Invisible Mentor: Janet Carding, Director

Company Name: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Website: http://www.tmag.tas.gov.au/

Part One: Introduction – Janet Carding Interview

Avil Beckford: In a couple of sentences, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Janet Carding: My name is Janet Carding. I’m a museum professional. I’ve worked in museums the whole of my adult life and I’m very passionate about them. I’ve also traveled the world. I was brought up in the UK, I’ve lived in Australia and become an Australian citizen, and then I’ve lived in Canada, and I’m about to head back to Australia again.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Janet Carding: Well, perhaps surprisingly, the people who don’t work in museums don’t know that no two days in a museum are ever alike. With an organization where you open the doors to the public, there is always something different happening because there are different people coming in and having different experiences, but also museums are so complicated that we have educators and curators and people who conserve the objects and a whole range of different people who support the organization.

It means that every day I’m in different meetings. Most of my time is spent in meetings with different people and much of my time, particularly, is in meetings that are about the future. So as the CEO I am usually looking for those three months up to about five years ahead.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Janet Carding: Well, my big break was the first opportunity I had to take a leadership role in a museum environment and that was in the mid-1990s.

I was working at a museum called the ‘Science Museum’ in London, one of the major national museums there. I had the opportunity to become one of the leaders in a major new project that the Science Museum was undertaking — to build a whole new extension. That extension was eventually built and opened in the year 2000 and it’s called ‘The Wellcome Wing’ after our major funder, the Wellcome Trust.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in specifying the building, working with the architect, and then moving over and working with project teams that helped deliver the exhibitions on two of the four floors of what was a major extension. This extension of the Science Museum was probably as big as some whole museums are and so it was a great project to work on then.

From that, I’ve always been in some form of leadership role from then on. The person who gave me that break was a man called Graham Farmelo, who was a physicist and a science communication expert, working at the Science Museum. I think he saw in me a combination of determination, of organizational ability, and also a sense of wanting to do great things for our visitors.

Part Two: Career – Janet Carding Interview

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Janet Carding: Mentors influenced my life in that throughout my career and my personal life, I’ve looked to people who I feel I can learn from and who I respect their opinion and their achievements. The people who when I listen to them, they have a huge amount of credibility that enables me to then go away and reflect. Sometimes, even if it’s difficult – what they might have told me – that I can reflect on that for the better. Some of my mentors have been in my family, some of them have been friends, and some of them have been people that I worked with.

At one time in my career, I did specifically seek the help of a full mentor who I paid for myself. That was when I moved to Australia, and I was very conscious that I was moving into a different culture, in a different environment, and I haven’t yet got a network of friends and colleagues, so I reached out and actually recruited a mentor to help give me what I needed to be able to be successful in that culture. I have to say, I didn’t regret it for a moment. I’m very glad I did that. I think many people have mentors in their life. I think one of the things that I would encourage people to do is if you feel you’ve got a gap in terms of advice and being with somebody you can ask questions and reflect on the answers, then it is worth reaching out to actually create that for yourself.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Janet Carding: I think the cool message is to really have self-belief and have beliefs in your own ability to succeed and at the same time understand how that is sometimes seen by other people. That you know how you feel inside, but other people could only see what’s on the outside. They can only perceive your actions and your behavior. I think, to me, that cool message is two-fold. It’s about having that belief on the inside, but then being careful to demonstrate things in a way that other people can actually be inspired by what they see in a positive way.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn from by observing them from a distance. In that capacity, what is one piece of advice that you would give to others?

Janet Carding: I would say, have a think about your impact on other people, your impact on those people around you. Think about how you can make sure that that impact is one that means that you can become more successful.

I do think there are times when for all of us – our motivation and our drive might be out of sync with the way that’s being perceived by other people, so you really have to think about the impact that your behavior has on other people, and to work on making sure that that impact is one that allows you to succeed in the things that are important to you.

Avil Beckford: What big steps did you take to succeed in your field? What is one step or action you have consistently taken that has contributed the most to your success?

Janet Carding: I think the big steps that I’ve taken are being open to taking on a leadership role. Throughout my career, I’ve moved from being a team member, to then being a team leader, to then being a project leader, and then finally a sort of leader of a part of an organization, and then ultimately a leader of the whole organization. But I think of all of that, what is important is to demonstrate that you’re able to take home that leadership, and be successful in it. I think it is about stepping forward rather than stepping back. That would be what I would say is to step forward rather than step back. That’s what I’ve done and that’s what I would encourage other people to do. When I talk to people about their career, quite often they feel that they have gaps in their resume, but perhaps if they’re willing to take on either a volunteer role or a project role or a role which they might consider without finding their immediate job, it might give them the ability to fill those gaps in a way that means they can move on.

