philanthropist’s curiosity.

At first this sounds like pragmatism. Stay with it a little longer and the bargain underneath starts to show.

Every prescription in the essay flows from one buried assumption. The institution’s survival is the goal, and the funder’s preferences are the fixed point that everything else has to bend around. The art is a variable. So are the governance, the programming, the staging, the board, and the way the institution presents itself to the world. The single thing held constant is whatever the billionaire happens to want. Berry has written, in good faith, a guide to reshaping a four-hundred-year-old art form with deep civic claims around the psychology of the people who hold the money. That it’s written in good faith is exactly what makes it worth answering.

The deeper trouble is the vocabulary. Berry writes about data points, social impact, public value, disruption, audiences as a market to be built. None of that language is neutral. It’s the language the nonprofit arts sector adopted over the last forty years to justify itself to power, and it was always going to lead somewhere like this. Once you agree to describe an opera as a delivery mechanism for measurable social return, you’ve conceded that its worth depends on what it returns, and to whom, and whether the return can be documented. You’ve agreed to be evaluated on the funder’s terms, in the funder’s units, by the funder’s clock. The essay’s fluency in that language isn’t a tactic. It’s evidence of a surrender that happened so long ago the field no longer remembers it was a choice.

I know how that surrender feels from the inside, because I spent years inside it. It doesn’t feel like surrender. It feels like competence. It feels like finally speaking the language the room respects. You learn to talk about impact and leverage and scale because those are the words that move the conversation toward a check, and after enough years the words stop being translation and become the way you think. I did this. I got good at it.

And I can’t claim I didn’t know better. I first learned about cost disease as an undergraduate, in a public finance class at the University of Rochester, long before I ran anything. That structural truth was handed to me early. I spent a career in a field that had organized itself around not saying it. You start to believe the case for culture really is a case about outcomes, that the opera really does have to prove its social return, that the burden of justification sits with the art instead of with a society that has decided, year after year, to underfund it. Berry’s essay is what that belief sounds like when someone says it out loud and feels no need to apologize for it.

One moment in the piece I can’t let pass. Berry writes that we shouldn’t ask the tech titans to save a struggling art form, because in their “cultural Darwinism” they may decide it deserves to die. He offers this calmly, less as an alarm than as a market condition to design around. Invite them instead, he suggests, to help invent a newer version of opera, something that might hold their interest.

Read that again. A former artistic director of a national opera company has written that the people with money may conclude opera deserves to die, and that the right response is to remake opera into something they’d rather have. The verdict over whether a civic art form goes on living belongs, in this framing, to whoever happens to be richest in a given decade. That isn’t a hard-headed concession to reality. It’s the entire argument, surfacing for one honest moment, and it’s the thing I most want to refuse. The survival of opera is not a portfolio decision. The day the field agrees that it is, the field has handed away the most important question it holds, and handed it to people under no obligation to answer it well.

There’s a deeper absence. Berry writes well over a thousand words about what opera must become to deserve tech money. He invokes public value, but the public appears mainly as evidence to be shown to donors. Audiences become a market to be built, a data point to be generated, a funnel to be widened. What never enters the frame is the public as the body to whom the institution owes an account of itself. Nothing in the essay suggests that an opera house in an American city might owe something to that city, to its public school students, to the artists who live there, to the democratic idea that a society is poorer when its cultural life gets rationed by private wealth. The essay can’t ask what opera owes the public, because the language it’s written in has no word for the public in that sense. It only has words for the market.

The crisis Berry describes is real. I don’t dispute the basic diagnosis. Box office income is down. Costs are up. The donor base is aging out. The new concentrations of wealth genuinely are more drawn to longevity research and rockets than to a night at the opera. All true. But the diagnosis treats the gap between what opera earns and what it costs as a recent failure, something opera fell into and could climb back out of with sharper management. It isn’t. Sixty years ago, Baumol and Bowen studied the performing arts and named the thing precisely: cost disease. A live art form can’t raise its productivity the way a factory can. Mahler’s first symphony still needs 100 musicians and the same sixty minutes it needed over a century ago. The gap between cost and earned income isn’t a sign of mismanagement. It’s a permanent structural feature of the art, the price of having it at all.

The field has known this since 1966. The idea is foundational enough to be taught in arts administration programs across the country. And yet the sector spent the last four decades describing itself in a language that quietly denies it, the language of productivity and leverage and measurable return, a vocabulary built on the promise that the gap can be closed. Berry writes in that language fluently. So the diagnosis reverses cause and effect. The crisis isn’t that opera failed to market itself skillfully enough to billionaires. The crisis is that the field adopted a vocabulary that made it permanently dependent on their approval, and then forgot that it had done so. Someone who knows the field well sits down and writes an earnest guide to getting Jeff Bezos through the door, the Times runs it, and almost no one blinks, because the premise underneath it is one the whole field already shares.

The real question isn’t how opera makes itself legible to tech wealth. It’s whether opera can remember what it’s accountable to. Only one of those questions has a future inside it. An institution that knows what it owes the public, that can say plainly why it exists and to whom it answers, can take money from a tech founder or a sovereign wealth fund or a line in a city budget and still remain itself, because it walks into the room holding a fixed point of its own. An institution with no center of gravity gets reshaped by every dollar it accepts, and it doesn’t experience the reshaping as loss. It experiences it as strategy. It feels clever in the moment, and the cleverness is the cover. You don’t notice what you gave up, because giving it up looked, at the time, like good management.

None of this means opera should refuse tech money. Money is money. A house that needs it should go after it, hard. But the pursuit can’t come first. If an institution decides what it is and what it owes before it walks into the donor’s office, the conversation that follows is a negotiation between two parties with something to offer each other. If it walks in having already agreed to become whatever the donor finds interesting, it isn’t a negotiation. It’s an audition, and the art is the thing being auditioned.

