Other GLI at CGU Programs

The Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University (GLI at CGU) provides other program offerings, such as:

• The Directors' Seminars
• Adapting to a New Culture: Museums
• Regional Programs

The Directors' Seminars

Directors' Seminars are programs designed for small groups of museum directors, presidents, and CEOs. The seminars are both practical and restorative, informal conversations with colleagues at some distance from the urgency of daily responsibilities.

• Demystifying Influence
  Directors must influence a variety of constituencies on a daily basis. In most situations museum CEOs lack authority and must use influence. Sometimes they exercise influence rather than authority even with persons who report directly to them. Directors are also often the objects of others' attempts at influence. Much of a day in the life of a museum director includes the need to exercise or resist influence in enormously complex organizations. This directors' seminar unpacks influence and shows it to be a set of reasoned frameworks and seasoned skills —ways of thinking and acting that can be strengthened in order to take influence to the next level.
• Leading Retrenchment
  Retrenchment is appropriate for many reasons: to achieve equilibrium between strategy and resources; to sort out programs that have strayed from mission and core values; or to stabilize an institution exhausted by a period of over expansion. Retrenchment is an almost inevitable moment in the lives of museums, a necessary and useful way to strengthen the institution. Rarely is retrenchment all-threat and no-opportunity. Directors need to examine their situations through multiple frames of analysis and to use reliable processes that will make retrenchment both useful and fair. This directors' seminar is about those lenses and decision models.

In the past, typical fees have ranged from $1,000 to $1,800 per participant. To propose a topic and register your interest in a future Directors Seminar offering, please contact us.

Adapting to a New Culture: Museums

Many people have moved into major roles in museums from careers pursued entirely outside the field often in the for-profit sector. Museums have sought them out because they have much needed knowledge and skills. Remaining at the top of their game in a new and often very different culture is a challenge. Sometimes energetic and talented newcomers rail against the culture of their new environments and sometimes they go native, losing the edge that made them attractive to the field in the first place.

The goal of Adapting to a New Culture: Museums is to demonstrate ways in which the important but different perspectives of persons new to the field can be optimized through greater understanding of their new organizational culture. Program participants will explore the history, values and contending futures of museums. They will also discuss how their skills can play out effectively in organizations that they sometimes see as dysfunctionally polite, conflict avoidant, averse to commerce, and driven by endless conversations and elusive core values. Those whose careers have been entirely in the for-profit sector will have an opportunity to explore how they can set standards of performance for themselves without the bottom line of profits and stock prices.

To register your interest in a future Adapting to a New Culture: Museums offering, please contact us.

Regional Programs

Occasionally, GLI at CGU designs and delivers strategic programs to meet specific regional needs. Examples include:

• Thinking Strategically In a World of Uncertainty
  A two-day program focusing on transition issues and strategic planning for visual arts and cultural organizations affected by Hurricane Katrina, (New Orleans, 2006). Offered in conjunction with the Getty Foundation's Fund for New Orleans.
• Leading People and Organizations
  Professional development opportunities specifically tailored to the needs of Southern California museums and arts organizations, (Difficult Others, Los Angeles, 2008 and Strategy, Los Angeles, 2008).
• Programa en Alta Dirección de Museos 
  A leadership program for Mexican museum leaders offered in collaboration with the Instituto de Liderazgo en Museos.
• NextGen: Canada
  A version of our Museum Leaders: the Next Generation (NextGen) program designed by and for Canadian museum professionals, offered in collaboration with the Alberta Museums Association and the University of Alberta Museums.