Reposted from Security Management Magazine

Imagine this scenario: You apply for your dream corporate security job, a senior leadership position at a reputable company. You’re confident. You have more than a dec­ade’s worth of security management experience, plus an impressive array of degrees and certifications.

You get to the final stage of the hiring process, and HR informs you that you are one step away from an offer. All you need to do is answer one question within 30 seconds: Find the next number in the sequence: 2, 7, 28, 63, 126, ___.

Did your heart just skip a beat? Wel­come to the new world of hiring, in which assessments matter and objective reviews of prospective candidates rule over subjective evaluations and opinions.

Until recently, attempts to move up the corporate ladder into a senior management role as a security professional were typically very competitive but straightforward. Often, they followed a four-stage process: learn about the job opening, submit a detailed résumé and cover letter, participate in interviews with HR and the hiring manager, and receive a job offer, if selected.

Arguably, some senior security roles were filled based more on who you know rather than what you know, so references and recommendations could also be crucial.

But the world has changed, and few reputable companies still use the old format. Many have added more difficult steps, including challenging personality and cognitive ability assessments, which can catch even the most competent security professional off guard.

Why the Assessments?

In terms of qualifications, many of today’s organizations want their senior security leaders to have executive presence, proven leadership skills, and the aptitude to manage people, programs, and budgets as efficiently and effectively as the leaders in every other department of the company.

But now, a candidate’s performance on a formal assessment is another component to be evaluated during the hiring process. In general, an employer will give more weight to the results of formal assessments if the organization is hiring someone to actively lead change across the entire enterprise, rather than a caretaker manager who will mainly keep watch over the security department.

In part, this is because change agent managers will be working in a dynamic and sometimes tumultuous environment, and assessments can help measure if applicants can think on their feet and meet unexpected challenges. Employers do not want to hire someone who has topped out at their current level and who does not have the motivation to excel in a more demanding role. Nor do they want someone who cannot handle stress and accept feedback or who does not collaborate well with others.

A major reason that applicants for senior roles face more challenges is because human resource leaders know that about 80 percent of hiring mistakes are due to “inaccurate” interviews—interviews that failed to effectively assess if the candidate would be a good fit for the position. In addition, training and research firm Leadership IQ found that 46 percent of all new hires fail within 18 months.

As a result, human resource professionals have turned to assessments to provide more key data points. Not scoring well on these assessments, in contrast to the candidate’s professional accomplishments, will send a mixed signal that applicants want to avoid. But high assessment scores, complemented by an impressive résumé and strong interviews, will offer further confirmation that the applicant is the right person for the job.

Hurdles in the New Hiring

To identify the right candidate for hire, many companies have expanded the previously mentioned straightforward four-stage system into a longer and more grueling process. This expanded hiring process varies depending on the organization and role, but if an applicant prepares for the worst-case scenario, a process with fewer stages will only be easier.

This new formula starts with the traditional, easily prepared for interviews. But later in the process lies a potentially fatal trap, which will bring an unprepared applicant’s journey to an abrupt halt with no second chance. The trap consists of a battery of assessment tests that the candidate must perform well on to proceed.

Regardless, the initial interview stages of many hiring processes often include a screening interview with a gatekeeper from human resources. This is usually followed by interviews with the hiring manager and the candidate’s potential peers. Many companies use formal interview protocols with specific questions that can be scored, although some still use conversational interviews and subjective grading.

The middle stages of the hiring pro­cess often include interviews with senior leaders, such as the general counsel and other key executives. After this middle stage, but before the final stage, the candidate is sometimes invited to take an array of online assessments and discuss the results with a psychologist.

This is a critical step. For the applicant, the good news here is that simply making it to this stage indicates strong interest, since the company is willing to pay for third-party assessments. The bad news is that failure to perform average to above-average on the assessments will end the process altogether.

One important disclaimer: applicants should know that while surviving the assessment stage usually means they have cleared all major hurdles, this will not hold if they have lied on their résumé or about their accomplishments. Many companies have a final process stage, and discovering false representations in it can cause issues. This last stage often includes providing professional references, including ones from supervisors, peers, and direct reports, as well as reviews of your job history, criminal record, and credit report.

Another recent change here is that many companies no longer request generic professional references from people who can attest that the applicant is a great person, but who cannot provide specific examples that confirm accomplishments stated on the résumé, nor specifically attest as to why the applicant would do well in the prospective job.

If it seems possible that the résumé and interview answers could crumple under scrutiny during targeted interviews with references, the applicant should take the time to ensure accuracy before applying. Common problem areas here include misrepresented or exaggerated numbers of direct reports, overstated numbers in budgets managed, or taking direct credit for an accomplishment that should seemingly be easy for a reference to confirm, but the reference cannot. Here, the general rule is to make sure that all embellishments are avoided.

Another potential area of concern is a candidate’s online presence. Social media and LinkedIn profiles should align with the candidate’s résumé to minimize the possibility of misunderstandings. One of the quickest ways to get ghosted is when an HR professional discovers a misrepresentation within the applicant’s social media presence.

In sum, the days of simply believing an applicant’s résumé and making a hiring decision based on a strong interview and intuition are over. But just knowing the new landscape and giving oneself time to prepare is likely to give the applicant a tactical advantage.

Assessment Specifics: What to Expect

Personality assessments do not evaluate experience, education, technical knowledge, or accomplishments. What they do measure are personality traits that influence how a candidate thinks, feels, and acts. They are also designed to assess cognitive skills and abilities that influence learning, problem solving, and decision making. Taken as a whole, these assessments are part of the employer’s strategy of identifying the right candidate and avoiding a bad hiring decision.

Companies often use more than one survey to assess different aspects of the candidate’s personality and cognitive abilities. Some of the test questions will overlap, but this allows the tester to look at trends across surveys, which can provide a more accurate picture of the candidate. Overall, these tests are scored based on the number of right and wrong answers, and the overall results are compared with a large candidate norm group.