So what does that center of gravity actually look like? It isn’t a mission statement, and it isn’t a slogan about community. It’s a set of commitments an institution can name and then defend when defending them costs money, which is the only test that means anything. A commitment to the artists in its own city, not only the ones with global followings. A commitment to a public that includes people who will never buy a full-price ticket and never sit on a board. A commitment to the plain idea that the work has worth whether or not that worth shows up in a foundation report. An institution holding commitments like those can sit across from a tech founder and have a real conversation, because it brought something into the room the founder can’t buy: a clear account of why it exists. The founder can fund that account or walk away from it. What the founder cannot do is rewrite it. Berry’s essay imagines the opposite arrangement, the one where the account itself is on offer, and the rewriting gets sold back to the field as innovation.

Berry ends with a sentence I agree with completely. The performing arts, at their best, have always made people believe in things they couldn’t quite explain, and that, he writes, is the most powerful argument the field has. He’s right. But you cannot make that argument in the language of data points and social return. The thing that can’t quite be explained is the first thing destroyed when you agree to explain it in the funder’s units. If that’s the most powerful argument the field has, and it is, then the field has to be willing to make it as itself, in its own language, to a public it is genuinely willing to answer to. Doing that is harder than learning to market opera to billionaires. It’s slower, and it may lose some rooms in the short term. It’s also the only version of this work that was ever worth funding in the first place.

Since I wrote the open letter to early-career arts leaders late last year, my inbox has changed. The early messages were about whether to keep going at all.

The messages I’ve been getting lately are more specific. They’re from people early in their careers who have their first or second job. They worked for it, they earned it, and now they’re sitting inside it and getting scared. The fear isn’t really about whether they can do the work. What scares them is what the institution might make of them. The phrase I see in those emails, almost word for word, is some version of “I’m afraid I’ll be pigeonholed.” In development. In marketing. As an administrative assistant. In whatever box the institution slotted them into when it hired them.

Getting the first job is some mix of luck, hard work, and someone deciding to take a chance on you. That part the field still mostly knows how to do, even if it doesn’t do it equitably. The part the field has almost no infrastructure for is what comes next. How a job becomes a career. How you stop being the person who answers the development director’s emails and start becoming someone with range, someone the field knows for more than one thing. For some of you that will eventually mean running a department or an institution. For others it won’t, and that’s not a failure. It means becoming the kind of professional whose next move is yours to shape rather than the institution’s to assign. Most people learn this by rumor or by damage. You’re not crazy to be scared.

The second job either hardens the first label or starts to break it. The next move matters. But the work that makes it possible is happening now.

Institutions assign the first label. The development associate. The marketing coordinator. The operations assistant. Someone in the room when you were hired made a decision about what slot you were the answer to, and that slot becomes your title and your scope and your perceived range. What you can fight is whether the label hardens into your identity. The label arrives on day one, but the identity gets built later, over three years and a hundred small acquiescences. You become “the events person” because you said yes to running another event. The digital person, because you were the youngest one in the room when Instagram mattered. Artist services, because you happened to be nearby when the artist needed something. None of those labels are wrong on the day they arrive. They become wrong because the institution keeps reinforcing them, and you keep accepting the reinforcement. After two years nobody asks you about anything else, you’ve stopped offering, and the label is doing the work that used to be your decision to make.

The cost shows up later, in ways you don’t notice while it’s happening. You become the person called when something needs running. The person called when something needs naming is someone else, and you start to forget you ever wanted to be that other person. The strategy meeting happens and you’re in it as the execution hand, taking notes other people will refer back to, costing things out, telling the room what’s possible inside the existing structure. Nobody asks what the structure should be. The board chair learns your name in the context of competence, almost never in the context of imagination. By year five you’ve built a reputation you can’t easily contradict, because the institution has spent five years collecting evidence for it and almost none against. What pigeonholes you in the end isn’t a smaller job. It’s a narrower version of who you let yourself be inside it.

Some of you reading this don’t feel you have many choices. You took the first job that came along because you needed to eat. Or because the field is harder to break into than it was thirty years ago. Or because you’re a person of color or a first-generation arts professional or someone for whom the offer itself felt like permission to belong. Some of what I’m saying assumes leverage you may not have, and I know that. The first job is still teaching you the instincts you’ll need for whatever comes after it, even when you didn’t pick this one and don’t get to pick the next.

The first job can become a calibration role, though the institution probably didn’t design it for your development. You have to steal that use from it. The work may not position you neatly for the next job. What it can do, if you let it, is teach you what kind of leader you actually are, before the stakes are high enough that you can’t afford to find out. It may be the only place in your career where the institution absorbs your mistakes as part of your formation rather than treating them as defects.

That window closes fast. By the second job, the questions you ask in week one will be filed as evidence of your judgment. By the third, you’re expected to be the person other people come to. Many early-career people miss this. They treat the first job as a placeholder, spend two years performing competence, take the next move that looks like a promotion, and arrive at job two having learned almost nothing they couldn’t have learned at job one. And the label tightens in the meantime, because the second job gets offered to you based on what the first one made you look like from outside.

You think the first job is about fundraising, programming, board management, operations. Those things matter and you should learn them. What the first job is really teaching you, though, is the thing the curriculum never names. How institutions actually make decisions, versus how they tell themselves they make them. Who has informal power and how they got it. The way money moves through an organization in ways the budget doesn’t show. How a board chair’s mood ends up shaping three months of programming. The quiet resentment of one senior staff member, killing initiatives nobody can explain the failure of. You learn this only by watching closely, and by being inside an institution long enough to see it happen. Your job is never just the tasks on the job description. It is the people you work beside, the work nobody formally assigned, and the parts of the institution you only understand because you were close enough to watch them move. That map of how the place actually works, more than any skill you developed in your assigned slot, is what protects you from the pigeonhole later.

