Museum management and leadership
As Peter Drucker famously opined, management means doing things right, while leadership means doing the right things. Management includes administrative tasks and responsibilities, as well as production and development processes related to goal-setting. Leadership, on the other hand, is about seeing to it that goals are accomplished, motivating people and bringing about change.
One of the special features of museum management is that museums have little financial leeway. This is because substantial parts of a museum’s expenditure and income are fixed. Fixed income is not an economic term per se, but grants allocated to museums can be regarded as such. Their share of museum oper- ating expenditure has remained stable at the current level of around 80% on average. Fixed costs in museums, for their part, involve personnel and property expenses. Their share of museum spending has also remained stable at around 80% (Museovirasto 2020).
The remit of the museum director essentially involves managing an expert organ- isation, as over 80% of museum staff have either a lower or a higher university degree (Suomen museoliitto 2018). This high level of education enables and requires a focus on personal leadership in delivering jointly-developed poli- cies and objectives, and in providing scope for adequate self-management. The management of an expert organisation is primarily coaching, and in this sense, traditional management approaches do not succeed.
Expert organisations are generally regarded as rather cumbersome management environments, according to experienced business executive Eero Kukkola. This is due to the independent thinking and decision-making that is integral to ex- pertise, but which can also cause tensions in multi-expert teams and difficulties in achieving organisational goals (Kukkola 2016).
In the museum area, this expert organisation trait is reinforced by the fact that when evaluating the credentials of museum directors, the focus is on expert tasks.
Up to 2020, in order for a museum to be eligible for state subsidies, its director had to have expertise in the museum field. The new Museum Act, which came into force in Finland at the beginning of 2020, and the state funding criteria set out in it, place more emphasis on leadership, but museum expertise retains its strong position in every museum and is compulsory for directors of small museums (Museolaki 314/2019).
The new Museum Act does not radically alter the management of museums, or the management culture of the museum industry. The director is still expected to play a dual role as both a leader and an expert, a feature that is underlined by the small size of museum organisations. In 2019, professional museums employed on average 13 permanent staff members (Museovirasto 2020).
Expertise aside, museum management is characterised by project and fixed- term work, and hence atypical employment relationships. In 2019, about 24% of museum personnel were engaged in work of a non-typical nature (Museovirasto
2020). This figure does not include trainees or people whose work is supported by various grants, which is common in museums. Atypical employment gen- erates a considerable amount of additional work for the administration and maintenance of a cohesive organisational culture.
In addition to the specifics of financial and human resources, museum manag- ers must take into account the fact that, as non-profit organisations, museums are public-interest entities. Their mission is value-based and designed to fulfil a social need, which guides the activities of state-owned museums and those owned by municipalities in particular, which account for 59% of the total in Finland. The value base is also emphasised in museums run by private founda- tions and associations, which, in turn, make up about 39% of the total number of museums (Museovirasto 2020).
Governing bodies
The work of a Finnish museum director is guided and supported by boards in municipal museums, and by boards of directors in private museums. In state- owned museums, this role is performed by central offices or the Ministry of Education and Culture. In all cases, the members of the governing bodies are appointed mainly on the basis of status. It is not uncommon for such members to be appointed by nomination committees or with expert assistance, with the aim of finding the most competent and suitable person for the position from the point of view of the museum’s current situation or strategy. It is common for the museum rules to allocate the right of appointment to several organisations.
In municipal museums, the right of, and responsibility for, appointments are both shaped by political power relations.
Members of the board participate in the museum’s activities in a voluntary capacity or in addition to their main work, on the understanding that they are not expected to dedicate a significant amount of time to these duties. As a result, guiding and supporting the work of the museum director emphasises the setting of goals, financial and operational supervision, as well as ensuring compliance with laws and regulations. The governing body duly has a supervisory role.
According to economist and business executive J.T. Bergqvist, the work of boards and other governing bodies should evolve so that they primarily support the management in terms of sparring and alternative solutions and strategic policies, as well as strengthening the organisation’s know-how in matters of substance (Bergqvist 2007). This is also true in the case of governing bodies in the muse- um branch, particularly since the diversity of the social functions of museums outside of traditional museum work is increasing. Museums are increasingly expected to be providers of know-how, efficacy and results in the business and social sectors.
The shift towards business management
During the 2010s, the management of museums and businesses converged. The change was due to the fact that the share of income earned directly from the
customer in the museum economy increased significantly. In addition, public funding is conditional upon private financing in connection with investment or, at the very least, upon the prospect of investment strengthening opportunities for private financing (Levä 2019).
According to Canadian museologist Robert R. Janes, museums are embed- ded in the business world framework, where their management is becoming shorter-term than before, and where action and investment are sought for their ability to provide a rapid and measurable impact. Money and its economic and activity indicators are a substitute for a hard-to-measure and slow-moving so- cial mission. This is one reason why business experience is increasingly being emphasised as a prerequisite for museum directors and members of governing bodies (Janes 2012).
Another indication of the emergence of corporate leadership in expert organi- sations in the 2010s was the introduction of the Lean Management philosophy, developed in the 1980s to meet the needs of the Japanese Toyota car manufac- turing company in terms of streamlining the workflow and eliminating waste.
Lean management is based on the concept of continuous improvement, a long- term approach that aims to bring about incremental changes in processes in order to improve overall efficiency and quality in an organisation (Torkkola 2015, pp. 22–27).