Cure your perfectionism! And other reasons (you’d never thought of) to grow your own vegetables

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Happy New Year!

Is there room on your list for one more resolution? I’d like to whole-heartedly recommend growing your own vegetables but – hear me out! – not for any of the reasons you might typically imagine. Forget lofty ideas about nature connection or feeling smug about having organic produce without the price tag, here are my top five reasons (you’d never thought of) to start planting in 2024:

1. Combat loneliness

Spamming people with pictures of your vegetables is the perfect way forward when you want to connect but you don’t quite know what to say. It really doesn’t matter what you’re sharing – the first successful shoots, weird and wonky fruits – it’s a light-hearted way to keep in touch and get a conversation started.

2. Cure your perfectionism

It won’t grow straight or evenly or perhaps at all. It will drive you slightly mad up until the point where it just… doesn’t. Less perfectionism. More patience. You’ll come out the other side a better person, I promise.

3. Enjoy new rituals

No matter how much or how little you manage to grow, you now have the makings of a ceremonial dinner. The more comically diminutive the vegetables, the more important the occasion in fact. Decorate the table, gather your loved ones, put your bountiful harvest on your fanciest plate and pay tribute to the wonders of nature!

4. Amuse your neighbours

Do you have climbing tomato vines instead of curtains? Runner beans instead of rose bushes? Are you regularly spotted trudging around with buckets of compost or bouquets of lettuce? Always remember – it’s ok to be different and it’s good to be interesting.

5. Enhance your CV

It is genuinely wonderful to all be encouraged to bring our authentic selves to the office now, but just getting through the day and making ends meet might not leave much room for anything else sometimes. A few seeds in pots is all it takes and congratulations – you are a grower! Ready and able to share details of your hobby whenever the world demands it.

And the great thing is that these benefits are available no matter what size green space you have access to – just because I have an allotment now doesn’t mean I didn’t start out with just a windowsill.

I hope you’re suitably convinced!

Wishing you a happy new year and a great growing season ahead.

There’s more than one way to acknowledge an email

It’s a very boring topic I know but I think it’s quite an important one. Like it or lump it – and regardless of any software you have installed to help avoid direct engagement with it – email is a key method of communication for most organisations. It’s versatile, it’s familiar, it’s ubiquitous.

In the non-profit sector, email is quite likely to still be the primary means for communicating about work in progress, particularly when that work involves individuals and groups outside of your own organisation. Emails detail tasks and email management is task management. If we can’t manage our emails, we can’t manage and communicate about our tasks, and we’re very unlikely to achieve the results we’re looking for.

So email management matters.

It feels to me though as if we might have passed the peak of our interest in this subject. In the early 2000s, productivity expert Merlin Mann developed the Inbox Zero method through a series of posts on his 43 folders blog and podcast. The subsequent refinement of the method led to broad agreement on five basic but brilliant principles to help us regain control. Following the invention of these principles, however, they’ve been increasingly obscured by overcomplication and too much automation.

I’d like to advocate for a return to those principles, not just because they’re really good, but also because we need them more than ever – workloads are higher, resources are stretched thinner, and in the post-pandemic workplace we’re separated from each other by both distance and culture. Even if we do still have a telephone it would be unthinkable now to use it, so we return again to our inboxes, overwhelmed and anxious, struggling to send a response or struggling through not having received one. It’s stressful and unproductive and I would dearly like us to all get better at acknowledging and responding to each other’s emails.

The Inbox Zero method is generally set out around the following five actions:

1.      Delete – delete or archive the message if it is irrelevant or resolved
2.      Delegate – send the task to a more appropriate contact
3.      Respond – if it can be answered quickly, do so straight away
4.      Defer – if it will take more time, schedule the task and let the sender know you’ve done so
5.      Do – work on what’s left, which should only include the things that really matter

There are many variations – and as mentioned, overcomplications – and at the risk of adding more fuel to the fire of confusion, I’d like to offer up my own. This is the approach I use and I find it more appropriate for the non-profit sector, and in small organisations in particular, as it includes a little more collaboration. You will also notice it’s in reverse order (because priorities should be… prioritised?):

A.     Act – flag and complete the task
B.     Bounce – schedule the task so you can complete it later
C.     Collaborate – ask the sender for help to manage the responsibility
D.     Delegate – send the task to a more appropriate contact
E.     Extricate – decline and be clear to the sender about your boundaries
F.     Forget – ignore the message and file it away if it might be needed later

(do you see what I did there?!)

