One radio program/podcast that I’ve always found interesting and recommended to my arts management students is This Working Life, hosted by Lisa Leong, on Radio National. Having said that, I have to confess that I’m an accidental listener rather than a dedicated follower but a recent broadcast caught my attention. In September 2024, Leong interviewed Leadership expert Ashley Goodall about change. The heading was “Maybe change isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”.
When I wrote about change in The A to Z of Arts Management I said that it was inevitable. And that’s because people come and go, technology changes, the economy grows or shrinks, pandemics come out of nowhere. As managers, we have to be resilient and thoughtful about how we manage change but we don’t have to inflict change just for the sake of it. Which is the point Ahsley Goodall makes. There’s an assumption that change is necessary and a key to growth in a company but that may not be the case.
Goodall was a musician before he became a management consultant and brought his learnings from conducting orchestras into his new role. He says that the key to the role of conductor is team work and describes leadership as a way of helping other people do what you can’t do. That’s a belief I’ve always held. As a manager, you know a little about a lot but the best you can do for your organisation is to recruit experts who know much more than you and facilitate them doing the best job they can.
Back on the subject of change, Goodall sees a management cult around the idea of disruptive change. That’s the belief that for things to get better, you have to mix things up. But if the result is miserable unhappy people, how can you view such change as positive? As Goodall points out, change and improvement are different. “Change means different; improvement means better.” The job of leaders, as he says, should be to create improvement. And how do you do that? It’s back to that earlier point – helping people to do their work better. And endless change is going to get in the way of people performing well.
My advice to new arts managers has always been to listen first to what your staff have to tell you about what they need to work more effectively and Goodall makes a similar point. He says that even if you have a mandate for change in your new role, what you want the leader to do is to say “Before we get to the change stuff, what is worth preserving? What is the ‘here’ that is good and valuable and strong and grounding and underpins our ability to do what we do every day?” In other words, ensuring that you have a good foundation for change.
In The A to Z, “people are rightly nervous about what change will deliver for them personally and for the organisation they value.” Change can rob people of their sense of agency, of their sense of belonging, even their sense of meaning. I went on to say “we have to make sure that we’re proposing change for the right reasons and ensuring that all elements of the change process including the emotional well-being of staff are considered.”
If you want to hear Ashley Goodall talk more about change and the importance of building stability into our organisations to help people deal with inevitable change: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/this-working-life/why-change-isnt-all-its-cracked-up-to-be/104238766