About the next move. The right answer isn’t always directly up.

Almost everyone around you, your peers, the people you love, the colleagues a rung or two up, will tend to reward the same thing: the move that reads as up. The promotion, the bigger institution, the larger title, the wider scope. Watch what happens to the people ten years ahead of you who took every one of those moves on schedule. A lot of them end up climbing an org chart they never quite understood. They took the job that looked impressive and discovered six months in that the work was narrower than what they’d been doing before. The politics absorbed more energy than the program. The scope they were promised dissolved the moment they signed. They moved up and got smaller. The pigeonhole just changed institutions. You’re early enough that none of this has to happen to you. Wanting to lead one day is a fine thing to want. The trouble starts when up becomes the only direction you can imagine, and you take each move on the schedule someone else set rather than the one your own formation calls for.

A lateral move, taken deliberately, will sometimes teach you more than a promotion and do more to break the category you’ve been assigned to. Going from associate at a major institution to a senior role at a smaller one looks like a step backward. It almost never is. You see more, you get trusted with more, you make visible mistakes and recover from them faster than you would climbing inside a structure where you’re mostly watching other people lead. It’s undervalued. Let it stay that way. You’re allowed to choose the job that will teach you more, even if it’s the one nobody congratulates you for taking. The better question is whether the job will stretch you out of the category the first one assigned to you. If you do want to lead someday, this is usually how the people who lead well got ready for it. They built range before they needed it, in rooms small enough that they could see the whole of what they were doing.

The two-year tenure has become standard. In the wrong role, it is also corrosive. You can learn the surface of many jobs in two years, and almost nothing of what the job actually is. A full strategic cycle doesn’t happen in that window. Neither does a board chair turnover. The relationships that teach you who you become when the work gets hard don’t form on that timeline. The people who stay four or five years in the right early-career roles develop a depth their faster-moving peers often won’t have. They have to trust it’s real before the resume shows it. I know this is asking a lot. The incentives are built against you here. I’m still asking.

Sometimes the calibration role is breaking you and you have to leave. The hard part is knowing the difference between a job that’s building you and a job that’s consuming you, because they will sometimes feel the same from the inside. What you’re watching for is whether the difficulty is teaching you something or just eating you. A boss who pushes you hard and supports you when nobody’s looking is building you. One who performs support publicly and undermines you privately is consuming you. The same test works on a board or a senior colleague whose anxiety needs a target. Pay attention to who you are on Sunday nights, whether you’re getting sharper or just more tired, whether the difficult conversations are leaving you with new clarity or just more wreckage. If you’ve been there long enough to know which one you’re in, trust what you know.

The move you don’t make matters as much as the move you do. The job you turned down because the chemistry was off and you couldn’t name why. The offer a friend passed your way that you didn’t take, because something about how people there talked about the person who’d just left told you more than the job description did. These don’t appear on your resume. They appear in your trajectory. The right “no” this early is worth more than three easy yeses, even if nobody rewards you for the no. You’ll have to reward yourself.

What you’re looking for at job two isn’t a bigger version of job one. It’s a job that uses what the first one taught you about yourself. By now you’ve seen yourself under authority, in crisis, being underestimated. If you learned that you do your best work in small teams where you can see everyone’s face, don’t take a job in an institution of two hundred. A passive manager who leaves you to figure everything out alone will break something in you if what you need is someone who pushes and tells you the truth. And if you’ve been labeled as one kind of professional but you know yourself to be a different kind, take the job that lets the other kind show. The career that survives the pigeonhole is the one whose throughline you wrote yourself.

Some of the moves that save you from the pigeonhole will look strange at the time. Staying longer than your peers may be the right choice. So may taking the job that teaches more and impresses less, or passing on the promotion everyone else thinks you should want. A career can wander and still be yours. The danger is letting other people make the turns for you.

None of my own career was planned. I started as an operations assistant and receptionist. Then came an orchestra management fellowship, Seattle, Detroit, and eventually, at thirty-one, a president’s job I didn’t think I was ready for. The board chair put me in the seat anyway. Looking back, even that strange path was still a ladder. The orchestra world had a route, and I climbed it faster than I should have. The pivot that wasn’t a ladder came later, when I left orchestras to build something at a university, and again when I moved to philanthropy. Someone later called that the drunken walk, and I’ve never found a better name for that kind of career. The calibration was happening the whole time. I just wasn’t paying attention to it yet. I learned some of that in public, over four years in Detroit, and I still carry parts of it.

You’re sitting with the question now, before the stakes get that high. The pigeonhole you’re afraid of is real. So is your ability to step out of it, if you start paying attention before the next move stops being yours to make.

With care,

Emil

You took it knowing it would be another job stacked on top of your actual one. The inbox carries a low-grade hum of operational anxiety that the chair of a forty-person board never has to feel. You may be the largest donor. You’re the person the ED calls when something is on fire at ten at night, the de facto governance committee and the de facto nominating committee and probably the de facto audit committee too.

You took it because the mission matters, and because someone had to hold the role seriously.

Your role looks nothing like ceremonial governance. You signed up for harder, less visible, more consequential work, and most weeks nobody will notice. Thank you for doing it.

But your job is not to become the missing infrastructure. Your job is to build enough infrastructure that the organization no longer has to survive through your overextension.

