There was a lot of news this past week you may have missed. Here are some headlines that caught our eyes.

Here are the First Photos of a Baseball Diamond in an Australian Cricket Stadium
—San Jose Mercury News
“In under a month, the Los Angeles Dodgers will play a two-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks at the legendary Sydney Cricket Grounds in Australia, marking the first-ever Major League Baseball games in the Southern Hemisphere.”

WME Partnering for Six Country Festivals
—ENCORE/CelebrityAccess
“William Morris Endeavor Entertainment is building its portfolio in the festival sector with investment in six new strategic alliances in the country music fest space.”

Boston Marathon Bans Bags as Part of Security Plan
—Associated Press
“Runners will be given a chance to check gear on Boston Common on the morning of the marathon to allow them to have a change of clothing at the end of the race. The athletic association said it will provide clear plastic bags for that purpose.”

“My Job Is Very, Very Different From Your Job”
—Sports Illustrated/The MMQB
“The Jonathan Martin-Richie Incognito situation, coupled with Michael Sam’s announcement, has put the NFL locker room culture under a spotlight. An Eagle takes us inside his workplace to better understand it.”

3D Glasses for Meetings
—PCMA Convene Blog
“Imagine sitting down at a console and working with a 3D model of your meeting that shows the exact placement of every chair and table, in a virtual environment that simulates the actual event space down to the color of the carpet and the texture of the walls.”

(Image: MLB PR)

I’ve never met anyone, manager or employee, that enjoys a performance review. Even if you know it’s going to be a good one, there’s still something nerve-wracking about having your work evaluated.

Enter Satoris Culbertson, an assistant professor of management at Kansas State University. Culbertson, working with associates at Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University, is developing ways to improve performance reviews. Surveying more than 200 employees who just completed a review, the researchers found three types of employee goal orientations.

1. “Learning goal-oriented people like to learn for the sake of learning. They often pursue challenges despite setbacks.”
2. “Performance-prove goal-oriented people want to prove that they have competence to perform a job.”
3. “Performance-avoid goal-oriented people want to avoid looking foolish.”

Performance-oriented people, the researchers think, will only be satisfied with positive reviews because negative ones make them look bad. Learning goal-oriented workers, though, may be satisfied with negative reviews because they would view it as a teaching moment.

“Surprisingly, we found that learning-oriented people were just as dissatisfied with an appraisal that had negative feedback as the performance-oriented people were,” Culbertson said. “Nobody likes to get negative feedback—even those individuals who aren’t trying to prove anything to others, but instead are just trying to learn as much as possible.”

Culberston said that managers have to be careful when providing feedback to employees, because they can affect motivation, commitment, and performance.

“It is not so much that the performance review needs to be abolished, but we need to fix what is broken,” Culbertson said. “Instead of limiting ourselves to formal performance appraisals conducted once or twice a year, we need to think about performance management as a system that is linked with the strategy of the entire organization.”

In other words, the review process should be on-going.

“We can actually make the most out of the system,” Culbertson said. “But if we are only going to have once-a-year evaluations, we shouldn’t expect it to work.”

Culbertson offers three suggestions based on the research to help managers improve the evaluation process.

First, focus on constructive feedback, bringing in ways for improvement.

“Negative feedback is not the same as constructive feedback,” Culbertson said. “We should be careful that negative feedback is provided in a way that is more constructive because it can help people try to improve.”

Second, tread lightly with number-based reviews, because people view numbers differently.

“This is where our words are really powerful,” Culbertson said. “We want to make sure we are conveying to employees whether we are giving a good evaluation or describing something that needs to improve.”

Third, steer clear of the “sandwich” approach (i.e., positive , then negative, then ending with positive feedback).

“Sometimes the sandwich approach comes across as dishonest or not something that people will buy,” Culbertson said.

How do you conduct performance reviews? What works? What doesn’t? Please contribute to the conversation in the comments section below.

(Image: Dilbert.com)

Plans are in the works to rebuild the famous Crystal Palace in London, with eight architect firms shortlisted to design it.

