Approaching Creative Leadership Now

This half day workshop on new thinking in creative leadership is for aspiring, emergent and current leaders in higher education and the arts led by The Culture Capital Exchange (TCCE).

The pandemic has changed the world, and changed how we need to work together. It has changed how we are as leaders and what we want our leaders to be. Anyone in a leadership role over the last year will, in all likelihood, have had to shift to a more distributed and responsive mode of working. The challenges to organisations, including sectors like the arts and culture, heritage and higher education have been complex and often stressful but alongside considerable challenges, new opportunities have also opened up.

Through this workshop we set out to explore questions around our evolving leadership challenges, such as:

- What is good leadership in Higher Education and the Arts?

- How has leadership changed post Covid and how can we adapt?

- What are the other big issues that intersect with creative leadership and its development?

- How can we develop leaders of the future? What skills do we need?

The workshop will enable insight into some of the current, urgent and emergent issues in our field of leadership and provide reflective space to foster a better understanding of how to support your own career or that of future leaders you may be working with.

Earlier this year, TCCE got together a group of leaders to think about these questions and to explore how current and future leaders, in higher education and the arts, can adapt to, and think about our post Covid futures. This workshop is one of the next iterations of our inaugural meeting and several of our original cohort will be contributing to this workshop.

Contributors include: Dr Rebekka Kill (TCCE), Dr Bill Balaskas (Kingston School of Art), Pauline Rutter (TCCE), Professor Paul Hollins (Leeds Conservatoire), Idrees Rasouli (Cambridge School of Art), Dr Javeria Shah (Central School of Speech and Drama), Claire Malcolm (New Writing North), Dr Sara Jones (City, University of London), Dr Nicola Abraham (Central School of Speech and Drama), Evelyn Wilson (TCCE).

Schedule

2pm

Welcome and Introductions

Dr Rebekka Kill and Evelyn Wilson

Part 1: On Good Leadership

2.10pm

Dr Rebekka Kill

TCCE

Thinking About Leadership - Reflection and the Project

2.25pm

Dr Sara Jones

The Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London

Is Leadership an Art?

What does it mean to lead creatively?

Is leadership an art? And if so, where and how should we be working with future leaders?

Why is this so important, now?

Part 2: Leadership after Covid

2.40pm

Dr Bill Balaskas

Kingston University

Leadership through Collaborative Research: Challenges and Opportunities Post-Covid

Based on my most recent book, Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (2020), this session will reflect on the current role of collaboration between HEIs and the cultural sector. At the same time, the session will aim to use the conclusions drawn in the book to investigate the potential directions for collaboration in the post-pandemic world.

2.55pm

Dr Nicola Abraham

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Horizontal Structures of Leadership: Encouraging Wellbeing and Innovation through Care

Innovation has been hugely important during the pandemic not only to continue existing work through adapting to the uncertainty of continuing shifts in policy to fight COVID-19, but also to learn from adaptations and find new exciting routes to advance practice. Learning in this context is complex, and requires structures that allow active listening and encourage pluralistic critical engagement at the same time as recognising and supporting wellbeing for the impact of the pandemic. This talk will share examples, insights and offer models of engagement in horizontal leadership structures to address the challenges and opportunities inherent in our current context.

3.10pm

Professor Paul Hollins

Board Member Leeds Conservatoire

Arts and Culture Leadership in a post post-truth world

Paul will posit a series of questions exploring notions of 'leadership' in the arts and culture, situated, he will argue, in a post-pandemic, post post-truth world.

What are the challenges faced by arts and cultural organisations ?

What are the challenges in the humanities and arts in Higher Education ?

What do we/should we expect of our leaders in theis new world ?

Has the role of leader changed as a result of the pandemic and recent social movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) ?

3.25pm BREAK

Part 3: Intersections, Reflections and Risk

3.40pm

Claire Malcolm

New Writing North

Risks and Rewards

Reflections on what Covid has really taught us about risk and the narrative of what might happen next.

3.55pm

Pauline Rutter

The Culture Capital Exchange

Freed from Leadership: I prefigure

Everyone knows something about leadership. Many of us have been in formal and informal leadership positions. However, as I was invited to contribute to ‘Creative Leadership Now’ (https://bit.ly/3cylAYo ), I was thinking about the words of a friend, Professor Chukwumerije Okereke. He was recently reflecting on being leaders of ourselves, on being open to reflection, growth and humility, on treading lightly so as not to trample others and of breathing deeply, and acting responsibly but without taking up too much space. I was also considering the discussions of the last ten months with so many black and ethnically diverse female academics, researchers and cultural producers about our lives, our practices and our passions. Collective wisdom, scholarly activism, care, and compassion within and outside of our institutions wove in and out of our conversations. I invite you to consider some of these themes and to reflect on your own leadership and/or the leadership you would like.

Part 4: Future Leaders and Being Human

4.10pm

Dr Javeria Shah

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London

It is time to take approaches to management and leadership 'offscript'!

The provocation draws on lived experience to make a call to action in which we collectively reimagine a more humanised management and leadership cultures.

4.25pm

Idrees Rasouli

Cambridge School of Art

Human-Connected Leadership

The session will focus on sharing examples of human-connected leadership that are developed around the characters of a local, a migrant, and a foreigner.

4.40pm

Plenary

Chaired by Evelyn Wilson, TCCE

5pm FINISH

Much of our work at TCCE has historically been about engaging with both aspiring and future leaders. Through our work, we constantly seek to catalyse change and think about new modes of development, growth and transformation

This is a free pilot workshop. TCCE is aiming to develop this work further into a subject specialist programme of leadership development in the forthcoming academic year.