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Solor

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  1. Triple bill for tomorrow still available - PM if interested: Obsidian Tear / Marguerite and Armand (Nunez / Muntagirov) / Elite Syncopations Tuesday 8 May 7.30pm Amphitheatre L67 £6
  2. For Sale at ROH: Obsidian Tear / Marguerite and Armand (Nunez / Muntagirov) / Elite Syncopations Tuesday 8 May 7.30pm Amphitheatre L67 £6 Manon (Hayward / Bonelli) Saturday 12 May 12.30pm Matinee STALLS CIRCLE D50. If interested please send me a PM. Thank you.
  3. Hello Aileen, I am not quite sure what you mean by "you keep posting along similar lines" - I have made just two posts, one in each thread, as opposed to your 3,990 posts. I don't think two posts is excessive is it? I'm just a new poster giving my own opinion on an interesting and important subject and bringing some new information about leadership issues based on my own profession. I am sorry if that is not welcome. Of course everyone is entitled to say what they think but you don't have to agree with them - I thought that was the point of such a forum. It's not about any personal animosity, it's about opinions / information on the subjects at hand i.e. the situation at ENB that the leadership has the highest salary but also the highest staff turnover - in other words the biggest remuneration for the worst results in terms of people retention. Regards the survey absolutely it's unusual to publish it - but other dance companies do not appear to have had the kind of retention problems over the last few years as at ENB. Turnover figures at this level are what triggers the company I work for to be called into organisations to work with their senior management on leadership style, culture, employee engagement etc to try to fix the issue.
  4. MAB hit the nail on the head about this way back when referencing the MacLeod Report into Employee Engagement. I work in management and leadership development. All the research (highly evidence based across a range of industries and working environments) shows that the key factor in people’s happiness at work (and therefore their likelihood to stay) IS their PERSONAL relationship with their management. Just Google “Employee Engagement” and you can read all the research. For example The Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development's publication “Becoming an Employer of Choice” states that "70% of people leave their manager and not the job". Think about your own jobs – those where you have had a really nice and genuinely caring line manager have been more bearable (even if other aspects of the job were not ideal) than those which might have in many ways been your perfect job but the person you worked for was unpleasant, treated you like dirt or in a threatening way and made no attempt to build a warm and caring personal relationship with you. Of course there are some occasions when people leave a job for other reasons even when they have a great relationship with their manager / director, but the point is these are the minority. The research proves beyond doubt that in the majority of cases (between 70% to 80%) people leave because of a poor relationship with management. And this applies to any industry / environment – human relationships are the same regardless of whether in a ballet company or a nuclear power station. There are technical factor differences of course in different jobs, but as far as management relationships are concerned all of us humans tend to crave the same things from our managers / leaders – such as empathy, respect, reward and recognition, feedback that is evidence based, emotionally intelligent responses, mutual trust, warmth and genuine care in you as an individual etc. If these qualities in management style are missing or, even worse, if the opposite is displayed by the manager / leader i.e. coldness, contempt, aloofness, lack of genuine empathy, dishonesty, back stabbing etc, the employee is likely to be unhappy and highly likely to leave as soon as a chance comes. If you as a manager go on any decent management training course it will teach you all this. Turtledove gives a brilliant list of questions to be asked surrounding the leadership culture at ENB – indeed this list could be explored as critical on any management training programme! Point H is very pertinent at ENB: “Do the Board and managers use a variety of means, including direct dancer feedback, to ‘take the temperature’ of the company and listen / act on what is being said?” At ENB yes they do an anonymous staff survey. ENB HR could therefore end all the “speculation” on this thread once and for all by publishing these employee survey results, including the feedback on the Artistic Director and the senior management. The data is anonymous so no risk of identifying individual employees. On the issue of “those in the know” which has been commented upon – some people who have posted likely know exactly what is going on, presumably through personal contacts in the company, but are nervous to say things explicitly for fear of getting friends into trouble. All employees in any job have a mortgage or rent to pay and rule by fear can keep anyone in any job from publically commenting about management. In leadership training we teach behaviours such as “Encourage the Heart” i.e. reward and recognition, and “Model the Way” i.e. defining positive values as a leader and leading by exemplifying them. All of us will have our own opinions about whether we think such leadership behaviours are evident at ENB – some opinions based purely on speculation, others on direct information from people in the company. Of course were the staff survey ever to be published it would end the speculation and provide transparency on the level or lack of leadership adroitness at ENB.
  5. A few points come into my head regards the issue of Miss Rojo’s salary. As has been said senior executive salary level is normally related to the level of scope of the role – particularly in terms of the size of the organisation and, crucially, the level of budget / financial responsibility. An MD of a company with a turnover of £1 Million is likely to earn less than an MD of a company with a turnover of £1 Billion. It is, therefore, bemusing that Miss Rojo is paid nearly 50K - 60K more than Mr O’Hare. Kevin has a far bigger budget to manage and deliver against, stewardship of a far bigger Arts Council public grant and he has to deliver highly complex, expensive productions such as Woolf Works with public money. ENB does not deliver comparable productions in terms of technical complexity and cost, it’s on a smaller scale than what Kevin has to do. No shame in that – it’s just a fact because the Royal Ballet is our premium company with the biggest budget, highest profile productions, access to the best resources etc. So one would expect the salary of the RB Director to be the higher – the same as the salary of the Music Director of The Royal Opera is higher than that of the Music Director at Opera North! In my personal opinion I don’t think the effect of dancing fees stacks up given one would expect the Director’s salary at ENB to be lower than the RB to start with – and actually Tamara’s number of performances is quite low at ENB. She has, to her credit in my view, stepped back from trying to steal the limelight as a Ballerina in favour of letting her dancers have the limited number of performances. She did not dance Juliet this year and she can go many months without dancing a single performance with ENB. Then there is the substantial rise taken over 2015 – 2016 of between 20K to 40K increase in one year. This is at a time when public funding is squeezed and taking a massive 20K – 40K pay rise in one year would raise eyebrows in most organisations I would have thought. Even if the Board offered it she could have refused it so that her dancers could have been given a bit more. The leap from Wayne Eagling at c.100K-110K in 2011 to Tamara Rojo at 230K-240K in 2016 is extraordinary. This is salary growth of 230% in 5 years. I would have thought any salary more than doubling during a period of austerity and restraint is very unusual (especially at ENB given it is part public funded). And we do not yet know the extent of any further rises in 2017 and 2018. Whatever your view it probably boils down to one very simple question – is Kevin O’Hare underpaid or is Tamara Rojo overpaid? I am no expert on salary levels for ballet directors but looking objectively at what the other UK ADs get suggests that Kevin is on about the right level and they need some serious realignment at ENB. The money saved can be shared amongst the hardworking dancers and staff who have been facing pay restraint in the same period.
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