Leadership Lessons with Salle Bourgie Montréal’s Caroline Louis

In a few sentences, what does impact mean in the context of your work?

The most significant impact that Salle Bourgie can make is to offer our audiences a concert experience that brings enjoyment and personal elevation in an environment fostering healthy social connections. We measure the audience volume that enter our venue annually, but our goal is to increase the number of those who return and actively engage with us. Bourgie Hall also has a major impact on the music scene: we commission new works each year, we present a significant number of international artists in Canada for the first time, and we have supported many Canadian artists who are now household names when they were in the early stages of their careers. As an executive, another form of impact I seek is to help my colleagues increase their confidence, autonomy, and expertise.

What aspect of your work process do you focus on most day-to-day, and why?

It’s tough to pinpoint one element that precedes others in a day’s work. However, 80% of my day is spent interacting with colleagues, artists, partners, or audience members. I focus on making sure team members have a clear vision of our priorities, eliminating roadblocks that could impede our progress, and planning — whether that be for a special event next week or with our Artistic Director for future concert seasons. None of those things can be done alone, so I mostly work on exchanging ideas, information, and directives on a given day.

How do you balance mission-driven work with the need for financial sustainability?

This might be the trickiest question, and I ask myself this weekly. The trap that arts organizations should avoid is developing peripheral activities that quickly generate revenues while draining resources that cease to serve the primary mission, as this results in a dilution of the organization’s brand. The key is establishing clear organizational priorities and determining a roadmap for fulfilling these aspirations. You’re at risk of engaging in erratic development when you don’t have a clear plan. The board of directors should play an essential role in ensuring that the organization is adhering to its primary mission and has the means to sustain it.

Is there an innovation, new initiative, or new approach that has impacted, enhanced, or otherwise expanded/improved your organization’s work in recent years

When I joined Salle Bourgie in 2022, I realized that our staff did not have an all-around view of the workflow and the organization’s objectives. My approach has been to improve access to information, tear down internal barriers between sectors, and engage our entire team with our organizational goals. It is now part of our work culture to share quantitative and qualitative information in an intentional and structured way. We have incorporated elements of Design Thinking and the “jobs to be done” approach that are helping our team rethink the way we communicate with and welcome audiences to the hall. I have found that our team members all have excellent insights about improving the concert experience, and it would be a shame not to use this extraordinary pool of talent.

In what ways do you see the role of arts leaders transforming in the years ahead?

The world is becoming increasingly complex, so we must be ready to accept this reality, embrace it, and work with it. An arts leader must stay within the current. For example, we must take the new standards of social responsibility that employees and audience members hold us up to. Also, the pandemic has taught us the importance of being agile and staying up-to-date with new trends before they become the worldwide standard. The lesson here is that arts leaders must continually invest in testing new ideas and working methods. The arts leader of the future must be humble, agile, curious, and lead the way as an early adopter when it comes to technology, social, and organizational developments.

Biography Caroline Louis