Sometimes you have to sing a little Kumbaya.

Last week PCMI's Leadership Project--a group of "mid-career" arts professionals who have signed up for a pilot program of leadership development--went on a retreat. We spent three beautiful days and two cool nights up at Skytop in the Poconos, working and talking and writing and figuring out what we were meant to do and how we were meant to do it. There was sharing, there was bonding, there was arts & crafts, there was a campfire. There was no singing, but we came close a few times. Always in the back of my head was a line from Ben Cameron's talk at Drexel a few weeks ago, where he said, basically, that burnout in a job wasn't caused so much by long hours or bad management or by being in one place for to long as it was by being disconnected from your core values.

The problem is that we almost never have the time or the energy to really think about and give a name to what those core values are. This, for me, was the basic agenda for the retreat. Find out what's really important to you and how you can arrange your life to honor those values. The other item on the agenda was just to have an amazing group of leaders hang out together for a while and share an experience.

The process of identifying, naming, and talking about core values requires time apart and discussion and openness, as well as trust with others who have the duty of listening to you. There's a lot of sharing. Many, probably most, of the intelligent, urbane, sophisticated people who make up the world of arts leaders in our town regard the prospect of this kind of work with skepticism. at best. They have budgets to make, trustees to placate, families to nurture, and very very little time for sharing. I was terrified about how it was all going to go over.

I needn't have worried--it was a brilliant success, thanks to the shared investment of the group and the skill of our facilitators. It really helped me refocus on the things that are important to me & the things that drive me in my work.

Inevitably, you come home from that kind of experience & try to explain it to people around you and even if only for a second, they look at you like you just came home from Jonestown. But it helps--it has helped people learn how to be in better alignment with their values, and it's connected a group of amazing leaders to each other, and set an agenda for the next year's work.