In practical terms, the assessments are usually divided into two groups—
timed tests and untimed tests. The timed tests typically allow five to 20 minutes for completion, and they focus on verbal comprehension and reasoning, as well as numerical ability and reasoning. The tests cover both verbal and math exercises, which are excellent predictors of analytical and problem-solving skills, offering multiple opportunities for a candidate to demonstrate skill. They can also be considered critical thinking tests, which look at a candidate’s ability to correctly infer, recognize assumptions, evaluate arguments, make deductions, and come to well-reasoned conclusions.

In general, verbal tests assess a candidate’s ability to comprehend written passages. While it is possible that a numerical reasoning test could involve complex math, it is more likely that the numerical exercises for a sec­urity leadership position will focus on evaluating numerical information, understanding patterns and trends in data, and making sensible conclusions and judgments.

The untimed tests are usually intended to take between 15 and 30 minutes to complete. It is critical for candidates to not rush through these assessments; they should assume that every answer matters. If time allows, candidates may want to go back over all the questions multiple times to catch any obvious mistakes in their initial responses. Some applicants may wonder why they must answer questions about fractions and parallelograms, which seem unrelated to security, but there is a method to the madness, so it is best to stay positive.

The untimed tests may include questions from established assessment tools such as Critical Thinking Appraisals (also known as Watson-Glaser), Leadership Personality Tests (such as those used in Wealth Dynamics, John Maxwell, DISC profile, and Strength Finder tests), the Hogan Development Survey, and various personality assessments—such as the Personality Research Form, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Winslow, Holtzman, Hexaco, and the Neo Pi-R test.

At many companies, the candidate will meet with a psychologist after completing the tests. These sessions will often feature open-ended questions by the psychologist, which are designed to assess how candidates see themselves, and how they think others see them. The way candidates articulate how they view themselves in their own words helps the experts interpret the survey data more accurately. To ensure accuracy, most companies require the testing vendor to have two different psychology professionals review the results.

Preparation

How to prepare for the assessments? Those administering the aforementioned tests often give generic preparation advice, like to get plenty of rest, take the tests somewhere free of distractions, and break up the tests into multiple sessions if possible. They will also encourage the candidate to answer all personality questions honestly and candidly, assuring that there are no wrong or right answers.

That is sound advice, but more can be done. It’s generally a safe assumption that fulfilling day-to-day responsibilities in the candidate’s current security position will not serve as adequate preparation for many of the assessment subjects. Thus, it is not advisable for applicants to take the tests cold. The bottom line is that assessments in some form are now part of the process and need to be taken seriously. Applicants should spend as much time preparing for assessments as they would creating a résumé and preparing for interviews.

The number one way to prepare for the assessments is to practice answering similar questions. If a candidate’s HR contact does not volunteer the actual names of the timed assessment tests, the candidate can request the names of the tests in advance. Then through online research, practice tests can be found and taken.

Internet searches will yield both free practice tests and tests that are offered for a fee. There are numerous smartphone apps available; Pocket Aptitude, for instance, has sample questions and answers for 24 different categories that represent content on various quantitative aptitude exams.

One suggested option is to treat the IQ and personality apps like games, and by enjoying them just a few minutes per day, a candidate will increase his or her skills. This preparation should be treated like a marathon, not a sprint; over time, each aptitude skill added to the toolbox will make the professional more competitive.

Let’s look at some sample questions to give potential candidates a better idea of what they might come across in an actual test.

Questions

1. Find the next number: 2, 7, 28, 63, 126, ___.

2. You bought 10 pencils for $5 and sold them for $6. What is your percentage gain?

3. Anne is 5 years older than Brian who is 4 years older than Charlie. The sum of their ages is 61. How old is Brian?

4. How would you answer the following true or false questions?

a. I am easily irritated.
b. I am afraid of what awaits me in the future.
c. I get nervous talking to people I don’t know.
d. I find it hard to trust people.

5. How would you answer the following true or false questions?

a. I usually believe what people tell me.
b. I am always honest.
c. Trusting someone comes easily to me.
d. I have no reason to doubt people who tell me something.

6. I enjoy making detailed plans.

Choose: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree.

7. My goals in life are clear.

Choose: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree.

8. I don’t like unexpected responsibilities.

Choose: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree.

Answers and Feedback

1. 215. The sequence is 1³+1, 2³–1, 3³+1, 4³–1, 5³+1, 6³–1. Notice that the increase starts slow, then increases sharply. This is a clue that it is an exponential increase.

2. 20 percent. This can be arrived at through straightforward calculation.

3. 20 years old. This can be arrived at through straightforward calculation.

4. If you answered mostly true, you may score highly for having apprehensive, fearful, and nervous personality traits. An employer may avoid candidates deemed too apprehensive, or who cannot handle pressure. Strong candidates show they can effectively manage workplace anxiety and demonstrate resilience and emotional stability.

The question also raises another point relevant to preparation. Some applicants try to answer based on what they think the employer wants to hear, and not based on the most accurate reflection of their true personality. However, true or false questions often do not capture shades of gray, so the test-taker may be confused as to which answer is most representative.

To address this issue, an applicant can take practice tests that provide feedback. Keeping an open mind will be educational in how nuanced human traits can be best expressed through multiple choice answers.

For example, let’s say an applicant is confident but not arrogant. Very little bothers her, but she does have a few pet peeves. By taking practice tests, the applicant will learn what combination of answers best projects who she is as a person, even if it does so imperfectly.

5. These are testing for trust. Those who project low levels of trust and struggle to receive information as accurate are often perceived as weak candidates. In contrast, strong candidates come across as trusting but cautious. The ability to show a certain level of respect and trust in what someone has said or done is key to managing a healthy work environment. It is a safe assumption that one will be tested on trust for a security leadership role, so taking sample tests on this topic is advisable.

