The Right Leader at the Right Time
When an arts and cultural institution begins a senior leadership search, there is a natural tendency to start by defining the candidate.
What sector should they come from? What size of organization should they have led? What title should they currently hold? How many years of relevant experience do they need?
These are all important questions. But I would like to suggest there is another conversation that needs to come first: what does the organization actually need from its next leader?
Every organization is at a particular moment in its development. One may need to diversify revenue or reach new audiences. Another may be navigating significant change. Another may have been through a period of disruption and need stability. There may be something that needs fixing, but equally there may be something working extremely well that the next leader needs to understand and preserve.
The leadership profile should follow from that conversation, rather than the other way around.
Defining what “relevant” really means
Having worked on senior leadership appointments across the UK and North America, I have seen how much the potential candidate pool can change when you start with the challenge rather than the CV.
Once you are clear about what the organization needs to accomplish over the next few years, you can work backwards. What would someone need to have experienced to lead through that successfully? What capabilities will be particularly important? And where might they have developed them?
Someone may never have held exactly the same title before, but they may have solved exactly the problem you need them to solve.
This is where I think we sometimes need to be careful about how we define “relevant experience.”
For arts and cultural institutions, sector experience can matter enormously. These are complex, mission-driven organizations with distinctive stakeholders, governance structures and funding models. There are many roles where deep knowledge of that environment will be essential.
But there are also searches where the experience an organization needs may have been developed somewhere less obvious.
That might mean looking across different parts of the arts and cultural sector, considering an adjacent sector with similar challenges, or, for some positions, looking outside the sector altogether. This can be particularly relevant for functional leadership roles in areas such as communications, finance, people, digital or commercial strategy.
The question becomes less “Have they worked somewhere like us?” and more “Have they demonstrated that they can do what we need our next leader to do?”
A genuine connection still matters
Looking more broadly does not mean that sector context ceases to matter.
Particularly when considering candidates from outside the sector, I believe a genuine interest in and connection to the arts is important.
Arts and cultural institutions are not simply businesses with a different product. Leaders need to understand why the work matters and be able to engage credibly with people who may have devoted their careers to it.
That connection can take many forms, whether through board or volunteer involvement, philanthropy, study, regular engagement with cultural institutions or simply an interest that has been part of their life for many years.
A genuine interest in the arts cannot substitute for capability. But it can be an important part of determining whether someone coming from a different environment will be successful within it.
Setting the next leader up for success
Ultimately, this is about more than identifying the strongest candidate on paper. It is about finding the leader who is right for the organization at that particular moment.
We have all seen talented leaders struggle in particular roles. Sometimes the issue may not be their capability, but a mismatch between their experience or skills and what they were brought in to do, what the organization actually needed and the environment they inherited.
That is why I think some of the most useful questions at the beginning of a search are not about the candidate at all. Instead they should include:
- What does the organization need from its next leader over the next three to five years?
- What will be particularly difficult about this role?
- What needs to change, and what needs to be protected?
- What experience or capabilities would give us confidence that someone can do those things successfully?
The answers may lead directly to someone who has spent their entire career in the sector. Or they may lead to a candidate whose background looks rather different from what was initially expected.
Either can be a great appointment.
The important thing is that the candidate profile reflects where the organization is and where it needs to go. Because finding the right leader is only part of the equation. Finding the right leader for the right moment is what gives that person the best chance of succeeding.
Milly Smith
Principal
Milly serves as a Principal for McDermott + Bull and leads the firm’s Arts + Culture Practice, based in Vancouver, BC. She partners with a diverse range of clients, including museums, galleries, performing arts organizations, heritage institutions, arts-focused higher education, and the broader creative industries.
Prior to joining McDermott + Bull, Milly served as Head of Arts & Culture in the UK for an international executive search firm, where she led high-profile searches for globally recognized institutions across the cultural sector. She brings extensive experience conducting executive searches across the UK, North America, and internationally, with a deep understanding of the leadership needs within the cultural sector.
Born in London, Milly holds an MA in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh.