My Greatest Leadership Mistakes: Failure to Appreciate the Artistic Temperament

When you hear the word "artist," what adjectives come to mind? Come on ... we know some of those less-than-positive descriptors:

Emotional
Temperamental
Dramatic
Spacey

They remind me of how I felt about artists when I was 25. You see, I was in this horrible rock band called “Dead Silence.” It was named after the way our wives responded when they heard our music for the first time. We were one of those basement band that should have stayed there. Somehow we managed to escape and find places that would actually pay us. It was amazing how many musicians went out to hear other musicians.

I met some interesting artists who came to the bars to watch us play.

The unfortunate thing was after a while I found myself putting all artist into little boxes. I had this notion they were mostly like this guy ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d54UU-fPIsY

Yep. Instead of viewing artists as the wonderful creations God Himself crafted to bring Beauty into the world, I thought they were a little out there … a little arrogant … perhaps even a little weird.

Please know I don't think that today. But the problem for me was that when I first started leading artists, I may have brought some of those stereotypes into my subconscious leadership mindset.

For me, hanging onto those stereotypes resulted in the sin of superiority and as a result, there could have been this little piece of latent jealousy that said, “I am not as talented musically, but at least I’m not like Nigel over there.” I think leaders of artists have big obstacles whenever they think they have superiority over the people they lead.

I think this manifested itself in the way I made decisions for our team. That is, I moved without taking adequate time to get (or simply dismissing) the input of my artists. I made decisions quickly, expecting the artistic temperament to just catch up and "get over it." Big mistake.

Nancy Beach in her book, “An Hour on Sunday” suggests that artists simply “feel” more. I agree with that. I think they do feel more and that allows them to channel great passion and emotion to create beauty and wonder for the rest of the world. Because artists feel more, I have found two things that seem to be irreducible minimums when it comes to leading artists and navigating the waters of the artistic temperament:

Artists require more of your time.

A few months ago, I entered into a conversation with a member of my team who is enormously talented and a person I respect and admire. We are good friends and I think he would say all the same things about me. The conversation was about tighter deadlines. To me, the case I presented to him was completely reasonable, logical, and absolutely apparent. I thought the conversation would last 5 minutes and we would go out to lunch. I think the conversation took about 2 hours. We ended, in a really good place, but I did not anticipate all of the energy that was there. This was good, passionate energy. It was discussion that needed to happen to effectively move forward.

Which leads me to this point:

Artists need to feel heard.

Don’t we all need to feel like we matter? That our opinions count? I think even more so for artists because God has given them great passion about what they do. I don’t think you can have great artists who are not passionate and personally invested in their art. It’s really quite impossible in my opinion.

I have found that if an artist disagrees with a direction I propose, it is important for me to at least acknowledge and consider their opinion. So, I have found it is important I provide a framework for discussion to occur; that I create a space for listening. This is increasingly difficult as the pace of ministry and the size of our team and ministry grows. But I realize this must happen. Some of the ways I am attempting to accomplish this is by scheduling regular meetings with those I would otherwise not often see, managing by "walking around," and keeping my door open during my working hours. I think these strategies have been helpful in that usually one of three outcomes occur: I realize I was wrong and change to a better plan, I am able to give the person a new perspective and they accept the plan, or we "agree to disagree." I think any one of these outcomes ultimately increase the effectiveness of the ministry and that is great for our Church.