Moreover, trust is a two-way street. A candidate should pay attention during interviews to gauge the way trust is perceived, and the extent to which company’s leaders trust information they obtain from others. This can provide clues about the company’s culture. Remember, an applicant being interviewed is simultaneously interviewing the employer too, and the process provides the candidate with subjective and objective data to make an informed decision.

6 through 8. These types of personality assessment questions focus on suitability for role, and employers can choose from more than 30 scales to compare the applicant’s results to the profile they desire.

Two popular scales for security professional leadership positions are ones on confidence and achievement drive. With the former, the questions measure confidence in one’s own ability to succeed. Generally, self-confidence is an important indicator for success as a security professional, whereas a lack of confidence makes one less suitable for a security role.

Because personality tests are given after the interviews, the interviews themselves—especially with individuals in the chain of command—may be used to assess company leaders’ confidence levels. This is usually a good indicator of what those leaders consider unsuitable, suitable, and very suitable in terms of confidence level, and it is another good indicator of company culture.

The latter scale, achievement drive, assumes hiring managers are interested in applicants who have an ambition to excel in what they do. Suitable and very suitable candidates will come across as professionals with inner drive who will do their best to achieve goals and positive outcomes.

The trick with both scales is how to convey confidence and a high-achiever mind-set without coming across as extreme, like someone who would knock down anyone who seems to be standing in their path. If an applicant chooses “strongly disagree” or “strongly agree” to virtually all of these types of personality questions, their score may suggest unsuitability for the security leadership role. Again, taking a few practice personality tests online will provide insights on how to best align your answers with your personality.

Be Lincolnesque

When Abraham Lincoln said, “I will prepare and someday my chance will come,” he likely was not foreshadowing how a qualified security professional could achieve his or her dream job. Still, his words remind us that there is no time like the present to prepare for future opportunities.

A security applicant interacting with a prospective employer would be wise to assume that every step of the interaction is specifically designed to help HR and the hiring manager answer these questions: Can the candidate do the job? Will the candidate do the job? And how will the candidate do the job? Assessments help answer these questions, and so they are now commonly part of the professional advancement journey.

Let’s say that you succeeded in securing that dream job, and one of your duties will be to serve as a hiring security manager. Keep an open mind about using personality assessments as a valid data point in your next hiring decision.

See Original Post

Reposted from Tech Republic

Smart security teams have updated incident response plans in place before a security breach happens.

Companies that don't take the time to develop a security incident response plan pay a high price when the inevitable breach happens. 

According to IBM, organizations with incident response teams and plans spend about $1.2 million less on data breaches than companies without preparations in place. 

However, in IBM's recent report "The 2020 Cyber Resilient Organization Study," the company found that about 51% of companies have only an informal response plan that is often applied inconsistently.

Building an incident response plan and testing it is an investment of time and effort that will reduce stress and costs. 

What to include in a incident response plan

IBM security experts recommend that security teams take time to understand the top threats in their industries and prepare detailed response plans to a specific kind of attack.

Establishing a clear communication strategy is a must for any incident response policy. Daniel Eliot, director of education and strategic initiatives at the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), said clear and comprehensive communication should be a top priority during all security breaches.
 
"Without a clearly articulated chain of command and both an internal and external communications strategy that brings all the right people to the table, the quality of the response gets diminished," he said.

Jerry Ray, chief operations officer at SecureAge, said incident response plans need to take into account how to allocate resources depending on the criticality of the infrastructure components affected by the breach. This could mean prioritizing immediate remediation of the attack or restoration of a mission critical server or forensic analysis of the mechanism of the attack. 

"The order and allocation will be entirely dependent on the attack vector, the system(s) attacked, the data exfiltrated, the IT staff available either in-house or on contract, and the general industry or business line of the victim," he said.

Prepare for the aftermath

Often incident response policies focus on what to do before and during a breach, but it should also include steps for what to do after an incident.

For example, Eliot said that documentation often gets neglected in the aftermath of a breach/.

"Document the lessons learned, and then develop and implement a strategy to reinforce these learnings across the enterprise," he said. "If you don't learn from your mistakes, you're bound to repeat them."

Eliot said companies recovering from a security breach should answer these questions:

• What went wrong in our response? 
• What went right in our response? 
  
• How can we reduce the chances of this happening again? 
  

Ray added that another important follow-up task is to do a total review of all the tools, policies, and settings within the system that suffered the breach. 

"Typically, the single point of failure is somehow revisited and shored up or patched as if that was the only weakness," he said. "In reality, the entire security blanket needs to be unwoven, as the ineffective components may have led to or created that point of vulnerability, which on its own may not have been vulnerable."

Eliot also recommended that IT teams loop in legal counsel after an attack to understand any applicable reporting and notification responsibilities under national and international data breach laws.

TechRepublic Premium's Incident response policy will help your company set a plan for immediate action as well as develop follow-up tasks after a security breach. The policy includes guidance on assembling a response team and the responsibilities of every person on that team.

This Incident response policy gives you a comprehensive start on a plan and allows you to customize it to fit your company's particular needs.

See Original Post

Reposted from The New York Times

On any given day, somewhere in the United States, someone is going to wake up, leave the house and get in a huge argument with a stranger about wearing masks.

Grocery store managers are training staff on how to handle screaming customers. Fistfights are breaking out at convenience stores. Some restaurants even say they’d rather close than face the wrath of various Americans who believe that masks, which help prevent the spread of coronavirus, impinge on their freedom.

Joe Rogers, 47, a resident of Dallas, said that just last week, he had gotten in a physical fight over masks.

In line at a Mini-Mart, he spotted a customer behind him not wearing a mask, he said, and he shook his head. The man asked why Mr. Rogers had been looking at him and Mr. Rogers, again, shook his head.

“I wear a full face guard, the mask that they use when they spray pesticides,” he said. “He reached for my mask and tried to pull it off.” Mr. Rogers said his “natural instinct” came out and he put his hand up and knocked the man to the floor.

In Dallas, beginning June 19, businesses were required to ensure customers and staff wore masks. Mr. Rogers said that though he had not hit another person in “a decade or so” this was not the first altercation he’d had over masks.

