Stop Sucking At Things

"I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse."
       - Florence Nightingale

"I've always been a late person."
"I'm not good at returning phone calls."
"I just don't understand social media."
"I suck at websites."

How often have we heard these kinds of qualifiers? How often have we used them ourselves? While we all have personal areas of strength and weakness, in today's highly competitive market it's no longer feasible to operate successfully with glaring weaknesses in our work habits. We must constantly seek to improve our skill set- particularly in those areas where we lack natural aptitude. 

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KIRSTEN:  Websites (creating them, editing them, making them work...) do not come easily to me. However, more often than not in arts organizations situations arise where a significant change needs to be made on the website, but no one knows how to make the change. I have found myself sitting in front of my laptop for hours struggling with Wordpress, googling phrases such as "why big space between lines of text wordrpress coding help." While I'm sure that I could have paid someone to do the task much more efficiently, by tackling this myself I had added to my knowledge bank. The next time a website needed to be changed, I was able to change it.

Sometimes this includes doing things the hard way. For a summer choral program I ran in San Diego, I knew that it would be easiest for parents and students to be able to register online, but I wasn't sure how to make that happen. After painful hours of research, setting up forms on Wordpress, having the forms delete themselves, and setting them up again, I was able to make online registration and payment an option for parents. This option wasn't completely necessary, as I could have had parents simply download PDF forms and send them to me via email or hard copy. The process of setting up online registration was a struggle for me, but it eased the process for the client. In the end, I received more registrations due to the easy process, which in turn generated more income for the program. Personally, this was a great learning experience. With my new organization the South Shore Children's Chorus, I was able to kick off online registration with ease. I am glad that I've now earned this knowledge and experience, even though it was a true weakness of mine a couple of years ago.  


KRISHAN: When I served as organist at The Immaculata Parish, University of San Diego, I frequently dealt with engaged couples planning their wedding at our "destination" church set atop a hill. In my first few years on the job, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests I received for organ services for weddings. I set up a separate email account to handle the deluge of messages from engaged couples- but I eventually began to ignore that account when other commitments piled up. I would reply to e-mails only about once a week, which simply wasn't frequently enough to keep up with the pace. At one point, my Pastor took me aside and informed me that he had received a number of complaints from engaged couples who were frustrated at my lack of response. I replied that I wasn't particularly good at keeping up with that e-mail account, but that I was willing to hire a part-time assistant to respond to the couples who were trying to get in touch with me. My Pastor's response has always stayed with me: "Krishan, your position is not just a job, but a ministry.  You're a representative of the parish, and your pastoral communication with these couples may be one of the only contacts they have with the Church." This forever changed the way I looked at my position; I was no longer just a "hired gun". I made it a priority to become not just efficient, but gracious and responsive in my communication.

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We are not suggesting that artistic leaders need to do everything themselves; certainly, there are times when delegation is called for. Nevertheless, we strongly believe that well-rounded professionals must, at the very least, develop basic competency in some fundamental areas. And with the rapid pace of our world and its technological advances, we need to continually re-educate ourselves in order to avoid being left behind.