What Festival Leaders Decide in the Quiet Months
Festival Leadership · Team Culture · Deep Culture
⏱ Reading time: 9 min.
It's August. If you are a spring producer, the show has been struck for months and you know exactly what this stretch of the calendar feels like, even if nobody has ever handed you a word for it.
I call it load-out syndrome. Still lit, nothing running. The power is on, the lights are up, and there is no show. You are technically working. You are answering things. But the engine that ran you from January through the gates is idling, and some part of you has not fully come back online.
Now, if you just wrapped in June, July, or early August, listen up, because you are about to land exactly where I am. It is coming. Give it four weeks.
And if you produce in late fall, rest up. Your wall arrives during the holidays, when everyone around you is slowing down and you are still going, and then January hits. The music industry always comes in with a bang. Always. Nobody eases into a year in this business.
And some of you never stop at all. Venue operators. Touring. Hotel and convention services. Catering and food and beverage. Conference and meeting producers. Cultural institutions running programming twelve months a year. There is no quiet month on your calendar and there never has been.
For you it's double Dutch. The rope never stops turning. So you learn to jump in while it's moving.
That is a skill. It is not the same skill as planning during a lull, and nobody teaches it, and the people who have it make it look like nothing.
So wherever you are in your cycle, the same thing is true.
The quiet stretch is not the off-season. And if you don't get one, the turning rope is not an excuse. It is the condition.
Either way, this is when your next season gets decided.
Not on paper. Not in the budget draft. In you. What you commit to now -- where you are going, how you will get there, how you intend to lead the people who will be standing next to you at 7am or 2am when it counts -- that is set in these months, and everyone on your team will feel the result of it whether or not you ever say it out loud.
The Number That Should Stop You
Gallup released its 2026 global workplace research this spring, and there is one finding in it that I have not been able to put down.
Gallup's 2026 global workplace report found manager engagement has fallen nine points in three years, with the steepest drop between 2024 and 2025. Engagement among the people they lead stayed roughly flat. Managers used to run ahead of their teams by eleven points. That lead is now three.
Read that again slowly, because it is not a story about employees.
It is a story about the person in charge.
The leader used to be the most engaged person in the room. That was the whole quiet assumption underneath how we run festivals and live events. The director carries the fire. The department heads catch it. It travels down. That is how a temporary organization of hundreds of people who have never worked together somehow builds a city in 28 days and takes it down in 16.
That assumption is failing. Not because leaders got lazy. Because the load went up and nothing came off the other side.
Look. If the person carrying the fire is running on 22 percent, the room does not get 22 percent. The room gets less. Because a team can only build on what the leader is actually present for.
"Your team is not underperforming your instructions. Your team is performing your presence."
But Here Is the Part That Changes Everything
Same report. Same year. Same economy. Same impossible conditions.
In organizations Gallup identifies as best-practice, 79% of managers were engaged at work -- close to four times the global average. These organizations span every region and every industry. They are not operating in easier conditions. They built something different.
Twenty-two versus seventy-nine. Same storm.
That gap is not luck, and it is not weather. It is design.
Which is the whole point, and it is the thing I most want you to take out of this: culture is not the thing that happens to your team. Culture is the thing you build for them, on purpose, before you need it.
What This Stretch Actually Is
Every one of us has a version of this season. Maybe you are a festival director. Maybe you are a senior producer, an experiential manager, an artist manager, a venue operator, a hotel or convention services director, a catering and food and beverage lead, a conference and meeting producer, a marketer, a sponsorship rep, a cultural institution program director, a touring professional. Maybe you are producing your very first event next spring and you are reading this wondering if you are even allowed to be thinking about culture yet.
You are. That is exactly when to think about it.
Because this is the last stretch you get to be intentional before the machine starts turning again. Once the calendar tips, you are reactive. The marketing strategy gets timed into your production calendar. The budget gets locked. The first crisis arrives and it is not even a real crisis, it is just the first one, and from there you are responding rather than choosing.
So what do you actually do with it?
Four commitments. Not tasks. Commitments.
1. Know where you are going, and be able to say it in one sentence
Not the mission statement. Not the thing on the website. The real one. The sentence you would say to a department head at a folding table in a production office with nobody else listening.
If you cannot say it in one sentence now, your team will spend the entire season guessing at it. And a team that is guessing at direction will invent one, and it will be the wrong one, and you will not find out until load-in.
2. Know how you will get there, including what you are willing to lose
Everybody plans the additions. New stage, new sponsor category, new ticketing platform, new mock beverage program, expanded second weekend.
Almost nobody plans the subtractions.
Here is the honest version: if you add and never subtract, you are not building a plan, you are building a burnout schedule with a logo on it. Your team will absorb the difference with their bodies. That is the mechanism. That is how a 63 percent turnover number happens to an industry that genuinely loves its people.