“I’ve already been in several,” he said. “I’ve been in shouting matches with people at CVS. People just don’t understand it. If everyone just wore a mask, this would be over.”

Mr. Rogers’s brother, Jason Rogers, a Democratic candidate in Texas’ 57th House District, said that he was aware of the confrontation and expressed support for his brother. “This is Texas, you know,” he said. “Stand your ground.”

Masks were already a political flash point, and months of mixed messages about their usefulness have contributed to the confusion. Now, they’re also fodder for viral videos.

A surge of reported cases of coronavirus in states like California, Texas and Florida has led authorities in those states to issue new guidance on masks. Evidence suggests masks can help prevent transmission of the virus even when worn by seemingly healthy people.

Early in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said several times that those without symptoms did not have to wear masks. On April 3, the agency shifted, saying that masks should be worn in public.

But President Trump, announcing the new guidance, said, “Somehow, I don’t see it for myself” and has continued to appear in public without a mask. On Sunday, after months of shunning a mask himself, Vice President Mike Pence urged Americans to wear them.

Orders regarding masks that carry the force of law have been left to individual states. And in states where altercations over masks have been reported, those orders have recently changed.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California ordered the mandatory wearing of masks in public on June 18. A little more than a week later, Hugo’s Tacos, a taqueria with two locations in the Los Angeles area, announced that it would close temporarily because its staff was “exhausted by the constant conflicts over guests refusing to wear masks.”

The chief executive of Hugo’s, Bill Kohne, said that it was only in the last few weeks that the encounters had become so vitriolic. His staff had been confronted with racist language, he said, and he was concerned for their safety. Recently, one of Mr. Kohne’s facility managers supervising one of the storefronts observed five confrontations over masks in a single hour.

“The one that we most viscerally remember is that a customer at the pickup window who was asked to wear a mask literally threw a cup of water through the window at the clerk,” Mr. Kohne said.

He provided The New York Times with an email from a customer that he said was representative of many customers’ attitudes.

“Why is it the responsibility of a taco stand to dictate to its customers a personal freedom of choosing to wear or not wear a mask!” it said, concluding: “Go to hell taco man. Close permanently! Do us all a favor!”

(The person who sent the email did not respond to a request for comment from The Times.)

Public fights over masks have occurred with extraordinary frequency, service workers say, and far exceed the large number of those already captured by smartphones in viral videos.

Confrontations are taking place even in states that have been more consistent in guidance about masks. Massachusetts required that residents wear masks in grocery stores starting in early May. Still, Alli Milliken, 20, who returned to her job at a grocery store chain in the state several weeks ago, has already seen a conflict. She said that recently a customer wearing a mask called out another customer who was not.

“The unmasked guy shrugged at him and was like, ‘It’s a free country. The virus isn’t real. I can do what I want,’” Ms. Milliken said. “The masked guy then says, ‘I work in a hospital. I’ll be seeing you soon, buddy.’”

Ms. Milliken said that she had not been given any training or direct instruction on de-escalating conflict between customers.

“I don’t know how to go about saying, ‘Oh you should be wearing a mask,’” she said. “I don’t know what my place is.”

The conflicts over masks have been particularly difficult for essential workers, who have been working long shifts and dealing with frazzled and frenzied customers throughout the pandemic.

Londyn Robinson, 26, a medical student in Minnesota, said that her mother, a manager at a big box store in South Florida, was now having to instruct her staff on how to defuse tense situations, along with working long shifts and sanitizing the store.

“I never in a million years would have thought that working in a grocery store would have been considered a high-risk job,” she said. “It breaks my heart.”

Ms. Robinson’s mother, who asked to be kept anonymous for fear of losing her job, said that in the last two to three weeks, fights over masks had become astonishingly frequent. It was not uncommon for the police to be called to her store three to four times a day, she said.

“We’ve had shoppers go after each other,” she said. “Pushing matches, running carts into each other, running over people’s feet, ankles.”

She said that many of the staff members she supervised were already working 12 to 14 hour days and had been doing so since March. (There were physical conflicts with shoppers then, too; Ms. Robinson’s mother said she was slapped in the back of a neck by a customer who was frustrated that the store had run out of toilet paper.)

Even offering masks to customers did not work, she said: “They’ll outright decline or they’ll show you a fraudulent card that says, ‘You can’t ask me to do this.’”

The fighting between customers creates a tension that does not dissipate once the altercation has ended, she said. She no longer feels comfortable walking to her car alone after the store closes, concerned that an aggravated customer may be waiting for her there.

“Now we go two to three employees at a time,” she said.

In Florida, where cases of the virus have been rising rapidly, the state had not issued any official rules on masks as of Tuesday morning, leaving the decision in the hands of counties, localities and small businesses. (The state’s department of health issued a public advisory on June 20 recommending masks.)

Chris McArthur runs Black and Brew coffee in Lakeland, Fla., which is in a county where Mr. Trump won 55 percent of the vote in 2016. Mr. McArthur decided on Monday to begin requiring customers to wear masks at the business’s two locations.

“We had actually been mulling it over for a couple of weeks,” he said. “We were hoping that our city commission would pass an ordinance that would require it locally. Our fear was that if we went out on a limb, because it wasn’t the norm, we would receive a lot of backlash from our customers.”

Still, Mr. McArthur made the decision. “We felt like if we did that, other businesses might follow our lead and our customers might appreciate the extra precautionary measures that we were taking,” he said.

He said that he hoped that conflicts would not arise. But he expects them to, and has coached staff on how to respond. If a customer becomes belligerent, he said, “We would have to call the nonemergency line and hope that the police are available to come help us out.”

See Original Post

Reposted from the Gothamist

The Metropolitan Museum Of Art and The New-York Historical Society both announced today that they are planning to reopen in August, making them the first major museums in New York City to announce reopening plans since the coronavirus shutdowns began.

The Met is planning to reopen on August 29th with new social distancing guidelines in place, which will be revealed closer to the reopen date.

