MMF Publications: In Conversation
June 21, 2024
Discussion via Zoom moderated by Liz Levine, MMF Publications & Events Manager
Anonymous author of “Human Resources is Not Your Friend”
Brea Heidelberg, author of “Compliance vs. Care in Museums: The Problematic Dichotomy that Silences Workers Facing Discrimination”
LIZ LEVINE (MMF) I paired your pieces because they both reveal, through research and personal experience, a lack of care within museums, particularly in the relationship between staff and human resources policies and procedures. I’d love to start with hearing about what came up for each of you while reading the other’s article. How does this notion of compliance versus care fit into your experience at the museum you worked for?
ANONYMOUS During my interactions with HR, no one was advocating for me. Nobody in HR said it’s awful what you’re going through. There was a dehumanizing aspect when I was dealing with management and HR. Everything was within these legal parameters of the state that we live in, without acknowledging the human aspects of what was going on. I wrote about how the doctor told me I needed to stay home with my wife when she had an emergency with her pregnancy. HR and management initially ignored my request to work from home and then ultimately denied me that ability, even though I had worked from home several days a week for the entire prior year.
MMF Brea, how do you think that compliance came into play in your paired author’s experience? Have you witnessed similar situations in your work?
BREA HEIDELBERG (BH) First of all, I’m so sorry that you had that experience, especially while your wife was pregnant. It is abhorrent. And I’ve seen and experienced similar things.
The term compliance is a bit of a misnomer and a catch-all for the things that look like the legally right course of action. People tend to equate logic with a lack of emotion, which is an erroneous Western thing. Compliance doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually is within legal compliance or that they are barred from doing more or something different. It’s this idea of, well, I guess those are the rules. Who made those rules? Why aren’t the rules more humane or flexible?
I saw multiple opportunities throughout your piece where anybody could have stepped in and said let’s see if there’s more to this story. I’m perpetually baffled by people who are not curious, especially in creative organizations where we tend to puff out our chests and say we’re creative and intellectually curious but then don’t seem to be asking any questions. I think my first question would have been what is the supervisor’s capacity to manage people? Most people in the field aren’t trained on how to effectively manage people. I firmly advocate that performance reviews including anybody with a managerial capacity have a 360° component. If you’re only looking at what the supervisor is showing you, then you’re not looking at the whole picture.
MMF Does that resonate with your experience?
ANON Brea’s point about who makes these rules is an interesting one. When I started to do DEI work, I kept hearing this analogy that the museum was like a big boat, and it’s hard to turn it around. It’ll take a long time. That analogy could also apply to these issues with HR and how staff is treated, except the organization is not a boat. It’s made up of people, and people can change. But everybody seemed resigned to how things were, instead of asking why don’t we make new rules or new ways of working that could solve some of these issues that employees are bringing up?
MMF Brea, you talk about the pre-work that an institution needs to do—pay a living wage, acknowledge current inequities, and confront how white folks and white supremacy culture directly or inadvertently block meaningful equity reforms. Could you speak more about how organizations should think about this pre-work when reviewing current or building new HR structures? Why isn’t it enough to just go directly to trying to fix HR processes?
BH I’m in the process of finishing a book on HR in the arts, and all the research says that financial worry is directly linked to counterproductive work behaviors. Organizations don’t operate in a vacuum: people have to live in the world, and then they come into work, so the stressors of the outside world should be considered when thinking about how the organization operates. We can’t just say that history starts today, because then we’re building (hopefully better) practices on top of workplace trauma and previous harm without acknowledging it.
MMF What are the on-the-ground and structural barriers you see that prevent organizations from moving away from a compliance mindset?
BH That love of the perception of compliance comes from the “businessification” of nonprofits—this idea that businesses have it right, and businesses are cold and unfeeling and logical. So the nonprofit aspect is light and fluffy and mission statements, but when it comes to how we treat people, if we’re going to look better to donors, if we’re going to look better to foundations and grant-making institutions, then we need to comply with our (usually bastardized) understanding of business.
ANON And these large museums historically have been more homogenous: white, educated, and liberal. I’m a person of color, so I didn’t fit into all of these categories. These types of organizations are running into issues where they’re now employing people who don’t fit into their historical mold. What worked for them in the past, with a workforce that was basically the same in a lot of ways, doesn’t work anymore. They don’t know how to deal with this new diversity issue that has been boiling up in the past decade or so.
BH The thing that makes me so angry is, alright, so you’re being a jerk, and you’re gonna be all sanctimonious and self-righteous about it? They’re all like, we’re a nonprofit where we add value to the community, but without considering the employees part of said community in any meaningful way.
MMF Can you talk a little bit about what convinced or prepared you, especially in this context, to pursue legal action?
ANON When things were getting really bad at the museum, I consulted with a labor lawyer. She listened to my story, and she said I could try to bring a legal case for bullying or retaliation, but the threshold to prove that is incredibly high if you don’t have, for example, an email that says blatantly discriminatory or retaliatory things against you. But then they fired me soon after my child was born while I was still technically on parental leave—that that was their legal misstep. And it was a traumatic process, so a big part of me thought I don’t want to revisit this trauma. However, I had a friend who put me in touch their lawyer. I talked to them, and they told me I definitely had a case. And just realizing that I had rights made me want to exercise those rights.
