Profile | ‘You could almost touch the change that was possible’

Being a cultural leader in the 2020s is not a job for the faint-hearted. From the pandemic straight into to the inflation crisis, alongside a new wave of council austerity and revolutionary changes in technology and workforce dynamics, these are challenging and unpredictable times for UK arts and culture.

In the midst of this, the incoming generation of leaders must somehow find ways to keep spinning gold out of almost nothing to hold the attention of an ever-more distractable public audience.

It is fortunate that they have Hilary Carty in their corner. Carty has been the executive director of Clore Leadership – one of the world’s top cultural leadership programmes – since 2017, and her multilayered career has given her a deep understanding of what it takes to handle the detail and bureaucracy of arts management while at the same time nurturing excellent practice.

Carty was originally drawn to the sector by a passion for dance, which she counts herself lucky to have studied at a state secondary school in London.

The ongoing drive to strip creativity out of the state curriculum worries her. “I wonder what kind of human beings we think we want to create if we are not encouraging, nurturing and facilitating creative thinking throughout the formative years?” she asks.

Carty went on to major in dance at university as part of a performing arts degree. It was there that she discovered an unexpected talent for administration that was to echo through her future career.

“What amuses me is that on a Friday we’d have a couple of hours where we had to be in the classroom and they’d talk to us about arts administration,” Carty says.

“Most of us wanted to be in the dance studio or anywhere else except in a classroom learning about arts administration. It just tickles me pink that, for the rest of my career, that’s absolutely what I have been doing. I always say, be careful what you’re dismissing.”

After her degree, an opportunity came up to study dance in Jamaica. “I grabbed it with open arms,” she says. “I was very curious about dance that had more cultural resonance for me as a young Black artist growing up in London, but it wasn’t until I was at university that I really got to work with African and Caribbean dance forms. It was a fantastic experience.”

Her work to document traditional Jamaican dance techniques eventually turned into a book, Folk Dances of Jamaica: An Insight (1988), which put her on the radar at a time when interest in Black dance forms was burgeoning in the UK.

“It meant that I had a niche,” says Carty. “I was able to carve a career working on something I could specialise in. So that got my name out a little bit.” 

While still focused on teaching and performance, it was around this time that Carty’s career began to change direction.

“One of the early skills I discovered was that I could read criteria,” she says. “It’s a gem of a skill. I would look at an application form for funding, and while everybody else would be perplexed at it, somehow I was able to find my way through all the jargon.”

This aptitude led Carty to land a job as a dance and mime officer for East Midlands Arts. She describes the role as a valuable look inside the machine of arts funding.

“That early encounter with the funding system stood me in very good stead. I often say to early career leaders, if you get a chance to work inside a local authority or funding system, grab it.”

From there, Carty springboarded into managing the Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, the largest Black dance company in the UK at the time.

“It was a company that was on the up and one that was bringing joy to so many people,” she says. “It was rare at that time for us to see Black dancers on the stages of places like the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Sadler’s Wells.”

Carty is proud of her work to steer the group from what had been an ad hoc start-up to a professional company. “This gave me an understanding of what it means to work as a company day-to-day and to get the legal and financial things in place.”

She also made the decision to commit more fully to a career in arts policy and administration, undertaking an MBA in strategic management at the same time as juggling her demanding role at Adzido – “pure madness, but I survived,” she laughs.

Eventually, Carty ended up at Arts Council England, where she became director of dance. This was a foundational experience, she says: “I got to really understand what policy development is for and where you can intervene on a strategic level to make a difference for different groups of people.”

Survival techniques

There are striking parallels between the arts council of the mid-nineties, hollowed out after many years of a Conservative government committed to austerity, and today’s environment of cuts and intense competition for grants. Just as now, Carty says cultural bodies back then found innovative ways to survive.

“One of the moments I remember well was working with the largest ballet companies and agreeing with them that they would take a higher percentage cut so that the money could be released for the rest of the dance portfolio,” says Carty. “There was a sense that if we are more judicious, others can grow.”

One of Carty’s most challenging and rewarding roles was her work on London’s winning pitch to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Carty was driven by the legacy she believed the games would provide for communities in the deprived boroughs of east London.

“It was so inspiring to be in our offices in Canary Wharf and look out on to the parts of east London that were going to be affected if we secured the bid,” she says. “You could almost touch the change that was possible.”

Carty, seconded as director of culture and education for the run-up to the 2005 bid, was determined the arts would play a more central role in the games than ever before.

Although a Cultural Olympiad has run alongside the Olympics since their modern inception, the London team proposed the most ambitious programme to date.

“We said, let’s not just do a Cultural Olympiad, let’s do the very best, the deepest, the widest, the most enriching, the most engaged,” says Carty.

Hilary Carty

An interest in dance led Hilary Carty to undertake a degree in the performing arts, before specialising in the dance forms of the Caribbean. She became involved in regional policy development as dance and mime officer at East Midlands Arts, before being appointed general manager of Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble.