“The safety of our staff and visitors remains our greatest concern," said Daniel H. Weiss, President and CEO of The Met. "We are eagerly awaiting our reopening as, perhaps now more than ever, the Museum can serve as a reminder of the power of the human spirit and the capacity of art to bring comfort, inspire resilience, and help us better understand each other and the world around us.” 

The Met Cloisters in Washington Heights is also planning to reopen shortly after the main branch; The Met Breuer on the Upper East Side will not be reopening however, and the space will be taken over by the Frick Collection.

The Met is expected to reopen with shorter hours and fewer days per week, and all tours, talks, concerts, and events will be canceled through the rest of 2020. They hope to resume all those activities in 2021, including the Met Gala, which has been officially canceled for 2020; and they plan to have a belated celebration of the institution's 150th anniversary next year as well.

When visits do resume, the museum has a few exhibits it's planning to debut, including: Making The Met, 1870-2020, the signature exhibition of the Museum’s 150th anniversary celebration; The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, the latest in a series of annual presentations of a site-specific work on the open-aired roof garden; and The Costume Institute’s About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition, which was going to be the theme of this year's Met Gala, is scheduled to open on October 29th, 2020.

The Met, which officially closed on March 13th, has projected at least a $100 million loss in revenue because of the pandemic and the shutdown (and that figure was based on estimates that the museum would be able to reopen in July). As a result, it has laid off 81 staff members so far.

Before COVID-19, The Met had previously closed for two days on only two occasions: after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.

The New-York Historical Society is planning to reopen in stages starting August 14th, pending approval from officials. They will start with a special free outdoor exhibition called Hope Wanted: New York City Under Quarantine, which documents the experiences of New Yorkers during the height of the pandemic.

Curated by writer Kevin Powell and photographer Kay Hickman, the exhibit features more than 50 photographs taken by Hickman along with 12 audio interviews with the photographs’ subjects conducted by Powell and his team between April 8th and 9th. It will take place outdoors in New-York Historical’s rear courtyard; admission will be free, but access will be limited and face coverings will be required for entry, with social distancing enforced through timed-entry tickets and on-site safety measures.

Then on September 11th, the museum plans to reopen indoors with safety protocols for visitors and staff. “We are eager to welcome visitors back to the New-York Historical Society,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. “While so much has changed over the past several months, our mission of ‘Making History Matter’ remains vital, now more than ever before.”

More details about the reopening protocols will be announced soon. The museum, which also closed to the public on March 13th, has been collecting items from the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests in the city in recent months.

See Original Post

Reposted from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM)

In the midst of a pandemic that has brought an incredible amount of pain and suffering to so many of us, I know there’s a lot on your plate as a leader, and you are being pulled in multiple directions. However, it is critical that you realize we are witnessing, in real time, the tale of two Americas.

While every one of us is trying to stay safe and healthy, we’ve seen the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken on communities of color, and specifically on the Black community. This has been coupled with a string of recent racist acts of violence, including murder, against Black people in the United States at the hands of white people and police. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down, shot, and killed in Georgia; Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed in Kentucky; Christian Cooper was harassed in Central Park; and George Floyd was violently murdered by the force of a policeman while screaming that he could not breathe. In just the last few days, two names have been added to this list: Tony McDade and David McAtee. And these are only the incidents of harassment and death that have made the news. We know there are countless other incidents against people of color in this country daily that go unpublicized.

As we bear witness to protests across the country in the name of justice, equity, and our shared humanity, every person and organization must decide how to respond. Those of us with experience in the DEAI space often find ourselves working with leaders and organizations that describe themselves as committed to equity and inclusion, but regularly remain silent on timely issues that really matter. This inaction speaks volumes to how much further we have to go. It is time to truly recommit to DEAI and do better. Here are some steps you can take, as a museum leader, to do so.

Check in with your staff members of color

Just as you might check in with a colleague after a family member passed, check in with people of color in your museum about how they’re doing. For many of us, the murder of any unarmed person of color can feel like it was our own, because we know that it could have just as easily been us, a brother, a father, a mother, a sister, or a friend. Consider this statistic: Black men have a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police. That is shattering. For the Black community, every time an unarmed Black person is killed, it adds to a collective trauma that feels like watching yourself murdered repetitively on national television. You may not understand this phenomenon, but you need to accept it as valid and true.

I’ve heard from numerous people of color who work in museums and nonprofits with a stated commitment to centering equity and unlearning white supremacy culture, yet hear nothing from leadership, or even colleagues, when these tragedies occur. This is distressing. DEAI work cannot be sustained without supportive, authentic work relationships.

Acting like nothing is happening is putting your comfort over our humanity. Here are a few ways you can check in with your staff:

1. Accept that, while these conversations may be uncomfortable for you, you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
2. Check in with your staff members of color personally. Send them a note, call, or text. Let them know that you are there to support them for when they want and need support. They are grieving and processing; make sure you allow space for them to express and receive what they need as an individual.
3. Let staff members know what work-sanctioned resources are available. Do you offer counseling services, or do your health benefits include coverage for counseling? Remind staff members that needing personal or mental health time is critical self-care practice and a valid reason to take a day off.
4. Create space for staff of color to process without white people present. Affinity space is important at this moment.

Ask your staff members of color what they need

Beyond just checking in about how people feel, you should start a conversation about what they need. This can vary from person to person: your employees are not impacted by events in the same way. Black people are dying from the pandemic at a higher rate because of pre-existing conditions, lack of health insurance, a lack of access to proper care, and because social distancing is a privilege that people experiencing homelessness cannot afford. Now, in this devastating time, this reality is compounded with the fact that Black people are also dying because white police are harassing and killing them while jogging, bird watching, or enjoying other basic public rights.

