One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is what a fantastic team we have at Drake Music. Within that team, there’s so much expertise, experience, so many ideas, commitment and enthusiasm for the work that we do. I have been thinking about finding ways in which we could regularly share our experiences and learn even more than we are doing already, and finding different ways of doing that.
Even after seven/eight years in this job I still have a lot to learn from the people I work with. But most of the time, I don’t make time to do it because I get so caught up in the day to day running of the organization. But we all need more time to connect with each other and reflect on our work.
I’ve had several ideas about how we can make this happen, and some are easier to realize than others. For example, take our associate musicians who work across a diverse range of projects, with a very diverse range of musicians/ participants in different parts of the country. They rarely get a chance, I would imagine, to speak to other musicians on the team, and don’t always have time/ space to really reflect on their practice in a way that might be interesting for them and their colleagues.
One idea is to transform our documentation and evaluation processes. Currently these tend to be somewhat standardized, which is important for information gathering, but how interesting and exciting would it be to also create more space for a dialogue between musicians and managers across the organization, across different projects as a part of the evaluation process?
Clearly people will need the time to do that and we would have to pay for that, but it is a possibility. We’ve also talked a lot about using of social media to share and amplify what we do. Again, is that another way that we can work with our team, to actually internally and externally share more of what we do?
We’ve also been discussing other ways in which we could make it possible for everybody to do this kind of reflecting and sharing, especially if they find blogging difficult for example. For example, it could take the form of a conversation which we record and transcribe. I don’t want it to be onerous –I see this as something that could actually interesting and inspiring for everybody on the team.
We’ve now had two successful team away days, one in December 2013 and one in December 2012, and trying to find other moments in the year for our team to connect and to share and reflect would be brilliant. I know we can’t replicate that in the same way because we haven’t got that sort of money, but there is probably a lot more we could improve just by listening to others and sharing our experiences within the team.
Our work is so fantastically rich and diverse that there’ll always be something to share!