Carty joined Arts Council England (ACE) in 1994 as director of dance, and became director of performing arts for ACE London in 2003. From 2004-06 she was culture and education director on the successful bid for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

From 2006-11 she was director of ACE’s Cultural Leadership Programme, and then started an independent cultural consultancy. She joined Clore Leadership as executive director in 2017.

“The cultural section of the bid was the last section in the bidding pamphlet. The words of the International Olympic Committee were that it had more ambition and vision than they’d ever seen.

 “When we won the bid, I don’t know if my eardrums have ever recovered from the cheer,” she laughs.

“Prior to that there was a belief that England doesn’t really do things, we don’t quite make it work. I just thought, how amazing would it be if we could change that mindset?”

The rest is history; London 2012 is remembered as a spectacular success. While not all aspects of the post-Olympic vision were to be realised, initiatives such as the East Bank quarter in Stratford’s Olympic Park, which is soon to welcome new branches of heavyweight institutions such as the V&A and Sadler’s Wells, will secure the cultural legacy of the Olympics for decades to come.

A career crossroads

Following the bid, Carty found herself at a crossroads and decided to end her Olympic journey and return to the arts council, where the opportunity soon arose to lead a new £22m Cultural Leadership Programme. This was an ideal chance for Carty to unite two different sides of her career.

“I was interested in organisational development and people development – I’d been doing some teaching as my side-hustle – and the Cultural Leadership Programme gave me an opportunity to bring people right into the centre of what I was doing.”

Running from 2006-11, the programme led to a new range of support and measures, such as the Museum Leaders Network, which was aimed at opening up the field of cultural leadership.

“We put our tendrils out into the sector so that new people, fresh faces, could come on-side,” says Carty. “Over the course of those five years, we opened up learning and cultural leadership development and started that dialogue about what works and how might you do it.”

When the programme closed in 2011, Carty set up her own cultural consultancy. She relished the independence that came with being self-employed but after a few years, a role came up that was too tempting to refuse – executive director of Clore Leadership, although Carty says she almost didn’t apply.

“One of my awful tricks is that I tend to discount myself from opportunities. Had I not been blessed with very good mentors, some of the opportunities that I’ve had in my career I would never have had, because I told myself they didn’t want me.

“So I didn’t count myself in, but I was talking to a mentor and he said to me: ‘Well, you’re interested in change and people development, and that’s what your consultancy is doing successfully, but can you imagine the difference you could make if you took this role?’ And it just clicked.”

Ironically, one of the first projects Carty found herself working on at Clore was a governance shake-up based on research she had undertaken for the organisation as an independent consultant. 

“I had the challenge of poacher-turned-gamekeeper when I joined and had to rationalise my own recommendations,” she laughs.

The review led to the creation of the Cultural Governance Alliance, which is now a key resource for the sector.

“It’s important to stress that Clore Leadership was a successful organisation when I got there,” Carty says.

“It’s terrifying to come into an organisation that’s so well established, so well respected. Yet at the same time, I could see that there were positive interventions that I could make. I could see that there was a space for widening the reach and making it accessible to a broader range of people, while keeping the quality.”

The organisation is working to meet the evolving demands of the 2020s workforce. It has expanded its resources and learning tools, along with launching new courses, such as a senior leadership programme.

Clore is also putting inclusion at the heart of its work through schemes such as its Inclusive Cultures programme, which supports organisations in their work to embed inclusivity, and Brilliant Routes, a development programme for Black cultural leaders.

This spring, it is running a series of “world of work” assemblies, which will explore how leaders can respond to the fundamental changes in people’s relationship to work.

Tips for future cultural leaders

So what advice does Carty have for anyone with ambitions to become a cultural leader?

“Find your passion. Make sure you are working in the field that stimulates you and nurtures you, so that when the challenging times come, there’s more than just a job. And there’s also that business of counting yourself in, of actually making sure that you do put your best self forward. If you’re not in the mix, you don’t stand a chance.

“Find and keep good mentors, people who are going to be in your corner and who will support you and advise you.

"And just think long term. Sometimes things don’t go right and you make a wrong move. But you can usually find a way to pass on a lot of the skills and the experiences and the networks that you have, and put whatever you’re facing at the current time in context.”

Sage advice for today’s cultural leaders as they navigate through whatever unknown challenges the rest of this decade will undoubtedly bring.

Clore Leadership

Established in 2003, Clore Leadership is a resource for leaders and aspiring leaders in the arts, culture and creative sectors to enhance their skills, competencies and performance.

It aims to provide a foundation for leadership via a range of training programmes and fellowships, with courses designed for early career
change-makers up to senior leaders.

The programme has an alumni of more than 2,600, including 480 fellows.

In partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it recently launched an online library of research undertaken by Clore fellows, which it hopes will support leadership across the arts and culture sectors.