A few days ago, I was on seven Zoom meetings, four of which included white folks and three which were attended only by people of color. The former meetings did not even mention current events, while each of the latter included check-ins to ask how we were all doing, share our thoughts and emotions, and show support for each other as best we could. The stark contrast between these meetings really shook me. I implore you: take the time to check in with your staff members of color. We are filled with pain, rage, sadness, and many combinations of these and other emotions. Checking in to learn about what we’re experiencing and what we need is not a big ask.

Consider making an internal statement

Like other organizations, museums often make public statements when they are being impacted by timely events, such as the current pandemic. The recent tragic murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and George Floyd may be a perfect example of when a museum might consider a public statement about their commitment to equity. I understand, however, that may not be your case. As a museum leader, I know you have multiple responsibilities, multiple constituencies, and multiple points of view that you need to take into account when making decisions about public statements.

In the meantime, a good start is to make an internal statement. This statement does not have to be long, but it does need to acknowledge and address what is happening around the murder of Black people, and it needs to reaffirm your specific commitment to doing the much-needed equity work within your own museum.

Do not consider making a public statement without making an internal one first. In our experience, organizations have often released public statements about current events without addressing the issues internally with staff, leading to many staff members of color feeling oppressed within their own organizations. Your museum’s public commitment to DEAI must align with its internal one.

These are the times in which you and your museum’s commitments to DEAI will be put to test. As a museum leader, you will need to make the decisions that authentically showcase this commitment, express empathy, and honor your staff members of color’s experiences.

See Original Post

Reposted from The Atlantic

The debate over what should be done with controversial or offensive statues—whether they be of Edward Colston, the 17th-century British slave trader; Belgium’s King Leopold II, whose brutal reign led to the deaths of millions of Congolese; or Robert E. Lee, the Confederate army commander—largely centers on competing narratives between those who argue that getting rid of these statues is tantamount to erasing history and those who say that far from representing history, these monuments idolize the role of those they depict.

While some have suggested placing these statues in a museum or leaving them to deteriorate naturally, I propose another way: a statue of limitations, where towns and cities would hold a mass review of their monuments, say every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagine them, or remove them from the public square for good. These reviews, led by local authorities or citizens’ assemblies, would democratize the debate around these civic symbols and, perhaps most crucially, force communities to engage with the history and values they represent.

This isn’t a simple solution. For one thing, it would undoubtedly require plenty of study and deliberation, which is more than can be said for the processes that led to many of these statues being erected in the first place. “It’s not like some democratic assembly or a panel of historians decides to do these things,” Christopher Phelps, a historian and associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham in Britain, told me. “It’s usually the people who have great power and wealth deciding to honor the kind of past or kind of society they want.”

Take the Colston statue in Bristol, England, for example. The monument was erected in 1895, more than a century and a half after its likeness’s death, in a desperate bid by the city’s business and political elites to quell radical stirrings among the lower classes. Colston, whose philanthropy helped build the port city, seemed to be an ideal symbol of civic unity, even if the source of his wealth was not. A similar rationale informed the construction of statues of King Leopold II across Belgium—a process that occurred decades after the monarch’s death at the behest of his successor and nephew, Albert I, who sought to recast his uncle as a benevolent king. This reframing of history also applied to the building of Confederate monuments in the United States, the large majority of which were put up not during the Civil War, but decades after the South’s defeat. Confederate monuments “are not representations of Confederate life or the South or American history,” Phelps said, “but are a representation of the way people in the early 20th century tried to justify that past and reconcile it with national unity.”

Democratizing the process by which statues are erected, or reconsidered, could go a long way in ensuring that today’s statues are a fair representation of this century, rather than simply a relic of the past. It would also force communities to grapple with the history attached to these monuments, which, in turn, would help dispel the notion that statues were put up as an accurate representation of that history. As Claudine van Hensbergen, an associate professor at Britain’s Northumbria University who studies public statues from the 17th and 18th centuries, told me, “Statues are not history … They are symbols.”

This isn’t to say that the individuals depicted in statues ought to be perfect. While not every historical figure is deserving of being revered in the public realm, those who are aren’t necessarily without flaws. This reality has been at the crux of the debate in Britain over whether a statue of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which was recently defaced with graffiti during an anti-racism protest, should also be targeted for removal. Though Churchill is widely respected for his stewardship of the country and his thwarting of Nazism during the Second World War, he was also an avowed imperialist acknowledged to have espoused racist views.

Here, too, a formalized process by which communities debate and discuss the merits of a statue would help: Giving people the space to weigh the pros and cons would combat the simplistic view that historical figures are either heroes or villains. It would also provide communities with the space to discuss a number of approaches. Some could opt to install supplemental plaques to contextualize certain memorials, as was done with Confederate statues in Georgia. Others could choose to transfer the statue in question to a museum, as is planned for the statues of Colston and a Leopold II statue that was recently removed by Belgian authorities in Antwerp. Enterprising communities could even choose to reimagine statues altogether, as has been suggested by the graffiti artist Banksy, who sketched a remade Colston memorial that maintains the original statue while also commemorating the anti-racism protesters who earlier this month pulled it down into the Bristol harbor.

Logistically, of course, making any changes to, or removing, statues is more complicated. Not all statues are erected on public land, or by public authorities—the University of Oxford’s recent decision to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, whose imperialist legacy made him the target of student protest, would, for example, require coordination with local authorities as it is the equivalent of a historic landmark. (The leader of the Oxford city council has publicly backed the statue’s removal.) “It’s a lot easier to put a statue up than it is to take one down,” van Hensbergen said.

Still, a statue of limitations would aim to do more than simply provide answers for what to do with monuments of figures whose legacies have aged poorly. The concept rests on the notion that communities should periodically come together to reconsider who gets commemorated in the public square. Though this could mean removing monuments that no longer reflect the values of a society, it could also mean adding new ones that do—including more memorials to women, who make up less than a quarter of all statues in Britain and just 10 percent of statues in the United States.

Perhaps more than anything, the debate would help remind communities what statues are for. “Good statues … should be provocative,” van Hensbergen said. “Great art is provocative. It makes us ask questions of ourselves.”

