Collectively, HERE: Our Experiment in Shared Leadership

The four of us—Jesse Cameron Alick, Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, and Lauren Miller—stepping into roles as co-directors of HERE Arts Center was very much not the plan. Prior to our arrival, the board, staff, and outgoing leadership embarked on a rigorous planning and search process. They originally envisioned a shared leadership model of a three-person team that would include an existing staff member of the organization. Through the interview process and the changing circumstances of the organization and field, new priorities emerged, and the original plan no longer met them. Instead, the board decided to go off the previously mapped path. They bravely entrusted us to chart a new one as a team. While it was unexpected for the four of us to land at HERE, it was, in some ways, exactly how things were meant to unfold. It was the inevitable conclusion of a group of people taking risks rooted in shared values and laying the groundwork for previously unimagined ways of thriving to take root in the next chapter of HERE’s story.

At the time of writing this, it’s been nine months on the job.

From week one, we’ve been asked, repeatedly, (lovingly, excitedly) to articulate our vision for the future of HERE.

From week one, we met urgent questions around financial resources, depletion of human capacity, and physical infrastructure that threatened the existence of the organization.

We have been mired in response, and we have only just gotten to a place where we can begin to dream beyond crisis and into creation.

We’ve been busy.

How do we carve out the capacity to be less hasty, more thoughtful, and ultimately more responsive to the real needs of the real people we are in collaboration and community with?” –Jesse Cameron Alick, Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, and Lauren Miller

While we are far from the first to dive into a shared leadership practice, we find ourselves in the distinctive position of doing so while also stepping into a deeply historied organization as the second generation of new leadership in three decades. The story of HERE has become one of alchemizing the seeming tension of binaries—between legacy and dreams, stability and transformation, focused tweaks and holistic adaptations—into a truly healthy system that cares for extraordinary artists who make extraordinary work in relationship with the places and homes they inhabit.

As we investigate and learn the seasons of this work, we are continuously figuring out how to “do” shared leadership in our specific context. We still have a lot to discover.

Because we all started at the same time and were all new to the organization, the transition period has presented a huge challenge of quickly uploading as much institutional knowledge as possible while keeping the ongoing programming running and trying to lay groundwork for the future. We’re still learning something new about what we “don't know we don’t know” almost every day. Without someone on the leadership team with deep institutional knowledge, we have run into many moments of frustration, confusion, and miscommunication both internally and externally. We are grateful for all the guidance and grace our community has offered in these moments.

On the flip side, because we are all new and started together, the amount of risk, change, and experimentation we have been able to enact with relatively little friction is huge. Everyone with a stake in HERE, including the board, staff, artists, and us as new leadership, has big dreams for how this space can evolve into the future. We have been generously given space and permission to be bold in enacting that change; we have been able to take big swings and implement new ideas very quickly. In listening to input from staff and artists, we looked at the past and present through a lens of radical honesty. While we have a great deal of respect for and curiosity about past practices, we have been able to operate with very little institutional attachment to “how things have always been done.” For example, we have created new budget templates and experimented with a myriad of new programming models. We switched over to a new customer relationship management (CRM) system and started building many exciting new partnerships. In response to feedback about perpetual burnout, we made space in our schedules to prioritize pause and rest. After learning more about artists’ experiences within our HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), we paused applications in order to conduct a full research study for the purposes of optimizing the program. 

A general observation we’ve made is that shared leadership is, in fact, less efficient. We have prioritized observation, deep inquiry, and empathetic listening. Consensus takes time to build, and this space may look like less “action”—even while our two stages are abundant with activity on any given evening! The incentive structures of nonprofits use efficiency as a way of measuring effectiveness. We believe that if the system sets a goal for us to produce more and more outcomes, often with fewer and fewer resources, an inevitable conclusion is burnout and bankruptcy. It is an ongoing, active curiosity that roots each conversation and decision: How do we carve out the capacity to be less hasty, more thoughtful, and ultimately more responsive to the real needs of the real people we are in collaboration and community with? We are discovering in real time tactics for shared leadership that are generative for us, and we know that we will continue to unearth new frameworks. Nine months in, here’s what we can name about the way we lead together:

Collective Voice

One crucial practice for us has been to embrace our collective identity as a leadership team. Even from the very beginning, we negotiated our offers and contracts as a unit, with full visibility and transparency of communication. We made sure we received the same terms and worked to arrive at consensus around what we advocated for and what we compromised on. While we are each multifaceted artists and people who bring wildly different experiences and perspectives to the collective, we have been resolute in maintaining a unified voice around decisions big and small. As a team of majority people of color, women, and queer artists, this commitment has made us both stronger and safer, because when we fully share responsibility and accountability, it becomes difficult for us to be isolated and/or exploited as individuals.

Diving into both conflict and care in tandem has led to us build a high degree of trust in a short time.

Consensus, Consent, and Conflict in Decision-Making

We don’t vote. The way we approach decision making is not from the lens of four individuals angling and debating to see whose opinion wins the day. Rather, we stay in conversation until we either arrive at consensus or everyone consents to move forward on a decision without full consensus. We welcome conflict into our process. It is a regular practice for any of us to be clear when something doesn’t feel right or lands in a harmful way, and the others hear that, hold that, and stay in conversation. We also welcome care into our process by consistently making space for each person to voice opinions when they aren’t speaking up and checking in about each other’s well-being when we notice shifts. Diving into both conflict and care in tandem has led to us build a high degree of trust in a short time.

