BMB 670 Module 10 Final Project Example

Leadership and Ethics Plan, 2026-2027

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

BMB 670: Music Business Leadership and Ethics

Final Project

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Leadership and Ethics Plan, 2026-2027

Summary for the Board

The company's founder will step back by the end of 2027. She built the company on trust with artists, fans and crews, but that trust rests on her personal judgment, and the company faces ethical issues that her judgment alone can no longer manage. This plan recommends a shared leadership model and a staged handover, seven written policies, a culture change program, an ethics committee with an outside member, an annual public report and a quarterly dashboard. Its cost is about $260,000 in the first year, mainly for crowd safety improvements, training and an outside adviser, and about $140,000 a year after that.

Leadership

The founder's successor will be a pair: a chief executive responsible for finance, operations and staff, and a head of talent responsible for booking and relationships with agents and artists. The handover will run in three eight-month stages, moving decisions, relationships and authority while the founder remains available, and will be measured by the share of decisions taken without her and by agent retention. The new leaders should combine the consistency between values and action that Avolio and Gardner (2005) call authentic leadership with the servant leadership the operations director already shows toward crews.

Ethical Commitments

Policies, owners and measures

Each policy came from evidence in the milestones: the 2024 crowd surges, the fee complaints, the vape sponsorship offer, the 2024 lineup and local fees, the harassment reports, the 2025 permit hearing and the founder's 2020 decision to pay artists, which becomes a written commitment rather than a personal choice.

Culture

Policies change behavior only when people see leaders act on them. The culture program from Milestone Three, a code of conduct written with staff and volunteers, a speak-up route outside the chain of command, stop-work authority, training and specific leader behaviors, will run over eighteen months. Brown et al. (2005) found that employees learn what is expected largely by watching their leaders, so the new chief executive and head of talent will be measured partly on how they respond when concerns are raised.

Governance

An ethics committee of three people, the chief executive, the operations director and an outside member with experience in live event safety or ethics, will meet quarterly to review the dashboard, difficult cases and any exceptions to policy, and will report to the board. Ethics programs that answer to the top of the organization and include an independent voice tend to earn more trust from employees (Treviño & Nelson, 2021). The company will also publish a short annual report on its website summarizing safety, fees, lineup, harassment response and neighbor measures, which commits it publicly to its own standards.

Timeline

In the first half of 2026, the policies are adopted, the ethics committee is formed, the speak-up route opens, crowd safety improvements are installed and the code drafting begins. The festival in July 2026 is the first test. In the second half of 2026, training reaches all managers and responders and the first quarterly reports go to staff. In 2027, the code is built into hiring and contracts, the handover completes and the first annual report is published.

Costs

The first-year cost of about $260,000 breaks down as follows: about $90,000 for crowd safety barriers, monitoring and an outside review; about $45,000 for training responders, managers and volunteer leads; about $30,000 for the outside human resources adviser and speak-up system; about $25,000 to raise local act fees to the new floor; about $20,000 for the ethics committee's outside member and the annual report; and about $50,000 in revenue given up by declining the vape sponsorship. After the first year, the ongoing cost falls to about $140,000. Against this, the company protects a festival that produces most of its profit and a reputation that agents and artists cite as the reason they work with it. A single serious crowd injury or public harassment scandal could cost far more in liability, lost bookings and permit trouble.

What the Board Should Watch

In the first year, the board should watch four early signals more closely than the full dashboard: whether concerns are being raised through the speak-up route at all, since silence would suggest the culture has not changed; whether stop-work authority is used at the festival; whether the share of decisions made without the founder is rising on schedule; and whether any policy exceptions are requested, and by whom. Each signal tells the board whether the plan is working before the annual results arrive.

Risks

Three risks stand out. Agents could shift dates to the rival theater while leadership changes hands, putting pressure on the new leaders to bend policies to win bookings; the board should treat policy exceptions as a matter for the ethics committee, not the booking team. Long-serving staff may resist the code and speak-up route as bureaucracy; involving them in writing the code is the main response. And the costs may tempt the company to delay crowd safety work after a good year; the committee should report on it each quarter until it is complete.

Conclusion

The plan treats the founder's departure as the moment to write down and build into the company the values she carried personally. A shared leadership model, seven policies with owners and measures, a culture program that makes speaking up safe, an ethics committee with an outside member and a public annual report together give the company a way to keep its commitments after she has gone.

References

Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315-338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Treviño, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2021). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right (8th ed.). Wiley.