See Original Post

Reposted from Artnet News

The Oakland Museum of California was born in the shadow of racial division and protest. We opened our doors in 1969 amid the demonstrations to free Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, who was on trial in the wake of a violent exchange with police. His trial took place across the street from the museum, at the Alameda County Courthouse.

In this context, the museum’s founding director, Jim Holliday, attempted to form a community advisory committee amid calls to better incorporate community members into the project. He was fired for insubordination six weeks before the museum opened; other museum leadership resigned in protest of his ouster. 

The commitment to equity, which is baked into our DNA, is also compelled by our location in one of the most diverse cities in the country, defined by a history of social justice and activism. Over the past decade, we have worked to live up to those values. We have diversified our board, our staff, and our audience, and have begun to measure the impact we are having on the well-being of our community beyond traditional measures of attendance or financial benchmarks, which tend to reinforce the way things have always been done. 

At the same time, our external research—and, even more importantly, the internal reckoning we’ve confronted in recent weeks—have revealed how much further we have to go. I present some of the steps that we’ve taken with humility, acknowledging that we have many more steps to take collectively as a field and within our own organization as we work toward justice. 

Inside Out

We know, especially now, that a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access begins at home. Over the past several years, we have worked to increase the diversity of our staff and board, to develop tools for greater intercultural understanding, and to place engagement with our community at the core of our work. This involves not only setting benchmarks, but also making sure we are measuring the right things. 

On the board level, we set a specific goal for people of color to comprise 40 percent of the members; we met that goal in 2016 and have sustained it since. Seven years ago, we established a community engagement committee to help design internal training specifically for trustees related to equity and inclusion and to champion our work with community partners. We are now one of 50 museums across the country participating in the American Alliance of Museums’ Facing Change initiative to increase board diversity, a two-year effort that involves training, the compilation of a diversity and equity plan, and the recruitment of at least two new trustees of color. 

On the staff side, we restructured our entire organization in 2011 to place the visitor at the center and to dismantle some of the silos that typically exist in museums. We created new positions to serve as visitor advocates and established an evaluation department so that we could hold ourselves accountable. While introducing these functions into a museum may not seem significant, incorporating the perspective of visitors and community members into discussions about planning exhibitions and evaluating success has been transformational. We now launch most major projects with a convening that includes community members with lived experience in the topic to help us shape the content. And every major exhibition concludes with a full debriefing led by our head of evaluation so that team members can hear directly about visitors’ experiences. 

We’ve also created new teams and initiatives to cultivate leadership at every level of the organization, including a paid internship program. Beginning in 2013, we put in place new processes for recruiting, hiring, and compensation designed to reduce bias and promote equity. For example, we created new job description templates for positions to eliminate barriers for hire, including education level, and developed a compensation structure that does not factor in degrees or tenure. We also implemented a rigorous hiring process that includes panel interviews for all staff openings, which aims to counterbalance individual biases.

A commitment to equity must also extend beyond the staff. Last year, we began shifting our approach to investing in order to incorporate sustainable and responsible practices that align with our social impact priorities. While we have not yet formalized a new investment policy or divested in specific sectors, we have engaged the staff and board in discussions to consider how all our investments, including vendor relationships, support our mission. Our current context will surely influence these discussions.

The journey to make equity and inclusion a central aspect of every person’s job—as well as a fundamental responsibility of governance—has taken years and significant commitment from every level of the organization. It’s also taken investment. This has sometimes required us to make difficult choices—such as the decision to focus less on technology and digital engagement in recent years. These are choices that, as with everything right now, we’re having to revisit as the museum remains closed to the public. And yet our sustained focus on equity positions us to move forward now with even deeper work around anti-racism. 

Outside In

This commitment is inextricably linked to our relationship to our community—ties that have been strong since the beginning, as the museum served as a department of the city of Oakland for most of its history. Since the 1970s, we have worked with advisory councils and volunteer groups to connect the museum to the particular needs of Oakland’s diverse communities. Two of our active committees today include our Dia de los Muertos Committee, which leads an annual community celebration now in its 26th year, and the Native Advisory Council, which provides expertise and guidance on issues related to Native collections, programming, and cultural practices. 

Over the past few years, we have doubled down on this commitment. We have collaborated with community members in co-creating programming with deep local resonance, such as All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, RESPECT: Hip-Hop Style and Wisdom, and Queer California: Untold Stories. Our Friday Nights at OMCA, a weekly festival of music, dance, food, and art-making, has been a game-changer for our institution, attracting some 200,000 people annually. Together, these programs have made OMCA much more than a museum. We are now seen as an indispensable community resource and a gathering place for all of Oakland and the East Bay region. 

We’ve been able to measure our success because of the investment we’ve made in evaluation. Our highly local audience (90 percent from a 50-mile radius) is more diverse culturally (56 percent people of color in 2019 compared with 46 percent in 2017) and economically (58 percent are low and middle income) as well as younger (62 percent under 45 in 2019 versus 58 percent in 2017), with many more families attending with young children. These shifts make our audience a closer reflection of the local population of Alameda County, which comprises 60 percent people of color. 

Over the past several years, we’ve also worked to identify our social impact—how successful we have been in building greater trust, understanding, and connection between people and communities. As of 2019, we’ve developed specific metrics to regularly measure (and share) our social cohesion outcomes. This examination has led to a fundamental change in how we define success. Attendance statistics, financial metrics, and audience demographics are the outputs and outcomes of our work, but we are now called to prioritize our impact—the real difference we are striving to make in the world. 

So Now What?

In many ways, our museum has been seen as a leader in the field of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access and is looked to for best practices in community engagement. But as with museums across the country, we now have to take stock like never before. Since our founding, we’ve been known as the “Museum of the People.” But like most museums, we have never fully realized the vision to be of, by, and for all of the people. 