This work requires a lot of energy and time relative to a more siloed approach. We talk to each other every workday across at least five different channels. It’s important to note that we have a consent-based process only because we have prioritized the time it takes to arrive at consensus. In periods of low resource and low time, or high or urgent demand, our communication suffers, and we see the negative effects of that ripple across our programs and relationships.

Merging Artistic and Managing Duties

As executive leaders, we share all the artistic and managerial functions of the organization. No one or two people wear the artistic director hat while others wear the executive director hat. Artistic and management work is done in tandem, in collaboration, which prevents these flows from being siloed into competing areas of need. Decisions typically categorized as “artistic” or “administrative” require the same kind of creative thinking, and more effective solutions emerge when we approach them as necessarily intertwined. For example, curating a new project for our space requires us to think through how the artistic inquiry engages our internal creative compasses and programming goals, and it requires us to discuss implications for our resources—space, equipment, labor, and staff capacity. We don’t wish for a new production to grow from a competition between different departments over resources, but rather from a discussion about how all the elements of our theatre can work in symbiosis. Another benefit is that we share responsibility broadly, and information never lives in only one person’s head. We are able to enact our mission and values holistically and assess how impact is distributed across our programs and projects from beginning to end.

Boundaries and Trust

It is vital to maintain solid communication boundaries around work and to trust each other in how we manage time and workflow. We are free to independently work in our own processes while being accountable to each other for deadlines and support on various projects. One huge benefit of having four people on this leadership team is that it makes it possible for one or more of us to step away at any given time without the machine grinding to a halt. This happens often; as working artists we have outside creative projects, and as humans we need to rest. At the time of writing, one co-director is workshopping a new piece in HERE’s downstairs DOT theatre and popping in and out of the office for meetings, while another is directing a piece for a new works festival, while two others are working remotely from a regional theatre premiere and a nearby university engagement, respectively. While it doesn’t all stack up like this all the time (this is a particularly busy week!), we do try and make time for each person’s creative practice to thrive. For that to be possible, it is crucial for us to work on actively building trust over time—because that trust can’t be taken for granted. Our relationships as individuals and as a collective are new, and we acknowledge that we have depths and complexities to continue to reveal to each other.

Leadership Throughout the Organization

Our team does not limit its conception of leadership to the executive level. We are dedicated to empowering leadership in all areas of the organization. This doesn’t mean that we think each person on our staff should hold the same level of responsibility and accountability that we have to the organization. But we are excited about each person having agency to solve problems, innovate, and help shape organizational culture within their scope of work. A specific practice that supports this goal is making as much information as possible available to our staff, including budget transparency within departments. We provide the tools to develop perspectives on decisions rather than assigning tasks without the opportunity to weigh in on overall strategies. Ideally, in empowering leadership within everyone, we create more pillars of strength within the organization that build our resiliency.

We could never have done this without each other. Our explorations into our specific shared leadership practice have absolutely been essential to bringing HERE to a point of greater stability for the generations of leaders who will follow us, and the ways in which the organization is shifting around this model fills us each with excitement about the possibilities the future might bring. Since week one, we’ve been asked to articulate our vision for what that future is. The answer might be that we have a million ideas, and we are still figuring it out. While we are figuring out specifics, there are core ideas that anchor our dreaming. These are some things we believe are indispensable to building that future:

• Jesse: More dancing. The theatre world at large has suffered from concentrating on the seriousness/expensiveness of the art instead of the vibe of the lobby. Queer spaces have exploded in popularity in the last few years. Their tickets fly off the shelves, while theatre audiences have been slow to come back. Casting celebrities in revivals may provide fast cash, but they are not long-term solutions. HERE aims to learn from clubs and make our space a place of gathering for queer, trans, Black, Brown, and young people, as well as artists in general—regardless of whether you are seeing a show or not.
• Annalisa: Courage. Care. And Coffee. 😝
  No but seriously, I think so long as we remain steadfast in our values and rooted in care for each other, for our team, and for the very lands, waterways, and interspecies relationships that make our artistry possible, we’ll be able to sense our way toward a wondrous, multivocal dance party of a future for HERE Arts Center.
• Lanxing: Reckless imagination powered by our most deeply held desires, rooted in the most clear-eyed compassion we can summon. In the current state of our world, it doesn’t seem like any of our lives or labors are going to be easy into the future. We should lean into trying to build what beautiful things we can, when we can, and just know that we are going to have to stay with it in order to find the bliss inside the trouble.
• Lauren: A commitment to the collective and celebrating the release that it can offer. I truly believe the only way we survive together, not just in the arts but as a society, is to abandon the ego of individualism. There is such joy to be found in that freedom! I feel sturdy when supported by other perspectives, tastes, experiences, skills. Our organizations likewise are strengthened by structures held up by more than a single pedestal. I also hope we will continue to cultivate the kind of soft-focus it takes to sense the 360 view—the desire to find the spots we don’t immediately see and seek out the empty spaces that want to be filled.