The firms are David Chipperfield Architects, Grimshaw, Haworth Tompkins Architects, Marks Barfield Architects, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and Zaha Hadid Architects with Anish Kapoor.

“This is a stellar line-up of talent demonstrating the world-wide interest in this unique and challenging project,” said London Mayor Boris Johnson. “The rebuild of Crystal Palace is set to produce an extraordinary new landmark for the capital, which will support the rebirth of this historic park and catalyze jobs and growth in the local area.”

Originally built for the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace consisted of iron and glass and featured 990,000 square feet of space. It was disassembled after the event and relocated to a south London suburb until it burned down in 1936.

Chinese billionaire Ni Zaoxing promised last October to rebuild the palace, which will include a hotel, a conference center, an art collection, public park space, and retail space. It is estimated to cost $835 million, and construction could start early next year.

(Image: The Crystal Palace in 1854, public domain photo)

Up on stage: Scott Johnson, Greensboro Coliseum (Moderator);
Doug Aitken, Borman Entertainment;
Pete Healey, production manager – Luke Bryan;
Mike McGrath, tour accountant – Blake Shelton;
Patrick McDill, Live Nation;
Adam Sinclair, Verizon Center DC;
Aaron Tannenbaum, CAA;
Jan Eric Volz, tour manager – Rascal Flatts

Venue managers and tour professionals took over the mics for an IAVM sponsored back-of-house discussion at PollStar 2014. Moderated by Scott Johnson (Greensboro Coliseum, North Carolina), the panel dug into venue selection, day of show dynamics, and what a tour looks for to build confidence for future visits. Here are a few highlights:

Venue Selection

The general consensus of the tour pros was market saturation. Patrick McDill (LiveNation) said that going to a city too many times was the top issue. Doug Aitken (Borman Entertainment) reinforced this as a top priority, urging venue managers to “know their market” and the show calendar for other venues in and around their city.

Past experiences were also mentioned as a strong factor in deciding where to send a tour. Aaron Tannenbaum (CAA) mentioned that he needs to feel comfortable sending a client to a venue, and that is influenced by previous experiences there. When asked how a venue can overcome a bad show, the conversation shifted toward the major pain points that lead to a rough show in the first place.

Avoiding the Pain Points, Building a Great Day

From having one clear point of contact to knowing well in advance the exact details of a venue’s loading and rigging capabilities, members of the panel repeatedly stressed how crucial good, honest communication is. Pete Healey (production manager, Luke Bryan), described the toll it takes on the crew to arrive at a venue after little sleep, only to discover that the load-in is going to take twice as long as planned due to limited docks or a lack of needed forklifts.

“If your venue has a rough load-in … tell us in advance,” Healey urged.

Emphasis was also placed on that first interaction between the tour crew and the venue team. McDill mentioned that it’s the early morning experience that tells him how the day will go.

Jan Eric Volz (tour manager, Rascal Flatts) felt similarly, mentioning that, “I appreciate seeing the general manager early on the day of the show, because everyone tends to follow their lead. Smiling faces and a willing attitude make us look forward to being there and to coming back.”

Even towels were mentioned (more than once) as an important detail to a crew that is living on the road.

“We roll out of our bunks, and we’re immediately at work. A nice shower goes a long way,” said Mike McGrath (tour accountant, Blake Shelton).

“Your venue is not just a name and city on a piece of paper. When something doesn’t go right, it affects us personally. A bad shower, slow Internet, these things matter,” McDill said.

When I recounted the session to Michael Marion, CFE (Verizon Arena, Arkansas) later that day, he nodded and mentioned a Dippin’ Dots station that they placed backstage at the Verizon Arena—free for the tour crew. In a subsequent Pollstar session that Marion participated in, he reinforced the importance of a great experience for the artist and crew back-of-house in more direct terms, commenting that “there is nobody in New York or Nashville thinking their career is over if they don’t play Little Rock.”