Last week, even as I was honored to speak to colleagues across the country about diversity and equity at our virtual American Alliance of Museums conference, I was also called upon by our staff to see, acknowledge, and be held accountable for the inequities in our own institution. These inequities include a lack of black people in key roles, particularly within the curatorial ranks. We’ve heard as well a call for greater transparency and participation by broader staff in decision-making, and respect for roles and expertise that have not been typically valued within museums. Beyond critiques of our institutional practices, I’ve listened to the pain, exhaustion, and despair of black people and people of color with whom I’ve long worked. And I’ve walked the streets of my city and seen murals that appear on the plywood boards that cover broken windows paying tribute to black lives lost and calls for reparation and justice. 

As we move through quarantine, we’ve begun to consider how to reinvent our institution when we’re able to reopen our building. That reimagining has become a cry for action from the inside out and the outside in. 

So, our journey continues. I know it will take every bit of training and learning and all the tools we’ve developed in recent years. But mostly I know it will require listening with self-awareness, taking a stand with compassion and courage, and reimagining what a museum of, by, and for the people can truly be. Black Lives Matter. Black Thoughts Matter. Black Stories Matter. 

See Original Post

Reposted from Artnet News

Authorities have arrested six people in connection with the theft of a Banksy mural dedicated to victims of the 2015 Paris attacks. The work was recovered in a farmhouse in Italy, near the Adriatic coast, earlier this month.

On a visit to Paris in 2018, Banksy installed the stenciled mural of a somber-looking woman with a veil on a steel door outside of the Bataclan theater to commemorate the 90 lives lost. It had been at large since last January, when hooded thieves removed the piece with an angle grinder.

Now, six individuals have been placed in custody in connection with the crime, which caused widespread anger throughout France, while they await trial. Two have been put under investigation for organized theft and four others have been accused of concealing the theft. While the identities of the suspects have not been revealed, Euronews reports that the local French departments of Isère, Haute-Savoie, Var, Rhône, and Puy-de-Dôme were involved in the investigation.

The work was in good condition when it was found by French and Italian police. The art-adorned metal had been stored in the attic of a farmhouse occupied by Chinese nationals who appeared unaware of the valuable artwork hiding in the uppermost floor.

According to the Evening Standard, one of the French police officers who had intervened during the Bataclan theater attack was also on the scene when the door was rediscovered and “was overcome with emotion.”

When the work was shown to the public this June after its recovery, the French embassy expressed its relief. “It belongs to the Bataclan,” said Christophe Cengig, a liaison of the French embassy, at the event. “It belongs to all of France, in a sense.” He added that the Bataclan theater owners “were thrilled, very happy” that the work had been recovered.

This isn’t the only Banksy to be targeted by thieves. In May, an opportunistic thief in a hazmat suit was caught attempting to steal a Banksy work from a hospital in Southampton, UK, mere days after it was installed.

See Original Post

Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance

For many Colorado businesses, now is the right time to update their hazard communication program to ensure compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Hazard Communication Standard, 29 CFR 1910.1200. 

The standard requires employers with hazardous chemicals in their workplaces to label all containers, obtain safety data sheets (SDSs) and train exposed workers to handle the chemicals appropriately.

The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted lots of businesses to purchase new, stronger chemicals to disinfect high-touch work surfaces, equipment and tools to prevent the spread of the virus. Businesses using these new products more frequently and for longer durations need to ensure they comply with the OSHA standard. 

Companies could use the refresher. In fiscal year 2018, hazard communication ranked as OSHA’s second most frequently cited standard.

Keep your employees safe by reviewing these tips and tools.  

Tips for hazard communication

Add any new cleaning chemicals used for coronavirus disinfection to your chemical inventory list. 

Inform and train employees on the hazardous chemicals in their work area before their initial assignment and when new hazards are introduced.

Train employees on the hazards of the new chemicals, appropriate protective measures, and where and how to obtain additional information. 

Ensure that all containers of hazardous chemicals in the workplace are labeled. 

Instruct your receiving department to review labels on incoming products to ensure all incoming containers of hazardous chemicals have labels that include the following information: 

• Product identifier
• Signal word
• Pictograms
• Hazard statements.
• Precautionary statements
• Name, address and phone number of the responsible party.

Review the format of SDSs.

Get the SDS for each new chemical and make all of them readily accessible to employees.

‍Resources for hazard communication

Want to know more about implementing or updating your hazard communication program? Try these tools: 

• Consult Pinnacol’s hazard communication guide, including our sample hazard communication program. 
• Learn more about the GloballyHarmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals.
• Listen to the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates’ April 3rd webinar, which addressed hazard communication and COVID-19 cleaning. 
• Review OSHA’s guidelines on preparing workplaces for coronavirus, including hazard communication rules.

See Original Post

Reposted from The Art Newspaper

The autistic teenager who threw a six-year-old boy from the tenth-floor viewing platform at Tate Modern last summer has been given a life sentence and jailed for at least 15 years. Jonty Bravery picked up and threw a six-year-old boy at the Bankside gallery on 4 August 2019; the victim, a French tourist, suffered bleeding to the brain and fractures to his spine, legs and arms.

In her summing up in court, judge Justice McGowan said: "I cannot emphasise too clearly that this is not a 15-year sentence. The sentence is detention for life. The minimum term is 15 years."

Bravery, 18, who has a personality disorder, was charged with attempted murder after being arrested at Tate Modern; he admitted the charge at the Old Bailey in December. The court heard Bravery had approached a member of Tate Modern staff, saying: "I think I've murdered someone, I've just thrown someone off the balcony."

Justice McGowan added: "You went to the viewing platform, looked around and spotted the victim and his family and went to the boy and threw him over the railing. The fear he must have experienced and the horror his parents felt are beyond imagination.” The judge added that Bravery may never be released.

In a recording obtained by the BBC and the Daily Mail, Bravery told his care workers about a plan to kill someone late 2018 when he was in the care of Hammersmith & Fulham council. In the recording, he says: "In the next few months I've got it in my head I've got to kill somebody." Bravery has been held at Broadmoor Hospital since mid-October.

See Original Post