Changing Museum Culture: Research from the Field

Posted byRebecca ShulmanPosted inOrganizational Culture in Museums

Here is a metaphor I keep coming back to:

Museum directors feel like they are captains of ships that are under attack. While they put out fires and fight off pirates (metaphors for declining attendance and revenue), the staff below decks are crying out, “But you’re not listening to us! We want to be heard and valued!”

Why are some employees “below decks”? If there are pirates to be fought off and fires to be put out, shouldn’t everyone be on deck, wielding swords and dousing flames with water?

But they aren’t. Museum directors feel under attack for very real and pressing reasons. They are trying to keep their budgets balanced, make up for significant drops in attendance since 2019, and reinvent themselves amidst concerns, ranging from repatriation to relevance. And meanwhile, staff are crying out for very real and pressing reasons: they are underpaid, under-acknowledged, left out of communication loops, and overworked.

In order to better understand and address the challenge of better engaging and the full museum staff, and bring them on-deck to save and improve their museums, I interviewed 14 museum directors. The goal of these interviews, and the resulting report, was to better understand how museums assess organizational culture issues, what they find, and what solutions they have produced. My findings have now been compiled into a full report.

You can read the full report here; a downloadable PDF is available here.

Here are a few highlights from my findings:

  1. Overall, museums do not have a consistent and reliable way to assess organizational culture. We often depend on a “trickle up” or open-door approach.
  2. The challenges museums are identifying include:
    • Transparency: What should be shared with everyone?
    • Interdepartmental Communication: How can communication be strengthened between departments?
    • Management Training: What do managers need to know and do?
    • Management Ability: What does meaningful staff support look like?
    • Change Management: How does rapid change impact staff?
    • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: What does real diversity, equity and inclusion look like, and how do museums get there?
    • Workload: How do we “right-size” workload?
    • Pay: How can we pay enough?
    • Personality: What do you do with a mismatch of individual and museum?
  3. Many museum directors are developing significant and useful approaches to address these challenges; most of these directors are working independently, meaning that each museum is finding its own solutions, rather than learning from others.

If you are a museum director and are interested in finding ways to address organizational culture challenges, consider Culture Shift, which will take you through the process of assessing the area of change that will have the greatest impact, and designing strategies to address that challenge and make meaningful change. Learn more here.

Early bird registration ends August 31; registration closes September 30.

Published by Rebecca Shulman

I am the Principal of Museum Questions Consulting, which delivers a range of services that motivate leaders at all levels to think deeply and carefully about goals and systems, so that they can plan effectively. have over 20 years of experience as a museum professional, working both within museums and as a consultant. Most recently I served as Founding Director of the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum, in Peoria, Illinois. Prior to that I worked as Head of Education at the Noguchi Museum, and Senior Manager of Learning Through Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. While at the Guggenheim Museum I wrote a book, Looking at Art in the Classroom. Learn more about Museum Questions, my consulting practice, at www.museumquestions.com.

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