Workplace Culture Tensions in Museums: A Response to TrendsWatch’s “Short Take”

Each year, the Center for the Future of Museums—part of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM)—publishes the TrendsWatch report, highlighting major shifts and emerging issues shaping the museum sector.

The intention of this miniseries is to offer TrendsWatch (TW) snapshots to support distillation and application at museums; we will cover each trend with a post. Today’s post will focus on TW’s Short Take: Pulled in all Directions. For this trend I’ll provide a summary of the topic as presented by the Center and offer analysis, insight, and tie-ins to related topics.  

Growing Friction and Competing Expectations

As the title suggests, this brief article is centered on the growing friction felt within organizations of all types. Specifically, the expectation that the museum (as an employer) will support the strongly held values of its employees. Among the challenges are:

• An increase in staff expectations that their employer will support the causes the employee feels strongly about. TW links this shift in employee expectations due to generational characteristics. 
• Leadership feeling caught between the different stakeholders they are beholden to, including board members, donors, and the public. 
• Leadership at the board-level believing they must strike a balance between the museum’s mission, its financial health, and its reputation. In my experience, this focus can result in staff feeling disenfranchised and excluded from decision-making, which may foster internal division within the museum. 

The article goes on to acknowledge that the use of social media to amplify discontent or outrage can outpace museum leadership’s ability to provide a thoughtful response. In addition to the pre-existing power imbalance between employer and employee, museum leadership can face intense public scrutiny, including from their peers, before they’ve had time to fully respond or explain their decisions.

How Museums Can Respond: “Museums Might” Recommendations

À la the more traditional TW articles’ “Museums Might” section, this shorter article offers suggestions for what other museums have done and found helpful: 

• Develop a description of the workplace culture the museum team (leadership, staff, and volunteers) is working toward. 
• List shared values as guidance for how to treat one another. 
• Integrate the vision for workplace culture and values into employee onboarding. And I would add volunteer onboarding given that volunteers are stated by TW as part of the community responsible for workplace culture.  
• Facilitate a system to support productive conversations around difficult topics. 
• Build a process and platforms for how to identify and address potentially contentious issues. 

This last suggestion could use further fleshing out in order to be applied. The majority of museums don’t have this type of system in place. The suggestion also doesn’t account for the fact that most museum staff (including leadership) are subject matter experts, not leadership experts. This is a significant knowledge and skills gap in the field and most museums aren’t equipped to create a system for addressing hard things.  

Too Short to Truly Address the Complexity

Unfortunately, the brevity of this “Short Take” limits its ability to address the complexity of the issue—which is particularly ironic given the TrendsWatch theme of “Mapping Complexity.” 

The article ends with a reminder that we work in museums because we believe in what we do, followed by a call to prioritize “the higher good.” While perhaps well-intentioned, this phrase can feel dismissive of real issues and mayh be interpreted as discouraging open dialogue or dissent.

Additionally, suggesting that staff redirect their values-driven efforts to voting, philanthropy, or volunteerism overlooks the structural barriers many museum workers face—including low pay, voter disenfranchisement, and limited access to civic participation. These are real-world issues that deserve more nuanced acknowledgment—especially when this same report highlights them elsewhere.   

It’s an unfortunate ending sentiment, especially in a time of high uncertainty, strife, and very real consequences for museum staff. When the causes championed by museum staff are tied to human rights, the basic principles of safety, and the ability to thrive (not just survive), museums (as employers) cause harm by failing to engage meaningfully with staff concerns. It’s possible the TW authors did not intend this consequence, but the framing risks overlooking the lived realities of museum workers. 

A Call for Strategic Leadership and a Human-Centered Approach

In all fairness, this TW content was written prior to the most recent US presidential election and the subsequent instability faced by the museum field. However, even outside of that context, the article misses the chance to provide useful guidance to the museum community. 

Encouragingly, we are starting to see efforts towards more strategic and human-centered leadership—from individuals as well as many professional organizations, including AAM. As for TW, perhaps they can invest in a deeper exploration of this topic in future reports to provide a much-needed roadmap with practical steps forward.