Gender

Perhaps it is no surprise then, that, when asked what the impact of leaders practicing vulnerability could be in the cultural sector, contributors overall felt that it would lead to:

Healthier and more resilient people and working environments

• closer, more honest team dynamics • better self-care, and less isolation, perfectionism and burn-out • greater openness, generosity, trust, equality and respect • better listening • a learning culture that accepts failure and encourages growth and adaptability • a greater sense of purpose, meaning and commitment, distributing ownership of the mission and organisational pride • motivation and productivity

More creativity and innovation

• more collaborative approaches drawing ideas from a more diverse pool of people • more support and appetite for risk

These insights give a steer on what values and behaviours need to be modelled to create creative and connected cultures, and the role of vulnerability in the process. In the conversations with cultural leaders and in the generous, detailed contributions to this research from survey respondents, the relationship between vulnerability and cultural leadership was revealed to be a rich and fertile landscape – one in which self-authorship and authenticity are co-evolving with more open, accepting, diverse and emergent organisational cultures, and wider paradigm shifts. Finding ways, as in Foster’s quote above, of “behaving like the artists we are” in the task of building organisations and cultural ecosystems that thrive.

Several male and female contributors mentioned gender, suggesting that perhaps vulnerability was more relatable to women. Alison Tickell, Director of Julie’s Bicycle gave her perspective:

I think women do have a different take on leadership, it is (generally speaking) much more collaborative and attuned to a wider set of emotional reference points; it’s not so focused or self-interested, but with that comes a great deal more transactionality – a relational context to everything you do. It’s a much harder place to be.

Doing justice to the comprehensive field of gender and leadership studies was outside the scope of this report, but it’s important to acknowledge the issues raised by contributors, particularly around assumptions of what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” leadership. Assumptions about feminine leadership from interviewees were that it is more relational – collaborative, inclusive and compassionate – with a tendency towards holistic thinking. Male – or “heroic” – leadership was characterised as directive and structural. One male interviewee wondered whether the fact that he did not relate to “vulnerability” as a relevant word in relation to leadership was because he “was a man, ” and, while every woman who was interviewed or responded to the survey related to