How to Find the Way in Executive Search for Arts Organizations 

“Can you find someone that shines?”

I heard this comment a lot when I first started to pursue executive search. As someone who had recently co-founded a firm, Evolution Management Consultants, dedicated to an inclusive and deliberate search process for leadership roles, I was puzzled by conversations that centered whoever had the most “shine” on their resume. Why was this an important criterion for a leadership role? I understand the need for charisma and influence as a leader, but I could not quantify or identify that from a comment about finding someone who shines. How would this make them an effective leader? If the person does not have shine, does it mean they are not a good leader?

Executive search in theatre had a mysterious aura to me. Theatres and arts organizations would put out flashy press releases about their new leader or leadership team. There are many leaders who have stayed and succeeded, and there are others who did not. So why did it not work out? As I dived into the search and planning world in 2019, after three years in the theatre management program at Yale School of Drama, I was determined to discover what made a search successful for the organization and the candidate.

If leadership can be defined broadly as a function of establishing a direction, how does a governance body (whether the board or a search committee) determine which candidate offers the best path forward? Surely, the answer cannot simply be about how much pizzazz someone has in their resume and experience. That may be great for the press, but what does it mean for the organization’s strategic future?

Many of my dear friends in theatre who are part of the Global Majority were somehow being asked to go on the road trip of the search process, but they had no idea how to get to their destination or why they were being invited. 

This is how I have been thinking about search in arts and culture since I started about five years ago. At Yale, I was taught about planning, search, and board governance by the late Management Consultants for the Arts (MCA) founder Greg Kandel. The process he described to me and often spoke about in class sounded like a directionless road trip. An organization would hire him to help find their next executive leader. Greg would talk to various people at the organization, usually one that he had a longstanding relationship with throughout his years of placing candidates across the country. He would guide a group of people from the company’s board through winnowing down applicants and selecting a final candidate to recommend to the board to hire. It was curious to me in the years I was in school that most of these hires were white men.

The opaqueness of the process and the repetition of the outcomes (many people who were hired in leadership were already leaders) left me particularly frustrated because many of my dear friends in theatre who are part of the Global Majority were somehow being asked to go on the road trip of the search process, but they had no idea how to get to their destination or why they were being invited.

I learned this all too well in one of the first major searches I conducted in my career. It was for an executive leader of a theatre, and it was right after the murder of George Floyd and the 2020 protests about the killing of Black people by the police. Theatres were desperate to show that they were responding to the calls of protestors, which included working with Black-owned organizations. This was glaringly true for executive searches in the arts, which were dominated by historically and predominately white firms. The search committee I met with told my team they were embracing the values of equity and inclusion. They wanted to “do things differently” and “meet the moment.” This sounded like what so many people in theatre wanted: an organization that put its dollars behind its values.

But that reality came crashing down quite quickly. My team was met with consistent resistance from the chair of the board and another prominent wealthy board member and donor. There were conversations behind the scenes about how we were “forcing something on them.” Our integrity was called into question at one point about our vetting. After the search, the candidate experienced some of the same things that we did. The organization was saying one thing but doing another.

All the while, as I sat in a tower of privilege, attempting to learn how to become a managing director of a regional theatre, I was perplexed. As a Black man, how could I expect to become a managing director when there were few managers of color? From what I could see on paper, the primary difference between these white managers and managers of colors was the experience that those listed brought in their experience running institutions and keep them afloat. How was I to compete with that? There’s a structural disadvantage that I felt and experienced.

As I learned more about how to conduct searches, I did not have a great concept about making money and being an entrepreneur. The cost and mechanics of the search were unknown to me. But I knew one thing—that there’s a serious problem of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) leaders not landing in the top roles on the management side. At the time, even studying at one of the top theatre management programs dedicated to the regional theatre model, I could not find much information about previous managing or executive directors of color in League of Resident Theatres (LORT) theatres. The disconnect between the rhetoric of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in leadership and practical application of these concepts was a large, gaping chasm. For a while, rhetoric was all you needed when it came to DEIA in theatre, and there were certainly folks who pointed out the lack of representation across all identities. The various demands during the reckoning on race in 2020, such as those in the We See You White American Theater statement, laid bare some painful questions about the state of leadership in theatres. Why was it so overwhelmingly white? How could folks in leadership make promises now that they had not done in the past? If DEIA was so crucial, why are there still so many backlashes to the work (see any artistic director of color right now) and solutions that seem fleeting at best (see any organization who wrote down that they cared about DEIA)?

A good search process, to me, means that we do leave the organization better than we found it and that we create a healthier, vibrant, and inclusive field one theatre at a time. 

All of these questions came roaring back to me as I read Seema Sueko’s 2023 American Theatre article about the search process in US theatre. She outlines in great detail how various search firms operated, including the first firm I co-founded, ALJP Consulting. There is much there that I agreed with in her analysis of how searches are conducted. There were also some observations that called me to respond and continue the conversation about a process that is shrouded in mystery and misconception. One in particular is something that a firm she worked for told her as part of their approach—that their charge was to “simply to help the organization find their next leader, not to help them get better as an organization.” I felt called to expose deep, structural flaws about the field regarding the way we conceive of search, the purpose of consulting firms and our work with organizations, and how we recruit and retain leaders in our field.

