What defines a good leader? A qualitative study on successful leadership strategies of female leaders inside museums

Even though women are strongly represented in the cultural and creative field, the sector is far from offering equal opportunities for women and men. Similarly to other sectors, the great barriers found are the limited participation of women in decision-making positions, the common segregation into certain roles, or the lower employment conditions and payment rate. Promoting gender equality and generating greater dynamism in the cultural and creative sector is therefore a fundamental goal to achieve. As assessed by UNESCO (2015), one of the solutions to solve this inequality is to raise awareness on this specific issue. The present research aims indeed to contribute to this goal, through the identification of successful leadership strategies of female leaders inside museums. The identification of successful strategies inside non-profits institutions is a particularly challenging process, for the presence of a wide-ranging number of goals and stakeholders. Moreover, the importance of considering different types of performance indicators is particularly relevant for cultural and non-profits organizations, where the main purposes express in the mission and the vision are non-financial. However, only during the 1990s, many researchers started to question the use of solely financial indicators. In particular, two professors from Harvard, Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Norton developed the so-called Balanced Scorecard (BSC), a framework to link multidimensional performance measures to the organization’s strategies and daily activities (Kaplan & Norton, 2001). Given the extensive use of this framework also in recent times, and its great flexibility and adaptability to different sectors and situations, an adaptation of the BSC to non-profit organisations, is chosen to analyse and define successful leadership strategies of female leaders inside museums. Indeed, the BSC allows considering different aspects of female strategies: not only financial data but also strategies related to the learning and growth of the organization, to the internal processes and the costumers and stakeholders perspectives. Therefore, eleven interviews have been conducted to either directors or heads of departments of five museums in Leiden and Rotterdam. Through their responses, and trough a content analysis of the museums’ annual reports, it was possible to answer the main research question: what define successful leadership strategies inside museums organisations? The main aggregated results are summarised in an own elaborated Balanced Scorecard, with the main and most commonly adopted strategies by female leaders. Furthermore, given that the interviews were 3 conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, the strategies to deal with this crisis were analysed and summarized in another BSC framework. It indeed emerged as a main finding that numerous strategies and approaches are common between the interviewed female leaders. These strategies are generally creative and innovative. Even though financial data are not always positively related, all the implemented strategies are in line with the female leaders’ ideas of success. Therefore, in line with other researches, to define successful leadership strategies, a multi-dimensional approach is essential to provide an exhaustive representation of the museums’ functioning, which consider financial aspects, but mostly the cultural and social values related to the museums’ idea of success.