Here are 3 things from last week.
Podcasts and articles
Last week Arts Professional published an article I’ve written about how I believe arts organisations need to rethink how they are structured around digital roles & responsibilities.
I also published the latest episode of the Digital Works podcast, an interview with the National Theatre’s Director of IT, Nicholas Triantafyllou where we talked about the evolution of technology leadership over the past two decades, the importance of collaboration, how NT At Home came about, and lots more.
Feedback and belonging
It feels like questions around feedback (how to share it, how to receive it, etc etc etc) are, sometimes, all I think and talk about.
Increasingly, I also think that the quality of the conversation around feedback in an organisation (how good it is, how people engage with giving/receiving it) has a fairly direct correlation to how engaged people feel with their job, and their work.
Afterall if you’re not getting good feedback you don’t know how you’re doing, or how you could improve, and if you also don’t feel like you can speak about things you’re not happy with, or ideas you might have, then you’re not going to be having a particularly enjoyable time at work.
I’ve been reading a few good books recently which all have some (or a lot of) thought-provoking ideas on this subject:
- Radical Candour by Kim Scott
- Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel Cable
- Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone
Employer differentiation
I chaired the most recent Tech in Culture EDI Alliance Partner Forum last Wednesday. The Alliance is a collaborative network of organisations who are all committed to engaging with the questions and challenges around EDI.
We had an interesting discussion about recruitment, and particularly the issue of how organisations working in and around the cultural sector can differentiate themselves.
In the past being able to offer fully remote working was a competitive advantage to some candidates, however now that many many more organisations offer some form of remote (or at least hybrid) working, the conversation moved on to how values-driven organisations can communicate and ‘make tangible’ those values.
Increasingly people are looking to work for organisations whose values align with their own, and whose impact on the world is noticable, and meaningful.
The cultural sector is well-placed in this context, but needs to do a better job of how it talks about these things.
