Getting a new perspective on leadership

Amy Vaughan: "I've finished my Peach Placement in London and I'm back full-time at The Junction as Director of Operations and Planning, which involves working in a completely different environment now.

"I'm a Cultural Leadership Programme Peach Placement at the Royal Academy. I'm doing organisational development for them. I've been here for six months, the Peach Placement's just come to an end, and I'm seconded here from The Junction in Cambridge."

"I did some external research, which was basically going around the country, going to other cultural institutions and asking them how they approach workforce development, how they finance it.

"For me, rather controversially, cultural leadership is something that's very difficult to define, to box it, because everybody's idea of culture is so different, everybody's idea of a cultural leader is completely different. So for me, it's about leadership, it's not about tagging 'cultural' onto it.

"It's about, how do you go into an organisation and lead them to the best possible outcome for them? Because it's going to be very different in the Ikon Gallery than it is in Contact Theatre in Manchester. They're both cultural organisations but they've got completely different objectives and goals and finances and ways of being funded.

"So it's actually about leadership skills and it's all about being able to understand an organisation, taking a bit of time to step back, get some perspective and say 'What does this organisation need from me and how can I best lead it?' rather than 'I think it should be done like this'.

"When you're working in an organisation, particularly in the arts, it's highly emotional, it changes every single day and it's a real hand-to-mouth existence. Therefore you sometimes don't take time to really think something through, and you don't see the bigger picture.

"What the placement did for me was allow me to go into an organisation where I had one specific task, and that was looking at the organisation from a distance and getting a really good perspective on where it needed to change, what things I could implement, what things I could recommend they implement. It had a much more distanced feel about it, and there was time to plan and to think about things. So what I'm trying really hard to bring back here is that idea that you have to step back from things sometimes."