This essay is for chairs of organizations that are small in the way that matters: by condition, not just by budget or staff count. These are organizations where the loss of one staff member is consequential, cash flow is fragile, fundraising is continuous rather than cyclical, and the executive leader is involved in nearly every aspect of the work. Some readers will be at $400K with a staff of three. Others will be at $1.5M with a staff of seven. A few will be larger on paper but still operating this way because they were never properly capitalized. I wrote earlier this year about what small arts organization leaders are asked to bear. This is the companion piece, for the person standing across the table from them.

Small organizations aren’t one thing. This may be a culturally specific theater, a niche chamber music presenter, a rural community arts center, a queer dance collective, or a Black-led literary nonprofit. The conditions in this essay cut across them, but community-rooted organizations also carry relationships the dominant culture often doesn’t see and can’t easily measure. That belongs in any honest conversation about success at this scale.

You cannot do this alone

The most common failure mode for chairs at this scale isn’t laziness. It’s the opposite. The chair who loves the organization and takes the seat seriously slowly absorbs more and more of the work other people should be doing. The trustee who hasn’t shown up in three meetings? You cover for them. The committee that doesn’t really function? You do its work yourself. The strategic question the board should be wrestling with? You answer it in advance because you’ve been thinking about it longer than anyone else.

A year into your tenure, you’re doing the work of three roles. Two years in, you’re exhausted. The rest of the board is more passive than when you started. Your ED is making fewer independent decisions because too many of them now route through you.

The problem is not that you worked too little. The problem is that you worked too much in the wrong direction.

Then you start to resent it. You’re the chair. You may also be the largest donor. You wrote the year-end appeal because nobody else would. You made the calls to the two trustees who weren’t going to renew their gifts. You sat through the budget review nobody else read. Around month eighteen, you start to notice that nobody else seems to care the way you do.

The resentment is not irrational. The asymmetry is real. You are carrying more than they are. By any honest measure of time, money, and attention, you may even care more.

But resentment will end your chairship badly if you let it harden. It will leak into board meetings as an edge in your voice that other trustees feel before they name it. It will leak into your relationship with the ED as a quiet expectation that they should be grateful in proportion to your sacrifice. Eventually, you may not know whether you’re staying because you love the work or because leaving feels like abandonment.

The fact that other trustees carry less may not only be a character problem. It may also be a system you helped build. Every time you absorbed work that belonged to them, you taught them they didn’t need to do it. Every time you wrote the appeal yourself instead of requiring the development committee to do its work, you confirmed that the committee was optional. Every time you covered for the disengaged trustee instead of having the conversation, you protected the seat from accountability and signaled to everyone else that disengagement carried no cost.

You may have helped build the dynamic you’re now resenting. You did it with the best of intentions. Overfunctioning is devotion in disguise. The disguise is what does the damage. The way out is not more heroic effort. The way out is to stop closing the gap with your own labor and let the gap become visible, and to use that visibility as the basis for actual board change.

Sometimes overfunctioning is covering a deeper problem. In a small organization, there’s almost no insulation between the chair and the ED. If the two of you don’t trust each other, redistributing tasks won’t fix the issue. That’s no longer a workload problem. It’s a leadership and governance problem, and it deserves to be named directly. But chairs should be careful here. “I had to do it myself” can be true, and it can also be the story overfunctioning tells to protect itself.

You see too much

That is the structural problem nobody names. The chair of a forty-person board sees polished reports. The development office produces a fundraising summary that has already been reviewed three times. The communications team sends an update that has been workshopped for tone. The CFO presents financials in a format designed for people who don’t live in spreadsheets all day. They see the work after it has been packaged for them.

You don’t have that buffer. You see the donor letter your ED drafted at 11pm on a Sunday before it goes out, because they sent it to you for a quick review and you noticed the typo. You see the program insert. You see the social media post that was meant to be casual and now reads, to you, as slightly off-brand. You see the email exchange with the difficult board member because you were copied on it. You see all of it. Because you see it, you have opinions. Because you have opinions, and because you are the chair, your opinions land like instructions even when you frame them as questions.

Micromanagement is rarely corrosive because the chair is wrong. The chair may even be right. The donor letter could be better. The program insert may have a design issue. The chair, in many cases, has more experience than the person who produced the work.

The corrosive thing is what happens to the staff who receive it. Your ED, who already has no peer inside the building, now has another set of opinions to absorb from someone who outranks them. Decisions slow because everyone is anticipating the chair’s view. Staff stop bringing forward work that isn’t finished, because finished work is the only kind safe to share. You then start seeing only the polished version and wondering why the organization feels so opaque, not realizing you trained it to be that way.

The phrase to keep close is: not my call. The program insert design is not my call. The wording of the social media post is not my call. Visibility is not authority.

They are not your audience

Some chairs slip into treating other board members as people to manage or please. It usually starts gently. You don’t want to upset the largest donor on the board. The founder-emeritus trustee shouldn’t feel sidelined. So you adjust. You curate the agenda, soften the summary, preview the hard topics, and smooth the edges.

A few months in, you’ve turned the board into something it was never supposed to be. The chair has become the responsible party, and everyone else has become an audience the chair has to keep comfortable. Meetings turn into reports the chair delivers and the trustees receive. Decisions arrive in the meeting already half-made because the chair pre-cooked them. The other trustees do less than they used to, not because they’re lazy, but because the chair has trained them to expect that the chair will handle it.

This isn’t governance. It’s a one-person show with a quorum.

The premise of a small board is that all five or six trustees are responsible for the organization. The chair role exists because someone has to coordinate, set agendas, and hold the partnership with the ED. You are not the senior trustee. The others do not report to you. You’re a trustee with a coordinating function. The legal liability is shared. The fiduciary responsibility is shared. The duty to the mission is shared. Running the meeting does not put you on a different floor from the people around the table.