I come into sharp contrast with my search colleagues, such as those at MCA, on this particular point: the concept that we are not here to help organizations. The idea of simply finding a leader and not trying to make an organization better troubles me. If a search firm runs a good process, hopefully the organization is left in a better position than when our work began. I think much of our work was about making boards, staff, and organizations better at the decisions that they make and knowing why they are being made. A good search process, to me, means that we do leave the organization better than we found it and that we create a healthier, vibrant, and inclusive field one theatre at a time.

Have we not seen the stories of leaders who have been placed and did not succeed because they were not told about dire issues within the theatre or due to a lack of support from board and/or staff? The crisis at Victory Gardens a few years ago lingers in the collective imagination. I don’t extricate myself from this as a search person—I too have seen failure and have failed. But where I have had failure, I have learned how to make processes better with each search and each relationship that I make with a theatre or arts organization.

It is in building relationships, carefully thinking about an organization’s artistic and managerial history, and being open and honest about very real challenges that staff and leadership face on a daily basis that the idea of search as a “journey” or “road trip” becomes critical to me. As search consultants, we are often dropped into a situation that we then leave when the job is done. What I propose, and what my new firm tries to do, is that search firms build processes that value longitudinal relationships over the task assigned or consulted. I believe that building the journey with purpose and specificity yields a great deal more than the task of sorting through resumes and finding a miracle worker. An example of this is our work with Baltimore Center Stage. We have worked with the organization on leadership transitions for the past few years and continue to have a relationship with their board and staff leadership to this day. We are invested in their success because we believe the theatre belongs in the regional theatre ecosystem.

But what might a good journey look like? I have a few offerings that might help us ask further questions and reflection.

Build the Reason for the Trip

A good journey requires a good amount of planning, and each theatre organization I work with requires a different journey. A search for an artistic director at Baltimore Center Stage should not be the same as the one for Theatre Latte Da, though the structure of the search process might be the same. We all have to make certain stops on the trip (stakeholder meetings, a job description, interviews), but how we get there should be curated and crafted based on the destination: placing a leader who can allow the organization to thrive.

Our work as consultants is to provide some direction to the search committees, staff, and boards that we work with and justify why we have chosen that direction. This does not mean that we are not open to input; in fact, we need it in order to make the trip better. The grounding that we can provide organizations lays the foundation for a good journey and process. They have to know where we are going and why, or else everyone will want to take a different trip.

Functionality. Not Personality.

If I had a quarter for every time I heard a search committee member ask me to find someone that “shines,” I could pack my bags to a villa in Spain and never see a piece of theatre again. Shine and sparkle do not help as descriptors of a good leader. It is why our approach at our firm is that leadership is a functionality and not a personality. Don’t get me wrong: you need charisma and influence, but those are sharper words than shine and sparkle.

Functionality of leadership struck me as a concept in graduate school. There is a course called Functions of Leadership which is broken into three key sections:

• Direction: a leader establishes a direction. The person makes choices about what will be the organization’s focus and purpose.
• Motivation: securing the essential efforts and resources for the organization’s success. This is an economic imperative. It is choosing where your finite amount of energy, time, and money will be spent in relationship to competitors.
• Organizational Design: how should the company be structured in order for people to communicate effectively? Companies are essentially a group of people pooling their resources together.

These three functions, once learned and practiced, typically yield a skilled and experienced leader. But staff and boards of theatres do not often speak in these terms. We have to be more precise about the kind of people we want to lead our companies in the future. It is the most consequential choice a board will make for not only its staff, but the community it serves. The clearer we can become about the different functions we need out of leaders, the less we can rely on personality and likeability to be the determining factor.

If you focus on the shine and sparkle, you might miss something more meaningful, intricate, and necessary for your journey. So save the shine and sparkle for the beach and fireworks, but not when hiring leaders. They are sometimes in the places you would expect…and sometimes not.

The more that we can consider ourselves a collective whole solving a collective problem with exceptional leadership placement, the brighter our future will be.

Something Bigger

No theatre operates in isolation, and no search journey does either. We are all connected within this field and to the world around us. For me, the reason that a search can help make an organization better is that better leadership can bring in better talent, which can lead to even greater success in artmaking. Our field needs great leaders, and we need leaders who will tackle the challenges of this epoch. When Greg Kandel’s firm placed leaders like Garland Wright and Maria Goyanes, they placed torchbearers who could guide us through the dark days. Garland understood the Guthrie Theater and knew it needed to return to its original mission and structure, which included an acting company. Maria kept and departed from the founder’s legacy that allows Woolly Mammoth to continue to be a force in the American theatre. That’s what great consulting can and should do.

We should have a much larger conversation around this subject as there is much more to explore: how do we prioritize care for the client and the candidates? How do you acknowledge various power dynamics without hurting people’s sense of self-worth and purpose within an institution? How can you compare candidates, and what qualities and competencies matter when choosing a leader? Can we hire folks who may not know theatre, and if we do, how can we welcome them in better? What are the ways to foster good partnerships between artistic and managing directors?

With all the upheaval that faces our industry and the reckoning of the past fifty years, search will become an essential part of how change occurs in our field. It is the next generation that will have to craft the new model over the next several decades. The more that we can consider ourselves a collective whole solving a collective problem with exceptional leadership placement, the brighter our future will be. All search journeys require some level of success and achievement, setbacks and conflicts, and, hopefully, clarity of purpose. This is the kind of world we should aim for our theatre and organizations. And the right leadership, careful and considered, makes all the difference in the world.