Here are those actions in a little more detail, including how they differ from Inbox Zero:

Act – flag and complete the task

Identify and flag all of the tasks that need your immediate attention.

This is your live list. You should be able to act on everything that’s been flagged within the space of a couple of days, and if you find that you can’t, then this is not the right category and the tasks need another form of management from the list. In comparison to Inbox Zero, this is simply anything you must or can action (‘respond’ and ‘do’) without needing to send a holding response (‘defer’).

In this category you are clearly accepting responsibility for actioning these tasks and the sender will need to know when they have been actioned – this is where it can be easy to over or under email. If you are tackling the task relatively quickly, you don’t need to reply until you’ve got the results of your work and you might not need to reply at all if the results will be evident through other means. Conversely though, it’s important to remember that reading counts as an action, and if you have read an email it’s usually helpful to make this known. A simple ‘thank you’ will usually do – or else what you see as ‘act’ may be perceived by others as ‘forget’ which could lead to frustrations or unnecessary follow ups.

Bounce – schedule the task so you can complete it later

Make a decision about when you will complete the task and add it to your calendar or workplan.

This category is for everything that needs your attention, but not right now. This is the ‘defer’ of Inbox Zero, with the small distinction that if your scheduling means the task will be completed in the timeframe that’s expected, then it may not be necessary to reply to confirm this. Less is more!

Collaborate – ask the sender for help to manage the responsibility

Reply to the sender to agree what should happen next to resolve the outstanding task.

This is a new addition to the Inbox Zero method and one which I feel is badly needed in small organisations. It’s for occasions when you need to ‘act’ on or ‘bounce’ the task but neither of those options is possible because you’ve just got too many other priorities.

Explain to the sender that the task cannot be a priority right now and shift the responsibility back to them, for example, by asking them either to come back to you at a much later date, to be more selective about exactly which element of the task they need your input on, or to start some initial work on the task themselves. The aim of this option is to allow you to put the task out of your mind but without being disrespectful to your colleagues (by not raising workload issues until late in the day) or neglecting your duties (by completely failing to address the task at all).

Delegate – send the task to a more appropriate contact

Pass the task on to a colleague who is more appropriately positioned to action it.

This category is exactly the same as the ‘delegate’ in Inbox Zero. Ensure all of the relevant parties are copied into the message and that the delegation includes a clear explanation of the rationale for the transfer of the responsibility.

Extricate – decline and be clear to the sender about your boundaries

Reply to the sender to decline the task and remove yourself from this area of work.

This is another addition to the Inbox Zero method which seems to lack an option for clearly but politely saying ‘no’. There are just some requests that are not appropriate and whilst ignoring the email may seem like the answer, at best it’s unlikely to discourage future requests, and at worst it’s unkind and may foster bad feeling. Clear is kind. It would be much better to decline and clearly set out your boundaries, particularly in the interests of maintaining reputations and relationships.

Forget – ignore the message and file it away if it might be needed later

Purposefully ignore the message.

Yes this is valid option – for cold calls, group emails, and errant requests – and it can be a useful way to send a particular message (without actually resorting to other f-words!). Use it but use it sparingly, and don’t end up using it by mistake when you ought to be using one of the above. In comparison to Inbox Zero, this is anything you want to dismiss (the ‘delete’ option) and I usually recommend filing or archiving instead of the nuclear option. In small organisations, it’s impossible to predict when you might suddenly need to come back to – or find yourself responsible for – something you previously thought was far outside of your remit.

Once you get used to this way of thinking, the categorisation will come naturally and quickly.

