Introduction
Happy 40th birthday to the Thornapple Arts Council!
Kathleen – our marketing and technology coordinator and the person who makes us look good – suggested that to celebrate this year, we start a new practice of including a narrative in our e-blast each month. Leave it to Kathleen to come up with great suggestions! But that left us with this question: What do we talk about each month?
It seemed redundant to just talk about all of our upcoming programming because you’ll see that elsewhere in the e-blast.
I thought about tying this blog post to a theme – you know, every day/week/month has some theme or another. But it seemed more important that our first monthly narrative be more about honesty than a pre-determined theme.
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Leadership in a Silo
by Megan Lavell, TAC Executive Director
After the Fair Ground Festival last July, I spent the next few months grieving – not because it was unsuccessful, but because it was financially unviable. My committee members asked me afterwards why I did not share more with them in the process of planning the festival, letting them know where I was struggling and needed more support. The truth is that I was trying to be a “good leader” and carry that burden alone and keep the stress to myself. I thought that it was my cross to bear, that heavy financial burden and the stress of the bottom line. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping people in the dark about my stress and anxiety and fears.
But really, all I was doing was creating a silo for my own suffering.
“I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping quiet about my stress and anxiety and fears. Really, all I was doing was creating a silo for my own suffering.”
The purpose of our festival is not important in this conversation; the culture of the committee that planned it IS important. And the role of leaders and leadership are paramount.
What started as a committee with a few of my friends and some colleagues turned into a support network of people each giving of themselves, sharing talents they had previously kept under wraps in some cases, and – like me – jumping in with both feet and hanging on until the bitter end.
It was a tough loss for everyone involved because we invested so much of ourselves into it. And in the end, instead of rallying the troops to stay strong and focus on our successes, I went and hid and cried alone.
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In an effort to be a better leader for TAC and all the people who support and invest in it, I have been seeking out professional support for fundraising, strategic planning, program structure, communication, and leadership. After last year, I thought I could afford to spend some time shoring up my leadership skills.
One of the sources I have come to enjoy is the Charles Day podcast “Fearless Creative Leadership.” In Episode 274, aired Jan. 10, 2025, Days asks a dozen or so people, “How Will the Best Leaders Lead in 2025?” What he came up with in those conversations were three leadership practices for this year:
Leadership practice #1: Optimism
Leadership practice #2: Clearly define the emotional and personal contract between the organization and your people
Leadership practice #3: Relentlessly pursue self-awareness
I have listened to that episode of the podcast twice now – partly because I’m not always a good listener and partly because I wanted to really make sure I heard everything it had to offer. And quite frankly, I love what it had to offer.
As I listened to experts in the field of leadership talk about those three practices, I reflected on the last year of my life and my own leadership practices. Sometimes I did okay; most of the time I fell short.
“Leadership Development IS that fire I need to focus on right now. And instead of putting it out, maybe I need to nurture it and grow it.”
The idea of being a solid leader is something that falls to the wayside when other more pressing issues pop up: events planning, paying the bills, doing the payroll, making sure the employee handbook is up to date. I have a friend who is a long-time executive director who said once that being an ED is essentially just putting out the fire that is burning the hottest in this moment. That fire, for me, is rarely Leadership Development.
But seeing the way that I let my team down last year through my own lack of optimism; my own undefined emotional and personal contract; my own lack of self-awareness made me think that maybe Leadership Development IS that fire I need to focus on right now. And instead of putting it out, maybe I need to nurture it and grow it and harness it into something good rather than something chaotic.
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One of the best lessons I’ve learned in my life is that it is not important to have all the answers; it is important to find the answers or find people who can help you find the answers. In the process of trying to become the leader TAC needs, I have been relentlessly seeking those answers and the people with them.
A great source of information for my leadership journey – courtesy of our strategic planning and all-things-nonprofit guru Teresa Durham – has become blueavocado.org. In the Feb. 4, 2025 article, “Nonprofit Leadership Isn’t Perfect, and That’s the Point,” Sam Aboudara said:
Leadership is no longer about having all the answers or even a perfect vision; it’s about guiding teams through uncertainty and empowering others to respond creatively to the unknown. In this complexity, a leader’s role becomes that of a connector — uniting people, ideas, and resources toward shared goals amidst the chaos.
Reading that quote made my heart sing. Maybe my failure as a leader last year was not that I failed to lead us directly and clearly down the rainbow-and-sunshine soaked path to success; maybe my failure was simply that I thought I should. Maybe success did not equal thousands of tickets sold (while that would have been nice); maybe it was simply being transparent about the rocky terrain of the path we were on together and letting someone else hold the map once in a while.
“Maybe my failure as a leader was not that I failed to lead us directly down the rainbow-and-sunshine soaked path to success; maybe it was simply that I thought I should.”
Aboudara went on to say:
One of my favorite quotes is from philosopher Sam Keen, who speaks not of leadership but of love: ‘We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.’
I think the same could be said for leadership. Maybe leadership is about taking imperfect people in imperfect circumstances and forging a path towards the impossibilities of perfection.
Looking around me last year at the beautiful chaos our team created, I cannot help but appreciate the imperfect people working in imperfect circumstances and how the shared belief in a perfect vision was enough to keep propelling us forward. I did not understand at the time what a gift that way. But in an effort to embrace my inner (and deeply hidden) optimist, now I do.
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So happy 40th birthday to TAC! I am going to give the organization and its many dedicated supporters, staff, and volunteers the same gift I gave myself last year on my 40th birthday: a little bit of grace and a whole lot more acceptance.
If you would like to make a birthday gift to the Thornapple Arts Council, we will gratefully accept and honor your donation at our birthday party later this year. And yes, there will be cake.
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