Planting Seeds of Community
Ready for a hot take?
I miss working in an office.
I miss having a separation between my living space and my workplace, with the mental pad time of a commute between them.
I miss the day-to-day mundane details of what coworkers are up to and what other projects colleagues are focused on.
I miss the funny coincidences of showing up accidentally twinning with colleagues’ outfits, the unfortunate shock of seeing how they handle bad personal news, the miscellaneous anecdotes that stockpile themselves over weeks/months/years of sharing daily routines.
All these little things that add up to knowing other people in the way particular to coworkers, people with whom you spend a lot of time but don’t necessarily socialize.
Don’t worry. This isn’t a “so everyone should go back to working in offices all the time” screed. I’m a HUGE champion of flexible work and the expansion of work-from-home that’s come to so many of us in the last few years. It’s made so many people’s lives so much more flexible around their needs and comfort. That’s an enormous win.
I hate the corollary trends around employee monitoring and forced return-to-office policies that speak to a sad lack of leadership teams’ vision or trust in their colleagues.
Maybe I’m seeing the grass looking greener on the other side of the self-employed fence, and to be fair, I don’t really want to go back to working full-time in one place right now, anyway. At the same time, I worry that in the dissipation of that old model of “workplace”, many of us are losing out on one of the last places where we coexisted and collaborated with people across difference.
Like it or not, you can’t choose all your coworkers, and working with people across departments and teams is a fruitful testing ground for empathy and recognizing shared humanity. Do you disagree about personal or professional values with that colleague, even as you acknowledge they’re really good at their job? Do you find that person pleasant company but can’t trust them to get their tasks done on time? What about that one coworker whose life looks significantly different from yours, and yet, there you both are, working in the same place and bringing your different life experiences to bear.
All of this is to say that while I’m quite happy to keep on working independently from whichever office locale (home? coffee shop? library?) seems right for the day, I also miss working with the same people over time on a regular basis.
This is part of why I’ve steered so hard into collaboration and community as one of my primary working goals. I like brainstorming, and I firmly believe that more heads are likely to come up with a solution-of-best-fit than one head alone.
It’s part of why I started CARE: to create the kind of community I want to be connected to.
It’s part of why I’ve joined multiple digital communities that gather together creative-thinking folks with various affiliations.
It’s also part of why I’ve been so happy working with Rebecca Shulman and David Bowles since May 2023. They’re both longtime museum world colleagues and friends who are also now working independently of museums, and we’ve been meeting regularly to put our heads together around our shared interest in professional development training.
While we each have our own career histories and teaching philosophies, we have a shared wealth of experience (57 combined in the museum sector) that’s led us to some common values around teaching and learning.
We believe...
... that good managers and teachers provide a fertile environment for surprising and novel growth.
... in the teacher as co-learner.
... in creating a culture of trust and supporting educators in taking risks (and sometimes failing).
... in the power of questions and provocations.
... in the power of objects to help people think about what’s important to them.
We’re in various stages of planning a few different offerings focused on taking the transferable skills that museum education has taught us and spreading them to management roles in museums and beyond.
But our first offer is live and ready and happening, and I’m so excited for it.
This first offer is SEED:Baltimore. It’s a 1-day, in-person workshop in Baltimore on May 16, 2024 (the day before the American Alliance of Museums annual conference sessions begin), followed by 6 virtual 90-minute sessions over the following months, all accompanied by a resource library.
Since we believe in the power of learning with others and over time, we’ve planned an experience that’s open to anyone who supervises gallery educators in a museum. We’ll explore philosophies of museum pedagogy, effective practices for management, mentoring, and communication, and the values and beliefs that inform our work.
We’ve started with this offering as our first after collecting feedback from a number of museum education colleagues about the current state of gallery teaching cohorts.
Would you like a copy of the report we made of our findings? Get in touch!
Discounted early bird registration is open through February 29, and the final deadline is May 1.
If your job involves creating a sustainable, forward-thinking gallery teaching program that engages visitors in meaningful ways, we hope you will join us. (You can also download a flyer with all the pertinent details.)
If this doesn’t describe what you do, but you want to talk about the possibilities of management training for another group you work with, we’d love to talk.
This may not be relevant to you at all, of course, but I hope that even if it’s not, it can serve as a reminder of what we’re able to make real when we work as teams instead of individually.
Consulting doesn’t have to come with a scarcity mindset of competition. Rebecca and David and I are making that a reality. We meet virtually every week or two, which sometimes looks like planning what we want to do together and sometimes looks like offering feedback about something one of us is working on individually. Sometimes it looks like sharing the mundane details of how our lives as entrepreneurs are going. Sometimes it’s about who’s ordering what for dinner or who’s got book recommendations or who’s recently had more than the usual friends and family drama to cope with.
In other words, it looks an awful lot like some of those things I miss from working in an office.
So if SEED:Baltimore is right for you (whether or not you’re going to AAM, by the way, since we set this up to be locally convenient to conference attendees, but are definitely welcoming folks who are just come for our May 16 day together) then I hope you’ll sign up.
And if SEED:Baltimore isn’t for you, I hope this helps remind you that it is indeed possible to make change in this strange new world of work life that so many of us are living in right now.
Find your people. Reach out to them. Keep possibilities open. It’s worth it.
Creative Prompt Coda: Introduce yourself to the next new person you meet with what you would put on your “unofficial resume”.
(cheers to Esther Perel for this idea)