Part Three: Life – Janet Carding Interview

Avil Beckford: Tell me something that you consider to be important about the work you do that others can learn from.

Janet Carding: I think that something that I consider to be most important about the work that I do, which is to see museums in terms of the role that they can play in the community. How can we make a community a better place because there is a museum in it? How can we enrich people’s life? I think that that’s an important point because it’s a point about looking outwards and into your community rather than a point about saying how can you just be successful within your own terms.

I think in the past, sometimes museums have simply judged their success by the quantitative collections they’ve held or the value of some of their pieces of art or even by the number of people coming in through the door, but to actually put that in the context of saying what is it that you’re trying to achieve for your community puts that in a much bigger context, which I think is really important. I would encourage people to think about that, whether they are running a not-for-profit or a for-profit organization.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Janet Carding: You know the hard thing for this question, Avil, is it’s hard to think of the biggest failure. I have lost to failures all the time and I learned from them like most of us do, but I’m not sure that there’s one that particularly stands out. But I will pick one, which I think goes back to my time at the Science Museum in London.

There, we were looking at how we could reorganize the organization. I think one of the things that I certainly found as a frustration and I think didn’t work well, which I should have done, was how we had the job working across four different parts of the organization that were geographically in different cities and we were trying to run a unit that actually worked across all of those cities. What was hard for me, is that it was very, very hard to actually have the same level of impact when we only visited some of the other sites maybe once or twice in every few months, and the people who were located there found it quite an isolating experience.

So I think what I learnt from that is that you can have something that looks good on paper, but you have to make the relationships work and you have to make things work even if it’s within your own organization. Work in terms of being a collaboration or a partnership. You can’t necessarily make it work just by saying that that’s how it’s going to be. You need to get people on board and get people buy in.

I think that that’s been something that I’ve really thought about over the years. I have to say it’s quite often very hard to get buy in to things particularly when you’re making a big change. But I’ve become convinced that it is important to get buy in because otherwise something that you can work away on by yourself isn’t going to get the success that it should have.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Janet Carding: I think the toughest decisions I’ve had to make have always been about people. When you have to tell somebody that the role that they undertook no longer exists, and that position is being made redundant – that’s tough. When you have to tell somebody that you’re feeling that they’re not going to be successful in that role and you need to move them somewhere else. These are always really, really tough decisions.

So, without mentioning any names, one of the toughest decisions I had to make was to ask somebody who had been working away very hard in their role, but wasn’t making a success in the role, that they should actually move elsewhere in the organization and have somebody else coming in and replace them, so that’s something that was very important could be delivered on time.

It affected my life in that we were a close knit team, and people I counted as my personal friends, as well as being colleagues. It was a very tough decision to have to recognize that you are taking a decision where you were thinking in terms of the organization rather than the individual and that sometimes, as a leader, you have to be the one who thinks about the organization and what makes it successful, and allow other people to represent individuals and to represent themselves.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Janet Carding: I think the three events that have helped to shape my life been the transformational moments.

1. When I moved to London.
2. I was brought up in the Northwest of England and I went to a university. That transformed my life. The university was actually in Cambridge. Then after that, I moved to London and I think that that was another transformation again.
3. Then I would say… actually moving to Australia was also something that transformed my life.

I mean in each case it was because I was working out how to move into the next phase of my life and also considering my own confidence and independence and working out how I could support myself and how I could build new friends and new collaborations. I would say, yeah, when I physically moved from place to place.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Janet Carding: Okay. Well, I would say when I was working at the Science Museum. We produced an exhibition called ‘In Future,’ which was probably the most experimental part of the Wellcome Wing, which was all about the present and the future. This was on the top floor and it was the most experimental part of that. It was an exhibition that used a projected video that you interacted with on a table, and up to eight people, who quite often where strangers had to work out how to work together and talk to each other about an issue to deal with the future.

I’m really proud of the fact that something which is such an experiment became one of the longest living exhibits in the Wellcome Wing, and remained on the floor and was often updated for more than ten years. I think almost 15 years until it was finally changed relatively recently. It made me very proud to do something which was an experiment, but turned out to be very innovative and something that a lot of people referred to as an important moment in developing new kinds of exhibits that groups in museums could use.

So, that was one thing. Another thing that I was very proud of was when I was working at the Australian Museum. I was very proud there of the way that we were able to develop a new exhibition about Australian animals and natural history, but again, it involves some really novel ways of interacting, and strictly for tourists coming to Australia. How these incredible animals – kangaroos, crocodiles, emu, koala, that aren’t anywhere else really in the world and they’ve kind of in these numbers of the species, how we could actually get across the stories about those.