BH I commend you on sticking it out and going through that process. I’ve experienced it myself, and even though I research it and I know what I am looking at, it still takes a toll. It’s difficult to have to rehash and relive in order to hold people accountable. I really appreciate that call to action at the end of your piece for people to not be silent about their pain. There’s a Zora Neale Hurston quote, “If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,” and that’s how organizations operate. If they are not forced—either legally or from public opinion or anybody just saying, hey, what you did was messed up—then their takeaway is, we were good. It wasn’t that bad. But it is that bad. It does take a toll on people, and it hurts the organizations themselves.
MMF Brea, you write that despite a verbal intention to invite accountability and collaboration within some institutions, the results are often more performative than participatory. That assessment resonates with the data in our report and many of the experiences I’ve heard from museum workers involved in participatory processes within institutions. On the flipside, museum leadership may voice frustration or concern about how much time and effort even more collaboration may take, and that some employees may not be equipped to advise on particularly sensitive processes and procedures. How do you think about that? Is there any reframing you would offer to staff or leadership?
BH I’ve had this conversation with a number of leaders as a consultant, and I find, as a Black woman, I’m always having to navigate what I say and how I say it and trying to make sure that they’re hearing my message and not just my identity. Part of my toolkit is to reframe when somebody says something ridiculous in the most base-level way possible. Some of my faves are: “You know, that’s the logic that people use to fight against democracy, that people were too uneducated to vote on policies and procedures that directly impact them. Do you really want to align with that logic?” Or: “Oh cool, so you can spend a little more time for people to actually be heard and maybe consider something that you haven’t, or you can spend three times as much time and money as dysfunctional turnover happens and as people leave your organization quietly. But the whisper network about the fakequity? Oh, that’s going to be loud and swift.” Some people just need to be told, you are out of pocket.
MMF That brings me to your conclusion, Brea, where you write how some organizations may “loudly [claim] DEI work, while quietly harming and silencing the very people they are congratulating themselves for helping.” Both of your pieces brought up this fundamental tension within museums, where they are the face of this equity work that they’ve gotten good at co-opting, while inequity within the institution persists. As folks advocating for more equity within institutions that use all the right language, that say that they’re values-driven, how do we how do we call attention to this “sneaky younger sibling,” as you call it, of the white savior complex?
BH This is the space for strong accomplice-ship and allyship. There are going to be spaces that aren’t safe for people of different identities to call out the mismatch between language and action. But it’s really nice to have somebody that you can pass a post-it note to in a meeting that says, can you bring up such and such?
It’s called trauma entrapment, when you’re signaling that you’re a safe place to land and all you have essentially done is ask them to expose their soft spot so that you can stick them in it. That idea of trauma entrapment is definitely at play in these organizations that have a very glossy website with the images and the language. Those are recruiting tools. People look at that and say, this might be a space for me. Then they get in and they realize, not only is it not a space for me, it’s a really dangerous space for me.
And, again, commending you [the anonymous author] on speaking up because these institutions are counting on people to go away silently. They’re counting on the prestige and the gloss and the perception of their organization as a great place to work remaining intact in order to perpetuate this harm.
ANON This idea of weaponized prestige is really interesting. In my case, I found out that a lot of former employees had gone through similar circumstances, and we were talking about how no one has called out this organization. We had the idea of reaching out to a few local journalists to see if they would be interested in the story. When we did, there was no traction because—they didn’t say this outright—a lot of journalists, or their outlets, want to have access to this museum in the future.
MMF Moving us towards a closing, Brea, what would a care-based approach have looked like in your paired author’s situation?
BH It takes time and work and consideration to become a more equitable and humane organization, but it’s manageable work. Before that supervisor is allowed to hire someone, before that job posting goes out, I’m making sure that they are ready to manage someone. I’m looking at the exit interviews of anybody that has recently left from under them. I am a big proponent of an extended onboarding process: 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day check in points. You’d be assigned a mentor that’s above your supervisor. You’d be assigned a buddy who’s at the same level as you so that you can have some relationship building to help navigate some of these things. It’s not that I want to undermine managers’ ability to assess their employees work, it’s that everybody’s on a learning curve to becoming equitable and humane. All of that doesn’t even necessarily rise to the level of pure equity work. To most people, it’s about making policies and procedures real and workable and flexible and considerate.
MMF Anything else that you want to share before we close out?
ANON Arts employees should really think about unionizing. It seems like an uphill battle, but I think that doing so would bake in some extra protections. In my case, if I’d had a union backing me, things maybe would not have gone so badly. Perhaps my benefits wouldn’t have been taken away. I am looking at how workers can empower themselves, and unionizing is one way that we can deal with some of these issues in HR and arts and culture organizations that we’ve been talking about today.
MMF And you, Brea?
BH One of the most pernicious pieces of what happens when you’re psychologically bullied at work or just treated inequitably and your organization is focused on compliance and not care, is the gaslighting effect. Workplace trauma is real. If you think you’re experiencing it, you probably are. I always do a plug that everybody that has access to healthcare should have their top three: your primary care, your dentist, and your therapist. If you’re a teeth grinder, [workplace trauma’s] showing up at the dentist’s office. If you have high stress from trauma, it’s showing up in your headaches or your shoulders or your low back. And it can show up in a myriad of ways that might look like grief or depression or anxiety.
The other thing that I’ll say is that sometimes workplace trauma can have a ripple effect. Again, I do this work and do this research, and when I started new job––a great job where I was well supported––after I’d experienced workplace trauma, it took a supervisor pulling me aside and saying, you’re okay, you’re safe here, you can relax. Because I didn’t realize that I had carried that with me, and it was still showing up in my new workplace, even though everything was okay. So that’s the piece of this that people very seldom talk about. Give yourself space and time and care.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.