When a hard question arrives, don’t pre-answer it. Bring it to the board unresolved. When a trustee misses two meetings, don’t cover for them. Name it, with care. When a decision needs to be made, let the meeting be where it actually happens.

The alignment problem

A small organization that has grown from $200K to $700K in five years is not just bigger. It’s mid-transformation. The board you have may have been assembled when the budget was a third of what it is now. The job descriptions on file don’t match what the staff is actually doing. The mission statement from year two has been rewritten in practice three times, but never on paper. Trustees who joined when the organization was smaller may not fully understand what they’re approving when the budget comes up for vote.

Growth happens faster than alignment does. The organization is moving, the board is approving programs, the staff is implementing strategy. But the connecting tissue is often missing: a shared understanding of what the organization is now and what it’s becoming.

This is your work as chair. You’re not producing the strategic plan. You’re not staging the retreat. You’re making sure the board and the staff are governing the same organization.

One test is simple. Ask each trustee, separately, to describe the organization in two sentences. Ask the staff the same thing. If the answers cluster, you have alignment. If the answers don’t cluster, your governance is operating on the assumption of a shared picture that doesn’t actually exist.

As the organization keeps growing, the gap between what the board thinks it is and what the staff is actually doing will reopen. Your job is to keep closing it. Bring staff into board conversations more often than the usual rhythm suggests. Ask the ED to walk the board through what’s changed in the last year, not just the financials but the substance of the work. Reconcile the written mission with the operational reality. Either update the mission or change the operations, but don’t let them drift.

Alignment is the chair’s lever. The staff can’t fix board misalignment. The ED often can’t raise it without trustees feeling challenged. You can. Keep asking whether everyone is governing the same organization.

The peer circle

The role is lonelier than it looks. EDs often have peer networks. Most chairs of small organizations are flying solo.

Build one. Three or four chairs at roughly similar scale, not necessarily all in the arts, meeting quarterly with enough trust to be honest. A chair of a community health clinic, a youth services nonprofit, an immigrant services organization, or an environmental advocacy group may ask the question another arts chair would miss. Someone outside your organization needs to be able to tell you when your devotion has become part of the problem.

A word on tenure

Boards need term limits. Chairs should usually rotate every three to six years. But the chair of a small organization is different. At this scale, the chair may be the exception that proves the rule. The reason is structural.

On a board of thirty, the chair’s departure is absorbed by the rest of the body. The executive committee maintains continuity. The development office holds the donor relationships. The institutional memory does not walk out with the chair because it was never held by the chair alone. Three-year terms work because the system is built to absorb the turnover.

On a board of six, none of that is true. The chair walks out with the institutional memory, the donor relationships, the working understanding of how the ED actually operates, and the year-over-year context that lets governance feel like governance rather than starting over. A new chair every three years can mean an organization in perpetual rebuilding of its top governance relationship. The ED is destabilized. The major donors have to be reintroduced. The institutional rhythm has to be rebuilt.

So the chair of a small organization may need to stay longer. Six years, sometimes seven. The longer tenure is the appropriate response to the structural reality of your scale. It’s not permission to become permanent. The longer you stay, the more the organization comes to depend on you specifically. Every major donor calls you. Every funder associates you with the organization. The ED’s authority can become contingent on your support. When you finally leave, the organization can spend two years recovering from a transition that should have taken six months.

The work of a long chairship is to undo your own indispensability from the beginning. Each year, ask: what is the organization less dependent on me for now? Introduce other trustees to the major donors. Bring colleagues to funder meetings. Write down what you know. Identify your successor early. Let the ED disagree with you publicly, and back them when they do. Do not spend your final year fixing what you should have fixed in year two.

Time served is not the metric. Transferable strength is. A chair who can leave at year six with the next chair prepared, major donors comfortable working with someone else, the ED operating with independent authority, and institutional knowledge stored outside your head has done the work.

If you do this well, the organization will miss you for a few weeks when you leave. Then it will be fine.

What the work looks like

Your executive director is still in the seat three years from now. In small arts organizations, leadership tenure can be fragile. Three years of healthy continued leadership is a governance achievement. If your ED is still doing work they’re proud of at year three, still in a relationship with you that both of you would describe the same way, you’ve done something rare.

You know what your ED is carrying. Not the dashboard. The donor who hasn’t returned a call in four months. The staff member who is struggling and may need to leave. The artistic risk they haven’t brought to the full board. If you can name three pressures appropriate to your role that the full board does not yet understand, you have the relationship. If you can’t, you don’t, regardless of how often the two of you meet.

You have moved a trustee off the board. Their service had run its course, or the organization’s needs changed, or they quietly stopped showing up. Most chairs avoid this conversation. The trustee is a friend. The chair decides it’s not worth the disruption. Success means you’ve had at least one of these conversations during your tenure and the organization is better for it.

Your giving and your authority have started to separate. As chair, you’re probably the largest donor or among the top three. Every interaction in the boardroom is shaped by that fact, whether anyone acknowledges it or not. Success means other trustees have direct relationships with the major donors you originally cultivated. The ED can disagree with you in front of the board without political cost. Decisions get debated rather than ratified around your preferences. You stopped being treated as the principal of the organization, even when your giving made that fiction convenient.

If the ED leaves near the end of your tenure, you should not chair the search committee. The next ED should not begin their tenure owing you anything personally. The deputy chair or another respected trustee runs the search. You participate, but you do not lead.

The organization is less fragile than it was when you arrived. A reserve fund. A line of credit. A second bookkeeper. Better insurance. Another person with check-signing authority. At least one piece of insulation now exists that did not exist before.

You can answer the real question. If you stepped off the board tomorrow, would the organization be okay? If yes, you have done the job. The relationships are not solely yours. The institutional memory is not held only in your head. The major donors are not only loyal to you personally. If no, you may have made yourself useful in a way that made the organization weaker.

