From Burnout to Balance: Building Cultures Where Leaders Can Thrive

ID: WMA2026_613

Track:

**Leaders work hard to cultivate cultures of trust, collaboration, and creativity, but who supports them? Data shows we are burning out generations of leaders in the creative sector, particularly women of color. How might we find new ways to connect, support, and ultimately thrive in this field? Join this facilitated discussion to explore what some institutions are doing to bring greater balance to their workplace and find new ways of working. **

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: While sessions such as this crop up at museum conferences regularly, the voices on the panel will be primarily women of color and/or truly innovative examples of balancing the workspace.

Objectives: New methods of leading with conviction and sustainability; attendees will hear from speakers as well as fellow audience members how they have adopted new ways of working to help ease burnout. These ideas should be replicable and inspiring.

Engagement: Participants will engage through small-group discussions, real-time topic generation, and facilitated report-backs, ensuring all voices shape the conversation. Guided prompts will help surface shared challenges and actionable strategies. Resources include flip charts or whiteboards, markers, sticky notes, and optional digital tools (e.g., Mentimeter) to capture themes. Facilitators will synthesize key insights, modeling collaborative leadership and providing participants with takeaways they can adapt within their own institutions.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Other 

Professional Level: Senior Level 

Scalability: While leaders from small to large-sized museums might employ varying degrees of tactics, the goals are still the same: how we might collectively create better ways of working that prevent burnout while supporting the leaders of each of the organizations present. Ideas shared will be ones that should easily scale and can be incorporated into a workplace setting regardless of organizational size or budget.

Participants