2019
The sprawling maze of corridors in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—home to paint restoration labs, artwork loading docks, and closets of broken audio guides waiting to be revived—is lined with bright yellow traffic signs that read "YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT." In my first few months working at the museum, I took these signs at face value: don't mess with thousand-year-old sculptures on the move. Step aside, let them pass, and then go back to work trying to save the institution from collapse.
The Met is indeed flirting with disaster: multiple hemorrhaging business units, pending funding cuts from New York City, and an aging, capricious donor registry have set the stakes high for one of the largest museum turnarounds in history—not to mention a series of dramatic leadership changes and a controversial new admissions policy further upending the institution's stability and morale. This spring, I began an externship with the Met's transformation team to fight for the future of a beloved institution in distress: I wanted to roll up my sleeves, learn the nuances of leading a complex organization through a critical time, and find better, more impactful mileage for my trusty toolkit of consulting frameworks.
Two months in, I rolled those sleeves down and took my assigned seat at a convening of the board of trustees. Each tabletop mic was separated by exactly six black-padded shoulders at the center of a chilly, high-ceilinged room where whispers would have sufficed. My boss and I— representing a motley crew of designers, architects, revenue officers, and department heads—had just presented an investment case to redesign the Met's iconic Great Hall and now had to advocate for our proposal among several other eight and nine-figure capital projects.
"A new modern and contemporary wing will attract a new type of visitor," one department head concluded. "We're woefully out of touch with our younger audiences."
"Yes, but the skylights renovation is not finished," a curator shot back. "We have to fix the house we live in before building new rooms."
"At the risk of sounding like a consultant," I interjected, to a solitary chuckle, "People aren't looking at the skylights. The Great Hall greets every single visitor."
A trustee came to the curator's defense: "Remember that the old masters were painted in natural light, and must be displayed as such!"
I mentally filed through my trusty frameworks for a rebuttal but came up empty. "The Great Hall is a tenth of the investment of the $150M skylights," I mustered. "And it promises to pay back in just three years."
"Three years is immaterial for an institution that will live forever," was the curator's response.
This debate continued for forty minutes, but we left with no consensus. I felt defeated: how could I compete with European masterworks and a 150-year-old institutional legacy? Never having operated in an organization where strategic direction and financial responsibility were so divided, I had inadvertently pegged myself as the bean counter who didn't understand the Met's artistic priorities.
Soon after this board meeting stalemate—long enough for other projects to take center stage, but short enough that I still felt the sting—I sat in a familiar armchair in our CEO's office. Like the man himself, Dan's domain is warm and cheerful, lined with tasteful delegates from each of 19 curatorial departments. I had come to him with a dilemma of clashing leadership personalities that I found myself caught between: one department head was on my side, determined to help me launch a new premium admissions product that would allow visitors into the galleries before hours, while other leaders were intent on stalling our pilot to use the resources elsewhere.
"Those dollars have already been pegged for children's fall art classes." "Our top-tier members rallied behind a live performance series that needs those funds to launch this month." "The digital team needs to fix our kiosks before they can build new products for you," were the forms of resistance I faced. I needed to enlist support from a zillion different departments to get this off the ground and hoped that Dan could wave a golden hand to quickly dissolve the roadblocks.
"Progress represents something slightly different to each member at our leadership table," he counseled me, tolerant and deeply thoughtful as usual. "Where admissions revenue wins today, an education program will win tomorrow. Let's let this one play out naturally."
I hustled down to the basement to avoid the certain tourist trample of a rainy Friday in the galleries, mulling over Dan's noncommittal advice to be patient. Distracted and frustrated, I nearly collided with a 2,000-year-old terracotta krater being ferried down the hallway. I dodged into an alcove to let it pass.
"YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT." I glanced up at the yellow traffic sign presiding over the hallway. Yield to the art. Yield—not just to the bubble-wrapped artifacts waiting to be shipped off on loan to the Louvre, but to the mission of the institution itself: art, education, access for all.
If I didn't yield, I would quite literally be run over by the Met's vast, uncompromising mission of artistic and cultural advancement. Moreover, without the skylights and education advocates to defend that mission at all costs, we would truly be bankrupt—so they were not opponents but rather my teammates all along. To pull my weight on this team, I needed to find a new set of tools instead of trying to force-fit the ones I had.
I knew where to start. Dan epitomizes the patient diplomacy of forging without forcing, and I now saw that his advice to let things play out was not a cop-out but a mantra of sorts for organizational survival. It occurred to me that his authority as a leader relies entirely on the power of this graceful diplomacy: he must channel—and therefore possess—an acute understanding of personalities and motives in order to ensure his own relevance in an institution where his team of curators has a monopoly on artistic expertise and his board of trustees wields all financial control.
This bean counter's foray into an uncountable world has proven that a measure of patience accompanied by a 360-degree outlook on institutional priorities can enable greater, albeit slower, progress in the long run. Funding for our Great Hall renovation has stalled, with the skylights project now underway, but we are aiming for an interim, lower-cost solution. Our new admissions pilot is earning money toward our deficit as I write this, but we are splitting marketing dollars with a new series of public art classes.
I came in hoping to operate my consulting power tools to help fix the Met's dire financial situation, but instead I find myself discovering a much quieter, more graceful tool: diplomacy. I am learning to yield not just to different kinds of people and progress, but to the mission of the institution, to the art itself.