What success isn’t

Success is not the next budget milestone. Budget growth without capacity growth does not make the organization stronger. It makes the fall harder when revenue dips.

Success isn’t a happy board. Some discomfort is the cost of real work. A chair who optimizes for the comfort of the trustees is failing the organization.

Success isn’t how much you personally carried. The temptation to measure your chairship by how exhausted you are at the end of it is real. Resist it. Tired is not a credential. The exhausted chair may also be the chair who absorbed work that should have been distributed.

What this asks of you

Most chairs will not hit all of this. Getting most of it right over six or seven years is enough. The chairs who burn out, exhaust their boards, or leave the seat in worse shape are almost never the lazy ones. They’re the ones who loved the organization so much that they did everyone else’s work and called it love.

The hardest part is restraint. Letting the board do the board’s work when you could do it faster. Holding trustees accountable even when the conversation is awkward. Building a system that doesn’t depend on you and then trusting it.

You’re the person who decides whether the load gets named and slowly redistributed, or whether it stays where it’s always been: on one exhausted leader and a board that doesn’t quite see what it’s asking.

Thank you for doing it. Now build what can survive without you.

Giving and governing have become so entangled in the arts sector that we’ve stopped seeing them as separate things. We treat them as one. And the predictable thing happens: power flows to the people who can write the largest checks. It shapes how organizations make decisions, who gets to make them, and what the institution is allowed to become.

Until we learn to see giving and governing as distinct, boards will keep governing in the shape of their fundraising obligations.

None of this can be restructured overnight. The financial dependencies are real. The give-or-get model is decades deep. Any organization that gets 40 or 50 percent of its contributed revenue from board members can’t unwind that in one fiscal year, or even three. Until another structure replaces that fundraising work, boards will keep doing it.

This is not an argument against major donors. Plenty of wealthy trustees are generous, serious, deeply committed to the institutions they serve. Some are the best board members I’ve worked with. But wealth alone doesn’t make someone best equipped to govern an arts organization, and we’ve built a sector that often acts like it does.

The idea has a long American history. Andrew Carnegie argued in 1889 that the millionaire was “a trustee for the poor,” administering wealth for the community better than the community could do for itself. We’ve quietly absorbed a watered-down version of that logic. Wealth starts to look like fitness to govern the institutions it supports.

Wealth is one form of capacity. Fundraising is a real governance responsibility. Neither is the same as judgment, or perspective, or community knowledge, or the willingness to ask the question the rest of the room is avoiding.

In the give-or-get model, a board seat comes with a price: write a meaningful check or raise the equivalent. The speed of that answer keeps the sector from examining what it produces.

When the price of a seat becomes the main thing that qualifies you for it, an unspoken hierarchy forms inside the board, and it has nothing to do with how well anyone governs. The trustee who gives one hundred thousand dollars a year carries more weight in the room than the trustee who gives five thousand, even when the second person has deeper expertise, sharper questions, or stronger community ties.

Nobody writes that hierarchy down. Every executive director in the country can describe it.

The sector has even built measurement systems around it: give-or-get totals, 100 percent board giving participation, board contribution as a share of budget. These numbers get reported to funders and benchmarked across the field as if they tell us how well a board governs.

They don’t. They tell us how well a board fundraises.

The same dynamic operates in hospitals and universities. A hospital donor who funds a wing carries informal influence over the institution’s priorities. A university donor who endows a chair shapes which fields the institution treats as central. The difference isn’t that these sectors have solved the problem. The difference is that scale lets them formalize a line between giving and authority that smaller institutions can’t afford to draw. A research hospital with a billion-dollar budget can decline a major donor’s preferences without risking the operation. A small clinic in the same hospital network can’t. The arts sector lives mostly at the second scale.

I was thirty-one when I became CEO of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Within two years, we were close to bankruptcy. The pressure I felt from major donors was rarely the kind you could point to in a single decision. It was structural.

You learn very quickly which board members can’t be disappointed. After a while, you can predict which trustees’ aesthetic preferences will shape what gets programmed, postponed, softened, or avoided. Some relationships hold up the budget, and you start treating them as almost untouchable in governance, often without ever naming it to yourself.

A smart leader navigates it. A less experienced one gets destroyed by it. Either way, the mission gets shaped by the checkbook, and the people inside the institution stop noticing because the shaping is constant.

For CEOs and board chairs, all of this becomes a daily problem you can’t set down. A serious share of your attention goes to keeping major donors happy in their governance role, separately from keeping them generous in their donor role. Those are two different jobs. You’re doing both at once, often with the same people, and the lines blur in ways that compromise both.

When the largest giver wants something the institution shouldn’t do, you’re not just managing a donor relationship. You’re managing a governance relationship that could weaken the rest of the board’s willingness to push back.

Carolina Performing Arts had a different structure, one most independent nonprofits can’t simply copy. CPA had an advisory board, not a governing board. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the legal entity. Fiduciary authority lived elsewhere, which meant the advisory board could focus on artistic perspective and audience knowledge, on institutional strategy and civic imagination, without carrying the full legal and fundraising burden of a nonprofit board.

I once had an advisory board chair who was a former chancellor of the university. His authority in the room came from institutional standing, judgment, and trust, not from giving capacity.

Most small and midsized arts nonprofits don’t have that luxury. Their governing board is the legal board. It must approve budgets, hire and evaluate the executive, protect the organization, raise money, and answer for the institution when things go wrong.

Even if smaller nonprofits can’t fully separate giving from governance, they can at least see the difference. Otherwise the give-or-get model becomes the unspoken logic of how the place runs.