The third thing I’d mention would be here at the ROM. We’re just completing our centennial year and I’m really proud of the way that we’ve used that centennial year to tell the community about ourselves and to build a stronger sense of how the ROM is active and an important part of the community.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Janet Carding: Well, I feel that I’m sort of repeating myself a little.

1. Thinking about the impact that your behavior has on other people.
2. Reaching out to other people to form friendship and to get advice.
3. Being unafraid of seeking out new places and new horizons.
4. Learning from other people, I think that actually life is not all about work, but is about doing other things and I’ve worked hard to try and get a balance. That’s something I think I struggle with, in these leadership roles, but I’m constantly working on.
5. Taking time to just simply enjoy yourself, enjoy going out and having a walk in nature, or going and seeing something that is different. I enjoy the things that I provide for other people, to create experiences where people can enjoy and reflect and think about their own lives. That’s one of the things you do in a museum.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people (living or dead) that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Janet Carding: Well, that’s an interesting one.

1. So these are a random selection of people. First of all, starting off here in Canada, I would have loved to meet Tecumseh who was one of the indigenous leaders during the War of 1812 and was a brave warrior. I would have wanted to ask him how he got the strength to lead his people in what was the very difficult struggle. So that’s one person.
2. I would have loved to meet a couple of actors. I would have liked to meet Helen Mirren. I think she’s a great example of an independent woman and I’d like to ask her about how the different roles have been ways for her to learn how to succeed in what must have sometimes been a complicated career I know ebbed and flowed, but she’s been very well now.
3. Another actor that it would be great to meet would be Johnny Depp, who I get the sense always does things he thinks he’s going to find interesting and how he balances what he finds interesting with what he thinks is actually going to be successful, or does he just simply follow what he thinks is going to be interesting?
4. I think looking at the world of arts and culture, it would have been wonderful to meet the first director of the ROM, Charles Trick Currelly, and ask him about his vision for the future of the ROM, the Royal Ontario Museum. We’ve been thinking a lot about that. It’s our centennial (This was last year). We even had an actor who became Charles Currelly’s for some our public programs so I got pretty close to asking him.
5. It would have been wonderful to meet someone like Leonardo da Vinci and just actually be able to ask him about what motivated them in terms of being so creative, in terms of exploring so many different areas. What is it that gave them that incredible sort of first full knowledge and to create?

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Janet Carding: The books that I’ve been reading all my life, and I still read about once every four or five years is Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, which I had found in one volume, but I’ve had it for a very, very long time. I would say that that book is always had an impact on me and still does because it provides these ideas that there are worlds, and indeed probably this world is one where there are always rules that you don’t know, and things that might happen that would surprise you and that the journey that you’re on is one that isn’t necessarily followed by rules and logic, but can be a really enjoyable ride.

Avil Beckford: You are on a deserted island for two years, how would you spend your time and what are five books you would take with you?

Janet Carding:

1. Well, I think Alice in Wonderland would be one of the books I’d take with me. I think it’d be great to take.
2. Something that would be really great on a desert island, like Gulliver’s Travels would be a good one I think, the idea of someday he’s gone to a strange island. I think in terms of other books — let me think. It’s maybe three books.

I was just counting my books this morning because as part of moving house, I had to work at how many books I had and I had about 750.

If I think of books I go back to on a regular basis… These are  really hard questions, Avil. I would say, it would be a great opportunity for me to learn some more history. So it would be great to have History of Australia because that’s the country, which I’m spending a lot of time. It’d be good to have Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War, something that I should know more about than I do because it seems to have been such an important part of establishing the world and the divisions that we have today. Then again, it would be good to have a book that simply was about art and culture, so I’m thinking perhaps of a catalogue.

I’ll just take the one that actually I’ve been looking at most recently, a US glass artist. We’ve been thinking about having an exhibition at here at the ROM in the future. His work is just so beautiful. I mean it’s nothing like seeing it, but his catalogues are just incredibly delightful and the idea of being colored glass that’s spectacularly lit. I think if I was miles away from everyone on a desert island, that would be quite good and that would just be joyous. These artists would be joyous.

How would I spend my time on the desert island when I was there? Well, I’ll spend my time learning how to survive I think. I’d spend my time being practical. I would make shelters. I would learn and think about boats. I would do those sorts of things, but I’d enjoy it. I’d enjoy the warmth. I will hope it would be a warm tropical desert island.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when….. 

Janet Carding: Oh, I’m happy when I’m by water.

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