Creative consultant Andrew Missingham, a former music producer, discusses the similarities between cultural and corporate leadership. And why arts organisations need to pay more attention to audiences than public funds.
"I don't think that leadership in the cultural sector or the commercial sector is different from one place to another. Leadership is leadership.
"My advice to leaders is: know yourself as well as possible. Try to make the things that you're best at, better."
"It involves having good relationships with people and maintaining those relationships. It's about setting a vision and communicating that vision internally and externally.
"Leadership involves having all five senses working at the same time."
Arts organisations: find your audience
"When convenient, the subsidised cultural sector will align itself with for-profit creative industries if it makes statistical sense to itself to do so. When convenient, it will divorce itself from the commercial sector and will emphasise the social benefit that it has.
"One of the downsides of large-scale public funding is that the audience is the funder itself. And so people will look towards that funder and try to please it.
"Cultural sector businesses which are not-for-profit, have a social motive and are funded by the government to propel their mission; when their funding is cut, their audience is going to cease to be the funder.
"As that money goes down, I think that organisations are going to be forced to look at the end-user a lot more. They're going to be forced to look at the people who go to the theatres, people who don't go to the theatres, the people who go to galleries, the people who don't go to galleries - the people who they're actually funded to serve. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing."
Creatives: use your transferable skills
"One of the things that creative people might need to develop more is their ability to understand how their skills are transferable from one place to another. The skills that I had as a musician and as a record producer, I use every day in the work that I do now.
"One of the downsides of large-scale public funding is that the audience is the funder itself."
"This is about 'the performance moment'. In other words, if you are used to being a performing artist, you will work back from the day that you've got to be onstage performing, to today.
"And you'll know that the performance moment is immovable. All you've got to do is work out how you're going to arrange your time leading up to it, leading back from the tech rehearsal, the cut to cue, back to the casting, right back to today.
"Similarly, as a record producer, the skills of putting teams together, identifying central motifs for works that you're going to create, marshalling people towards a vision. Those are all skills that I use now as a consultant that I learned as a record producer.
"Although the path seems winding and circuitous, I was lucky enough to recognise and pocket each of the skills that I acquired in the stages that I did them."
Cultural leaders: know yourself
"Wherever you are, and whatever business you lead, leadership involves really knowing yourself.
"It involves understanding your strengths and your weaknesses and putting teams around yourself to best complement the things you're best at.
"My advice to leaders and aspiring leaders is: know yourself as well as possible, and then try to make the things that you're best at, better. Don't try to make the things that you're worst at slightly less bad.
"So if one of your strengths as a leader is your ability to network and connect people, then really concentrate on making that something you're truly special at."