Ask what the organization actually needs from its board before asking who can pay for the seat.

The board might need someone who understands the audiences the institution claims to serve and currently doesn’t reach. It might need someone with deep knowledge of artistic production, programming risk, or the specific community where the institution operates. It might need someone who knows what it’s like to be an artist trying to make a living in this country, because that perspective shapes a thousand decisions the board will make about commissions, fees, residencies, and partnerships.

The math gets sharper as the organization gets smaller. A donor who contributes $50,000 a year to a small arts organization can carry the kind of leverage only a multimillion-dollar donor would have at a major institution. The CEO can’t push back without risking the budget, the board can’t disagree without risking the relationship, and the donor never has to be heavy-handed. The numbers do the work.

From the funder side, the pattern was harder to see, which is part of how it survives. We didn’t sit on grantee boards. We didn’t vote on programming. The dependency did the work for us. Even when we tried to be careful, the power imbalance entered the room before we did. Organizations would pitch us projects that sounded like what they thought we wanted to hear rather than what they actually needed to do, and most of them were quite good at it. I sat through years of those meetings before I understood that our caution wasn’t enough to undo the structure we were embedded in.

The current model also creates a familiar class of trustee: the person invited onto the board without meeting the give-or-get. Everyone knows the type. Few say it out loud.

They’re welcomed in language and treated differently in practice. The exclusion isn’t always conscious. When most of a board’s authority comes from giving, a trustee whose authority comes from somewhere else gets weighted less, often without anyone deciding to do it. We’ve built two-tier boards inside what we call single-tier governance, and the people on the lower tier feel it. The line often tracks race, class, and professional status, which is one reason the language of inclusion can feel hollow to trustees invited into the room but not fully weighted inside it.

Boards would have to name what kind of judgment they actually need from trustees. Recruitment can’t keep flowing through the development office’s network. In the meeting itself, in real time, the executive director and the board chair have to defend the legitimacy of trustees whose contribution isn’t financial. The major givers who stay on would have to accept that theirs is one voice among many, not the voice the room defaults to.

Major donors also need forms of recognition that aren’t board service. Naming opportunities, donor circles, patrons’ societies, recognition events: all of these exist, but most are treated as add-ons to board membership rather than something that can stand on its own. For the donor whose social identity is bound up with being a trustee, a plaque or a dinner doesn’t replace what the board seat conferred.

Major donors are often most effectively cultivated by peers. Peer-to-peer fundraising at the major-gift level is one of the few mechanisms in this sector that reliably works, and it works because of social-class dynamics we don’t always like to discuss in panel rooms.

The board, among other things, is what makes that peer cultivation possible. If we change who sits on the governing board, we still have to figure out who does the asking, in a sector that has long run on pay-to-play status.

Most arts organizations need more contributed revenue, not less. So how do we ask for major giving without using governance authority as the lever?

One possibility is a parallel structure: a governance body chosen for judgment and lived knowledge, alongside a major-donor council with real social weight, real recognition, and bounded access to institutional leadership. The institution would have to be honest that the donor council is doing the cultivation work the board used to do. That work matters. It just doesn’t set the artistic direction. If it does, the institution hasn’t actually separated anything. It has only renamed the old arrangement.

Another possibility is a hybrid board, where some seats carry a giving expectation and others don’t, with both kinds of trustees treated as equal in governance. The danger is obvious: the hybrid model can reproduce the same hierarchy under a more inclusive label. Trustees without a giving expectation have to be visibly weighted in the room, and the board chair has to defend that weighting against the gravitational pull of the larger donors.

Neither model is complete. Both are more honest than pretending the current fusion is neutral, when giving capacity has no necessary connection to mission and still ends up shaping almost everything.

The next time your board fills a seat, ask what the organization needs from this trustee before asking what the trustee can give. When a major donor signals displeasure with an artistic decision, notice that you’re managing two relationships at once, and decide which one the institution most needs you to protect. Watch the next meeting. When a non-major-donor trustee speaks, see whether the room weights their voice the same as the donor sitting next to them. It usually doesn’t.

The board that governs best may not be the board that gives most. Until we sit with the discomfort of that idea, we’ll keep building donor clubs and calling them boards.

People write to thank me for saying out loud what they have been thinking for years and for naming dynamics they had not been able to name. Almost all of them include some version of the same line: I’m so glad someone is finally saying this.

If so many people are grateful to read what they already privately believe, then many are walking around with truths they have decided not to risk saying.

The same pattern runs through leadership. The higher you rise, the more other people have to decide whether telling you the truth is worth what it might cost them.

Many leaders I know, myself included, say they want staff who will be direct with them. Their staff, asked separately, often want a direct leader too. Boards say they want candor from the executive director. Search committees say they want candidates who will tell hard truths.

Not every act of candor is useful. A lot of it is venting, or punishment dressed up as feedback, or cruelty pretending to be honesty. Some of it shows up too late to matter. Some of it is just an expression of power. The useful kind arrives while there is still time to do something with it.

Earlier this year I published an essay critical of how resources are distributed in our sector. A retired CEO I’ve known for years wrote back, furious. He explained at length why my analysis was wrong. The institutions I’d criticized were carrying burdens I didn’t understand, he said, and my critique was reckless.

More pointedly, he copied the presidents of several major foundations on the email.

I wrote a blunt public reply arguing that the email and its CC list proved the very blindness to power I had been trying to name. I posted it the same day.

Within a few minutes another colleague reached out and told me to take it down. She was worried that a public fight with a respected senior figure would cost me more than I had calculated.

I stared at the post for a while. My hands were doing that slight shake they do before I send something I’ll regret. Then I took it down.

