From Inspiration to Action: Building Stronger Teams Through Arts Leadership Development

St. Ann’s Warehouse plays a vital role on the global cultural landscape as an American artistic home for international companies of distinction, American avant-garde masters, and talented emerging artists ready to work on a grand scale. Located on the waterfront in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the theater provides artists with flexible, open space, enabling them to work with unfettered creativity.

Managing Director Lianna Portnoy needed clearer visibility into operational priorities and opportunities to get full value from their Spektrix system. Attending Spektrix Hubs helped her understand what the team had in place, what they didn’t, and how to turn learning into a shared plan for actionable improvement, bringing ticketing, marketing, and fundraising into the same conversation.

This story began at the 2025 US Spektrix Hubs in New York, where Managing Director Lianna Portnoy (she/her) explained why she chose to attend. As a senior leader, with responsibility for finance, HR, and overall organisational oversight, she’s not working in Spektrix every day. But that meant she didn’t always know what processes were in place, or what she should check in on.

Her reflections underscore a powerful message for leaders across the arts community: investing time in learning and connection can spark meaningful change, especially when you turn ideas into shared action.

Leaders are often responsible for overseeing technology – but may not always know what’s working, what’s missing, or where to get started with improvements.

Lianna arrived at Hubs with an open mind. She wanted to support her team in using Spektrix even more effectively – but because she doesn’t build events or run reports day to day, she wasn’t always sure which processes were happening consistently, where the gaps were, or even what to ask her team.

As Lianna worked through her Hubs workbook, her neat pages quickly became a mix of notes, doodles, and discoveries. By the afternoon, she recognized just how much untapped opportunity existed.

For many leaders, this rings true. Effective oversight doesn’t require becoming a technical expert. It starts with knowing which questions matter – and Hubs helped illuminate those questions clearly, connecting the day-to-day detail back to the bigger picture of audience engagement.

Insight can drive positive outcomes – provided you know how to turn it into clear, achievable action back at your organization.

After Hubs, Lianna wanted to make sure her energy – and everything she’d learned – didn’t get lost in the day-to-day. She used her workbook as a starting point to create a shared plan that brought fundraising, ticketing, and marketing into the same conversation.

Her approach was intentionally straightforward:

• Copy each topic from the Hubs workbook into a shared Google Sheet.
• Add fields for next steps, as well as the point person, priority, and status.
• Bring every department together for regular check-ins to review progress.

This created shared ownership and focus. Instead of siloed improvements, the team built a shared plan. Its simplicity made it sustainable, and its cross-team nature made it powerful.

The day Lianna spent at Spektrix Hubs wasn’t just a professional arts leadership development opportunity for her. It became the foundation for continuous improvement across the entire organization.

Ongoing connection with peers and the Spektrix team can help leaders sustain meaningful operational and cultural change, and arts leadership development, turning a single day of learning into lasting audience engagement and organizational strength.

The improvements underway at St. Ann’s Warehouse show what’s possible when leaders step back from day-to-day pressures and invest time in learning, reflection, and shared action. Hubs helped Lianna and her team see their operational reality more clearly, understand what was possible, and create a plan rooted in collaboration and transparency.

Back at the organization, they turned that insight into a structured, achievable plan with regular check-ins, support from the Spektrix team, and shared ownership across departments.

Their story is a practical reminder for leaders across the arts: when you invest in learning and apply it with intention, you can unlock clarity, confidence, and meaningful change.

Spektrix Hubs are our regular, in-person user gatherings across the US, Canada, England, and Scotland.

Visit our Hubs pages for upcoming dates and event resources, or reach out to Spektrix for expert support whenever you need it. We can work with you anytime through the year to understand your priorities and help you design next steps.