You will also get used to recategorisation, something that’s discouraged in Inbox Zero variations which usually promote the one touch rule – a nice idea but one which ignores the realities of changing circumstances and workloads. Every day is a new day and what was feasible yesterday is not necessarily so today. Recategorisation is essential. The most common moves will reapplying a new approach to things you had optimistically put into the ‘act’ category, but I’d encourage actively focusing on using the ‘collaborate’ and ‘extricate’ so that you avoid leaning too heavily on ‘forget’.

This isn’t just about how we manage our emails, it’s about the way that we work together and show kindness to each other through our approach to communication. You might be great at the work itself, but just imagine how much greater you could be if you were communicating more effectively about it too.

Exquisite Corpse: how to write great museum (and other) texts

Do you know what happens when 12 different people write a text? Funnily enough, it reads as if 12 different people have written it. At an individual level, the sentences are correct and coherent – some of them may even be quite beautiful – but together, they begin to turn ugly. They form a disjointed, painful, monster of a text. They are an Exquisite Corpse.

If you’re not already familiar with that term then you’re in for a treat! Exquisite Corpse was a collaborative drawing game invented in the 1920s by the Surrealists. The idea is simple: each artist draws a section of a figure, they fold the paper down to conceal all except the very tip of their drawing, the papers are passed round, and the next artist continues the lines, and adds the next set of body parts without any knowledge of what has gone before. At the end of the game, when all the sections have been filled in, the papers are unfolded to reveal a set of uniquely absurd creations. 

The drawing exercise is the most famous version of Exquisite Corpse but its origins are actually in written form. In poetry, the effects are highly arresting – they can be pleasantly and unpleasantly surprising. The game is wonderful and successful precisely because of the strange juxtapositions that emerge. This is not, however, what you should be aiming for when you are trying to take a reader on a specific journey – if you are trying to explain an idea or tell a story, for example, as you would in your museum text (and most other texts for that matter).

There will be plenty of things about your content that will be challenging – that will be novel, insightful, provocative (at least there should be, otherwise why are you writing it?) – but the words themselves should not be.

So how then, can the jarring nature of the Exquisite Corpse be avoided?

The first part of the solution is very obvious:

Step 1: Commission a writer.

Commission or allocate a writer. Just the one, whether internal or external to your organisation. Not only is this sensible as it will give the text a powerful single voice and a personality (to a greater or lesser extent as you think best) but it’s also an act of immense generosity. Writing is a joyful act and a pleasure – far better to give this joy to one person alone than attempt to collaborate and make everyone miserable as they compete to be heard.

The second part of the solution, is not always as obvious as it should be:

Step 2: Write the text

Write the text. That’s the great untold secret. It sounds like lunacy I’m sure and you must be thinking I’ve completely lost the plot, but when you look back at a text you are struggling with, answer me this – did you write that text? I mean, did you actually write it, or did you just assemble it? Sticking one fragment to another until all of the relevant ideas had been compiled?

Compiling has become our default setting and when all of the ideas have been compiled, there are always, of course, too many of them. Vital linking phrases start to get discarded left and right as you strive towards impossible word counts. You feel triumphant as the words vanish from view, like lines that are completed in a game of tetris, but just like in that gloriously addictive (yet somehow never completely fulfilling) puzzle – no matter how good you get at it, what you’re always left with is invariably full of holes.

Write the text.

Absorb all the ideas but then leave them where they lie. Brave that blank sheet of paper and write the text. You’ll feel much better for it and your writing will be better for it too.

Oh and if you are in need of a writer, please feel free to send a little joy my way!

Supporting leadership in the heritage sector

This article was originally published by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities on behalf of the Heritage Partnerships Team. I am grateful for their assistance throughout the Supporting Leadership project encouraging contributions to the research from across the heritage sector.

It is no secret that the cultural and heritage sectors are filled with talented and dedicated individuals. Organisations depend upon their unwavering commitment and without it, they would not survive. There has been great progress over recent years in recognising the contributions of particular groups, front of house and volunteers for example, but there has been one staff group that has remained very much behind the scenes - the administrative staff working tirelessly to support senior management.