Name one thing you are dropping. Say it out loud to someone.
3. Decide how you want to lead, and who you are actually listening to
This one is more pointed than it sounds.
Ask yourself why you follow the people you follow. The conference keynote you cannot stop thinking about. The industry newsletter you actually open. The artist whose team runs the way you wish yours ran. The peer whose room feels different when you walk into it.
Are you listening to them because their values match yours? Or because they are loud, and successful, and it feels safer to borrow a model than to build one?
There is a real difference. Borrowed leadership works right up until pressure hits, and then it comes apart, because it was never yours. You cannot hold a standard under stress that you adopted for convenience.
I grew up in an industry where it was fine to yell at your team. Where calling someone out in front of everyone was just how it went, and nobody flinched, because that was the model and the model was working, or looked like it was.
So that was what I learned leadership was.
Then I watched what happened to the people who did not yell. They did not become gentler. They found other routes, quiet enough that you could not point at it, and everybody in the room felt it anyway.
And here is what took me a long time to accept: calling it out did not work either. Naming the behavior in the moment did not change the behavior. It just moved it somewhere I could not see.
What changed things was stillness. When I started spending real time there, I got better at hearing what was actually being said. Better at seeing what was being avoided. And I started asking a different question. Not how do I stop this, but how do I break the pattern by inviting more voices into the room and celebrating innovative work instead of spotlighting the stale system.
So I started mirroring what I desired. Collaboration. Listening. Transparency. Owning wrong pivots out loud.
Then something I did not expect happened.
Seasoned leaders started telling me they were stuck. That they had lost their way. People with decades on them stated a vulnerability in front of me and did not take it back.
Help, not judge. Listen, not bark. Celebrate our strengths.
What I was watching was an emotionally intelligent leadership model outperforming a boastfully brain-based intelligent one, in real time, in a business that had insisted for decades it was the other way around.
I am a different leader now. I need more intergenerational voices and power-sharing in the room, and I know it. But I have also built the confidence to know when my voice is the one that is needed and expected.
4. Understand the policies that carry you into 2027
Not glamorous. Still the ones that make or break your room.
Vendor agreements. Tax-exempt and overtime structure. Shift caps and rotation. Volunteer terms. Contractor classification. Site safety protocol. Heat policy. Communication protocol. Escalation authority. Who can say stop. Who has to be told when someone says stop. Incident reporting. Debrief cadence. Pay timelines. Housing standards. Meal periods. I could go on and on, and honestly, so could you.
Those documents are your culture in writing. Not the values poster. Those. Because when the pressure comes at 8am, nobody consults the poster. They do what the policy allows, and they do what they have watched you tolerate.
Your Commitment Check
- Can you state where you are taking this organization in one sentence, without notes?
- Have you named one thing you are subtracting from next season, out loud, to someone who will hold you to it?
- Do you know why you follow the industry voices you follow -- values, or volume?
- Have you read your own vendor, safety, and escalation policies in the last twelve months?
- Does anyone on your team know what you are committing to, or are they still waiting to find out?
The Part Nobody Tells You
Big picture and personal path are not two projects.
They run side by side, and they have to point the same direction, or the whole thing wobbles. An organization headed somewhere its leader is not actually going will feel that misalignment in every meeting, and nobody will be able to name it. They will just say the season felt off.
I have not done this work perfectly. I have had seasons where the plan on the grid and the person standing in front of it were not the same, and my team knew before I did. But after 36+ seasons I have learned the tell: when the alignment is real, decisions get faster. When it is not, everything requires two meetings, an email, and a text.
"You cannot build a room you are not present in. Deep Culture is not a thing you announce in January. It is a thing you decide before anyone is watching."
That is why culture is the outward turn. The Three Depths -- identity, stillness, agility -- are the work you do on yourself. Deep Culture is what happens to the room when that work is real. It is not a fourth thing you add. It is what leaks out of you into the people around you, whether you are intentional about it or not.
The 79 percent organizations are not staffed by different humans. They are led by people who decided, ahead of time, what kind of room they were going to build. Then they built it before they needed it.
Some of you have about six weeks of quiet left. The rest of you have a turning rope and a decision about when to jump.
Either way, the season is already being decided.
If this landed, do one thing before you close this tab. Write your one sentence. Where you are taking this organization, in your own words, no committee language. Then send it to one person who will remember you said it.
Festival Leadership Foundations
The Room You Build Starts With the Leader You Become
Festival Leadership Foundations is a cohort course for festival and live events professionals who are done leading on instinct alone. Five modules built on the Three Depths Framework, closing with Deep Culture -- the outward turn into the room you lead. Cohort 2 early access opens September 14.
Join the Cohort 2 List →Early access pricing opens September 14. Enrollment closes October 6.