Small details and the need for great service back-of-house came up all throughout the packed session (standing-room only by the end), a reminder that the audience coming into a venue isn’t just the one out in front of the stage. And while the session largely avoided heavier issues like settlements, cancellations, and personnel conflict (one venue professional in front of me turned to his neighbor and said, “They keep emphasizing the goofy shit?!”), it was a good reminder that excellent service from the venue goes a long way in building confidence that a great show is going to happen that day—and hopefully for many future days to come.

Do you have Dippin’ Dots backstage? What else do you see going a long way to deliver a great back-of-house experience? If your an IAVM member, we’re also talking about this in VenueNet!

This year’s Performing Arts Managers Conference gathered venue professionals to share ideas, trade business contacts, visit with some of the industry’s best service providers, learn about best practices and industry trends from the pros, and tour some of its oldest and newest performing arts venues.

Kansas City has a rich history in the performing arts so there were an abundance of places attendees visited (nine venues to be exact). While all nine were simply amazing in so many ways, I can’t cover them all in this post, so I’ll touch on just a few.

Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity – Kansas City Ballet

For those of you who would love to take an old building and make it new. This historically significant venue was constructed in 1913 as the Power House building located in the Union Station campus. Before renovation, the structure was run down, filled with debris, and had floors covered in pigeon waste. The facility reopened in 2012, expertly restored by BNIM. The architectural firm blended the structure’s rich historic fabric with sleek and modern industrial elements. Its entry is welcoming and the viewing areas quite intimate. The natural light floods in from grand windows and strips of skylights.

The American Jazz Museum

Venue managers were then transported to a past era and experienced a modern facility simultaneously when they visited the American Jazz Museum. The group was welcomed to the facility with a custom jazz-vocal delivered by Dhana Powell-Pope, the museum’s corporate sponsorship sales and special events director. Now there’s a new way to help brand your facility as a true jazz destination—have your staff sing to your guests!

This beautiful facility is not just a single museum, but instead houses a comprehensive history of jazz, displays an outstanding collection of jazz memorabilia, provides a curated collection of art from many of the genre’s most notable artists of the era, the Negro League Baseball Museum, and the John Baker Film Collection, where venue managers experienced state-of-the-art SoundShower ® technology, allowing them to independently hear the music simply by stepping under these powerful speaker systems that direct sound in a single direction.

It is such a unique facility and so unusual to see a venue that houses multiple types of collections from museum quality art, a baseball museum, an archive of film footage, and a museum with a comprehensive history of the art of jazz all under one roof.

The Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

One the final night of PAMC, IAVM’s own Patrick Donnelly, the director of theater operations for the Kauffman Center, hosted attendees at a closing reception in the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. The night began with a rather witty, yet informative introduction to the history of the region’s performing arts culture, starting with a history lesson and ending with the construction of what has now become one of the City’s most iconic structures—the Kauffman Center.

The behind-the-scenes tour ran almost 1.5 hours and covered the building’s cutting-edge performance spaces as well as its architecture. Donnelly talked about using glass for a curved building façade. The venue requires each panel to be individually designed in Germany, created in Asia, and delivered and installed in a climate that can be challenging in its diversity. In fact, Donnelly mentioned that each season panes do break under the Missouri heat and must be replaced.

Most of the PAMC attendees were seen with their heads tipped to the ceiling, iPhones in hand, taking in everything from the seatback digital displays to the stunning vistas of the city and the signage at entry doors providing guidance on what is and isn’t allowed inside the venue.

It was certainly a spectacular opportunity for all.

If you would like to hear about PAMC, I’ll be writing a story about one of of the signature educational sessions called Boot Camp. And, if you missed PAMC this year, your chance will come again next February when the conference heads to San Francisco. In the meantime, you can always sign up for VenueConnect 2014, the all-association conference taking place July 26-29 in Portland, Oregon, where  each of IAVM’s sectors come together to share a week of inspiration and education in a city as cool as the Pacific Northwest breeze!

(photo credit: dharrisphotog via photopin cc)