“We can be invisible and only thought of when things go wrong.” Support staff

The Supporting Leadership Report, published in June 2020, has sought to change this and to reveal and recognise the importance of this staff group. The report presents the findings of the Supporting Leadership project, a research and knowledge exchange project that has used a nationwide digital consultation to investigate these roles:

• what they do

• how they do it

• and why it matters

These may seem like simple questions but they are surprisingly tricky to answer. The value of support roles is difficult to quantify – unlike other roles, support staff rarely have their own specific outputs and deliverables, instead they have an enabling function in relation to outputs or deliverables that belong to others or more broadly to organisations as a whole. Through the consultation, however, and a detailed analysis of the reflections that were shared, it has been possible to get a tangible sense of the intangible benefits that are connected to these roles. The report sets out nine distinct types of value: time, action, organisation, foresight, memory, consistency, mediation, honesty, and insight.

Support staff are relied upon by their colleagues to know what to do and to get it done, they offer stability and consistency in changeable workplaces, and their reach extends across and beyond their organisations as they manage relationships with staff and stakeholders.

“I’m able to speak to and work with anyone and everyone to get things done.” Support staff

Crucially, support staff free up leaders to lead, preserving and protecting their time and taking care of the small details so that they can focus on the bigger picture.

“My failure to pay close enough attention to health and safety, and to budgets, due to being spread too thin due to administrative tasks could have severe consequences for the organisation, reputationally and legally.” Leader

This work is not easy. Participants in the consultation noted the challenges they faced managing ever expanding remits and ever increasing workloads. Contrary to possible perceptions surrounding the scope of these roles, the majority (69%) of the support staff surveyed reported that they were an assistant to more than one individual – reflecting the constant pressure to do more, for more people, with the same amount of resource – and there was also great complexity seen in the extent of their remits, with 25 different job titles and 44 distinct work areas identified.

More importantly, both leaders and support staff identified an issue with perceptions – they felt that support roles were not well understood and not well respected.

“I think the role isn’t well understood, it can be abused and used as a dogsbody role.” Leader 

“I think people have the tendency to think that it is the type of role that anyone could do....It has always irked me somewhat when I’ve heard people say that they “can always be a PA” without really knowing the levels of judgement, tact, communication skills, organisational ability and so on that are needed.“ Support staff

This lack of respect can create practical barriers to the fulfilment of the role, as support staff are misused or struggle to work with colleagues who see their needs and requests as low priority, but it also has a significant impact on staff at a personal level. Most of the support staff surveyed reported some level of discontentment and many were thinking about leaving their current positions: 36% were either actively looking for new opportunities or intended to start looking within a year, 33% saw themselves looking within 1-3 years, and only 31% saw themselves in the same role in 3 years time. Whilst it is important for organisations to be dynamic and open to bringing in new ideas and approaches, high levels of turnover create instability and risk the loss of valuable professional expertise.

In heritage specifically, the intentions of support staff were aligned with the results of the consultation overall with only 33% of participants reporting that they could see themselves in the same role in 3 years time.

There was a remarkable amount of common ground seen across the experiences of all of the support staff who participated, however, the heritage and libraries and archives categories scored slightly lower than other organisation types in relation to the opportunity that support staff had to shape and define processes, and the heritage category scored highest in relation to the need for support staff to cover other staffing gaps. Heritage organisations can often be financially vulnerable and these results may reflect mounting pressure on resources, showing that staff are being forced to operate in a fire-fighting capacity rather than being able to focus on moving their institutions forward.

The Supporting Leadership Report identifies many opportunities to change the experience of support roles to ensure that staff are able to thrive and to commit to and perform at their best for their organisations. It sets out six key recommendations around the themes of:

• definition

• information

• awareness

• empowerment

• mutual benefit

• room for growth

The report also provides practical advice through a series of four tools focusing on role descriptions, working environments, recruitment processes, and development pathways.

More than ever, as the cultural and heritage sectors embark on a period of great change, responding to the disruption of the global pandemic and seizing and building on the momentum created by the Black Lives Matter movement, institutions will need to be able to retain and draw upon skilled members of staff if they are to successfully tackle the big issues that must be addressed. Support staff should not be forgotten in this endeavour.