Shortly after she began as director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in
Tennessee in 1999, Kaywin Feldman discovered an ancient Chinese burial suit of questionable provenance and authenticity tucked away in storage. The promised gift was lying on a table under a sheet like a murder victim. After she returned the object to its donor, she writes in a new book, he did not speak to her for the rest of her tenure.
Now the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Feldman has a lot of opinions about how museums should handle leadership transitions (including addressing long-simmering problems before the new hire arrives). She collected insights from her three decades at the helm of four institutions in the book Leadership Succession and Transition for Museums and Arts Organizations, published by Rowman and Littlefield in November.
Succession is a hot—and fraught—topic at a moment when dozens of US museums are preparing for, or have recently experienced, leadership turnover. Institutions currently on the hunt for directors include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. According to Feldman, this transition “is a time of heightened uncertainty and anxieties”. It can also be decisive: one third to one half of corporate chief executives fail in their first 12 to 18 months, according to several studies.
Feldman’s book is full of practical advice for museum leaders, like how to know when it is time to leave a job and which materials to request before beginning a new one. But her most important message is that a botched leadership transition is often the fault of an ill-prepared board of trustees. While the average tenure of a non-profit leader is seven to eight years, a board member’s typical term is three years, so they are likely to be relatively new to the organisation when they tackle the all-important task of hiring a chief executive. “I feel badly for boards,” Feldman tells The Art Newspaper. “I don’t think they’re getting enough help as to what non-profit leadership looks like.”
Feldman’s book aims to offer that help. Culled from its pages, here are the four commandments board members should follow when navigating a leadership transition. They double as evergreen tips for good museum governance.
1. Do not procrastinate on the hard stuff
If your institution has a metaphorical body in the basement, it is better to address it during the interim period or before the outgoing director departs. Feldman writes that if her board had done the uncomfortable task of returning the Chinese burial suit, she and the donor “could have started with a clean slate and formed a relationship helpful to the museum”.
Similarly, the board should require an incoming director to complete a succession plan—including a job description for the chief executive, an organisational chart, a staff-talent analysis and a communications plan—within their first year, before they could read too much into the request. (The plan should be updated annually after that, Feldman writes.) Only one third of US non-profits have a succession plan in place, according to BoardSource, an organisation dedicated to non-profit governance and leadership.
2. Understand that a non-profit is not a hobby. It is not a corporation either
Board members with experience in the corporate world are often tempted to appoint someone from their ranks as interim director, because they believe non-profit work is “easier” than business. This is a terrible mistake, according to Feldman. A board member-turned-interim director typically lacks museum-management expertise and is unprepared to dedicate the time required. (If no one on staff is equipped to lead the museum while a search is underway, Feldman suggests tapping a retired chief executive from another non-profit.)
Board members should also support an incoming director’s desire to adjust the organisational chart or restructure a department upon arrival. Such changes are easy to push through in corporations, where they are seen as necessary to return value to shareholders. But “in non-profits, it’s always personal”, Feldman says. The board’s job, as she sees it, is to provide resources to the director and avoid meddling in or obstructing their plans as they get them off the ground.
I have watched successful business leaders botch [non-profit] interviewsKaywin Feldman
3. Stay focused on what is really important
Board members often lose focus or ask the wrong questions in interviews. Rather than trying to gauge the candidate’s leadership skills, they might spend a large portion of the allotted 90 minutes asking them how their institution handles free community days, discussing friends they have in common or dissecting highly technical skills. “I have watched successful business leaders botch interviews because they are not sure how to hire a non-profit CEO and they don’t really know much about the business of the non-profit,” Feldman writes. (Interviews are conducted by a search committee, a subcommittee of the board that Feldman says should include between five and seven trustees.)
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that trustees will sometimes fall back on candidates with whom they have the most “chemistry” or “who seem best able to replicate the past”, Feldman says. Remember when Max Hollein, now the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Thomas Campbell, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, switched jobs in 2018, illustrating an almost comical lack of imagination on the part of the selection committees?
4. Check your bias
Over the years, recruiters repeatedly told Feldman that search committees were concerned she lacked adequate “gravitas” for a certain role. “I have come to realise it is … an unconscious code for ‘male’,” she writes. Feldman suggests that any search begin with a “robust training session on bias”, so that trustees can hold themselves and one another accountable and ensure they are making the best choice, rather than the most comfortable one, for their institution.
Working with the status quo
The strength of Feldman’s book is also its greatest weakness: it is eminently practical. This is advice I can imagine trustees might actually take. She is not proposing structural change. But bias training alone will not ignite a paradigm shift in how trustees—or the rest of us—think about what leadership looks like. It will not convince every one of them that emotional intelligence and a commitment to collaboration are more relevant leadership skills than gravitas.
This book also assumes that the people funding the organisation must be the same ones tasked with governing it. But how would museums look different if we separated funding from governance, and put people who are well-versed in non-profit operations in charge of a transition? Feldman offers sound advice to help the same people govern better—not to help different people envision a different future for museums.
• Kaywin Feldman, Leadership Succession and Transition for Museums and Arts Organizations, Rowman and Littlefield, 164pp, $115/$46 (pb), published November 2024
