Job-Sharing and Growing Pains

While Mr. Hollein’s beginning at the Met appears to have been relatively smooth, he has nevertheless encountered bumps along the way. The typically vigorous director was visibly depleted from an illness early in his tenure, a matter he said he preferred to keep private, since his health has improved and there was no interruption of his Met activities.

In addition, Mr. Hollein has had to adjust to sharing the helm with Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive, to whom he is technically subordinate. Each has his distinct turf — Mr. Hollein oversees the artistic and programmatic side of the operation, Mr. Weiss the business and administration. But Mr. Hollein was accustomed to running his own show in his previous director positions.

Similarly, Mr. Weiss, who led the Met solo after Mr. Campbell was forced to resign amid financial mismanagement in 2017, had grown used to being the only guy in charge. It was Mr. Weiss, for example, who greenlighted the curator Carmen C. Bambach’s recent presentation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness,” a special loan from the Vatican Museums to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death.

Both Mr. Hollein and Mr. Weiss admitted to some growing pains in the early stages of working together, mostly in having to keep each other abreast of decisions they might have formerly made unilaterally. “It’s a leadership model that has its advantages for sure, but also its challenges,” Mr. Hollein said. “You have to always remind yourself to communicate more. In my previous institution, I had all of this in my head.”

But both said they valued the partnership. “The challenge is, how do you build an integrated team among two people who are fully formed on their own?” Mr. Weiss said.

They have the wind at their backs, now that the Met has managed to extricate itself from a downward deficit spiral and to move forward on more solid financial ground. The museum is on track to break even this year, Mr. James said, having built up a new reserve for deferred maintenance; lowered the endowment spending to 5 percent; and stopped regularly dipping into its “quasi endowment,” or rainy day fund. In August, Moody’s Investors Service revised its outlook on the Met to stable from negative.