That was the part I couldn’t quite ignore. I had written about truth-telling, but when the cost became visible, I made the safer choice. I am not sure it was the right one. But it taught me something I had not fully admitted: I had been writing as if I stood outside the dynamic. I was inside it.

The CC list on the email changed the nature of it. It signaled that I should be disciplined by people with funding power over my work.

From his position, the email was a corrective. I had drifted into territory he considered dangerous. The CC list was his way of bringing witnesses. What he sent was true to him. The email was meant to enforce a perspective he had reasons to protect.

That is the kind of message that does reach us in professional life: a claim attached to someone’s stake, arriving as an angry email, a CC’d intervention, or a long-delayed corrective from a senior colleague. These messages arrive at full volume because the sender has a reason to send them. They’re easier to deliver than small private observations because they’re carried by the sender’s own conviction.

The real question is whether the people around someone can afford to give them honesty.

Once I saw that distinction, I started noticing another one: the truths that reach me are usually just the ones people can afford to share.

On a recent post, a commenter noted that I’m often writing about things others have written about for years, without my megaphone. He was right. His comment reached me at full volume, while the writers he was naming had not. Some truths need a credentialed carrier before they get heard.

The imbalance is brutal. Small useful truths are expensive to deliver and easy to withhold. Louder claims travel because the sender has a stake. The truths that would have made you better often stay in the heads of people who chose not to risk it.

I’m also realizing that these silences do not all come from the same place. Some belong to the field. Others live inside institutions. Some sit between two people who both know what needs to be said and both understand what saying it might cost. The situations differ. The silence feels familiar.

I just got back from a conference where one colleague sucked the oxygen out of every room. By the third session several of us were exchanging glances when this person raised their hand. None of us said anything. Not at the break or at dinner, and not later in the side conversations where most of the actual content of any conference happens. I wish I had a better answer for why I said nothing. I don’t. I made the same calculation everyone else appeared to be making: saying something would cost more than letting it continue.

We were peers in that room. The pressure landed on each of us. Each of us stayed quiet. Gender, race, and seniority shape who stays silent. They matter. But they do not fully explain what happens in those rooms. Telling a peer how their behavior is landing has become close to forbidden unless it can be disguised as a general observation. The risk falls so heavily on whoever might speak that almost no one does. The dominant person leaves thinking they were the most engaged participant. We leave silent. I left ashamed.

Last month I was preparing to facilitate a board retreat for a new client. I sent the presentation draft to several people for feedback. The team that had hired me responded with polite agreement and a few minor suggestions. Another consultant on the project, someone with no role in hiring me and no relationship to protect, told me the framing was wrong. She walked me through what she would do differently. She didn’t soften it. With little to lose by being honest with me, she could afford to give the observation plainly.

That one stayed with me because I needed the truth most from the people least able to give it. The people closest to the consequence softened their response. The person with less to protect told me clearly enough that I could change course.

Writing publicly about this sector generates gratitude because it says what often cannot be said in the room. Often the reader already knew it. They’re hearing it said, finally, by someone willing to carry the cost.

That gratitude is generous. It should also be alarming.

Some of it, of course, is just the pleasure of seeing your own view well-stated. I know that. But the messages that stay with me are the ones that describe the sender’s own silence: the meeting where they couldn’t push back, the board they sit on, the staff member they couldn’t be honest with. That kind of gratitude can’t be reduced to ideological reinforcement.

More people are asking for public conversations about dynamics they already recognize in private. What’s scarce is permission to say it out loud. The appetite for honest discussion about how this sector actually works far exceeds the number of people who feel free to provide it.

I’m just freer, in some cases, to absorb the cost. Even that freedom is uneven.

This is where the pattern stops being merely interpersonal and becomes dangerous. For leaders, silence can look exactly like agreement.

If the truth doesn’t reach you, how do you actually know how you’re doing? What do you depend on instead? Performance reviews? External metrics?

The performance review is often designed to manage you rather than to tell you the whole truth. External metrics tell you about reach and revenue, the things visible from outside. They can’t tell you that you cut Sarah off in yesterday’s meeting or that your assistant dreads your Monday morning emails. The most successful leaders I know often operate with the least accurate pictures of themselves, because the structure has insulated them from the feedback that would improve them.

The insulation gets more thorough the higher you rise. Subordinates often won’t tell you, because they have to calculate. Peers compete with you and shape their honesty around the comparison. Even the board, the body formally tasked with overseeing your work, is often managed by the leader it would have to confront. By the time you’re a CEO, almost everyone around you is managing some aspect of their relationship with you. Almost no one is in a position to give you the small private observations that would actually make you better.

This is the loneliness people don’t expect when they think about leadership. You can be surrounded by colleagues and board members and staff, and still have almost no one able to tell you what you most need to know about yourself.

It does not happen because you say, “my door is open,” or add a candor module to the next retreat. The work is done, slowly, by leaders who have shown over time that an unwelcome observation does not end the relationship. By people who ask specific questions and follow up on the answers. The actual labor is making honesty survivable. It takes years. Leaders who have done that work sometimes get the truth. The ones who haven’t get the rehearsed version. They don’t know what they’re missing.

It’s harder in the room. A few months ago I told a leader I respect that some of the deference around them was their own doing. Only a few people felt entitled to push back. The silence had started to look like alignment. The conversation was uncomfortable. They heard me, paused, and said they would think about it. I don’t know if anything changed. The asymmetry is built in. Whoever speaks pays the cost up front. The listener decides later whether to act. Most of the time the answer is no, or not yet, or not in any way the speaker can see.

In the meantime, I am grateful. I’m glad people are reading. I hear the gratitude now as evidence of how much truth is still being held in private.

The truth is everywhere in the sector. It just isn’t reaching the people who could act on it.