One of the most expensive things an organisation can do is to confuse being valued with creating value.
Before I went into independent consulting, I held various roles in marketing and business development. There was one organisation I worked for, an arts and cultural institution, which always seems to hire and retain (and reward) the same kind of person. On one level, there is a degree of healthiness to this — a culture intentionally curated should attract a specific cohort and calibre of talent. What I saw, though, revealed a culture that attracted exactly the wrong attributes necessary to create, or at least to not destroy, the value it is supposed to produce.
My job in this company was to lead a $2M (AUD) partnership portfolio and to grow company revenue through strategic partnerships. I was working on a suite of proposals, designed to persuade corporate and government funders to invest in an annual concert series. For this program, I’d sit down regularly with the company’s program manager — a key internal stakeholder — whose job would inevitably be to lead and execute on this vision. This was a big program of events, and so we sat together often. On this occasion, the focus was on: money. Proposed budgets, past expenditures, and where components of funding will be directed. The program manager asked me to move some numbers around.
“We can’t make it look like we are making money from this.”
If you’re in the commercial sector, you might find this to be the most absurd statement. But, as it happens, it’s a fairly common rhetoric in arts and culture, and other not-for-profit spaces. The ideas is that if a funder is there to invest specifically in one project, particularly a community or social impact project, they want to see that their contribution was vital. (But not so vital that they are the only investor.) Maybe it’s a vanity exercise, or maybe some funders feel better thinking that their investment is more prudent if it goes directly to a project and not at all to administrative or regular business operations. There are a lot of spaces still, in social and cultural impact work, where it does not fully register that a project’s profitability is a genuine marker of market longevity that should be paid attention to. It’s sort of a double bind to not acknowledge this, where a funder may wish to see financial sustainability beyond one project, and at the same time insist that a project must not appear to be profitable by design. At least, this was the notion that the program manager felt.
Hence, don’t make it look like we are making money from this.
That moment revealed a few things.
This was one individual who, in one statement, inadvertently disclosed to me a personal shadow belief: “I’m not allowed to personally benefit from my contributions.” That internal belief then manifested in a fairly important internal meeting with me, which then then translated into the basis by which I constructed all of the company’s funding business cases for that concert series.
That was one program, amidst a suite of annual programs, led by one senior team member within a leadership team who also thought just like them. The company consistently attracted, hired, and retained a specific talent archetype, and that creates problems if you want a thriving company mission.
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