What Every Museum Director Should Know about Working with Boards

While new directors learn how to manage and lead museums as part of their professional training and career development, the skills and knowledge required to work with boards--which are instrumental to a museum director’s work--must somehow be acquired on the job as one’s career progresses. What Every Museum Director Should Know about Working with Boards is designed to empower new and aspiring museum directors by equipping them with the skills and knowledge to work with boards.

What Every Museum Director Should Know about Working with Boards uses museum-based vignettes of all-too-true situations encountered by new museum directors to illustrate what museum directors need to understand about their work with museum boards, so that they have the skills and knowledge to identify, assess, and successfully navigate the common issues they will inevitably encounter as a director. Following the vignette, analysis of the situation and strategic guidance are offered.

A new director’s understanding of how boards are structured and operate, how they will interact with the board, and what areas they will work on with the board are all critical to a new museum leader’s success. However, busy new directors often do not have time to access the many widely dispersed resources about working with boards or to ascertain what parts of board operations will most affect their daily work. Consequently, What Every Museum Director Should Know about Working with Boards outlines how boards are organized, discusses the common points of contact between the director and the museum’s board, and examines the kinds of challenges museum directors will likely encounter in working with their boards. Given the importance of museum boards to the success of museums and a director’s understanding of boards to their own career development, What Every Museum Director Should Know about Working with Boards is an essential resource for new and aspiring museum directors.

Edward M. Luby is professor emeritus of museum studies at San Francisco State University, where he was director of the museum studies program and founding director and chief curator of the Global Museum, a campus-based museum at San Francisco State University. He was formerly associate director of the Berkeley Natural History Museums at the University of California, Berkeley, served as special assistant to the Vice Chancellor of Research, also at Berkeley, and was director of the Repatriation Unit at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. He has received numerous museum-based grants and has published articles in journals ranging from Museum Management and Curatorship and American Indian Culture and Research Journal to Exhibition and Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals.