“The conductor doesn’t say anything. He depends for his power on the ability to make other people powerful.”
“In a survey of happiness at work, chamber musicians came up happiest. Orchestra musicians ended up one up from prisoners at the bottom. What’s the difference? No conductor.”
- Benjamin Zander
So, is your job as a leader to just empower them and get out of the way, as the founder of one of our sponsors at Leaders in London, Ken Blanchard, always says?
“It’s the same for parents. If their eyes are shining, you know you are doing it. If they’re not, you’ve got to ask a question - who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?” said Zander.
So, is your job to make yourself dispensable?
And what about size? How do you get that ’small, in control, free to express myself’ chamber musician feel in a large organization?
How do you hand over power without creating chaos?
Zander’s answer is a shared guiding vision. At the Boston Philharmonic - his orchestra - they don’t follow a person, he says. They all follow a guiding vision: passionate music open to all, with no barriers.
That vision guides all their conversations and decisions, he says. What do you think?
Phil Dourado of www.TheLeadershipHub.com
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November 28th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Another sentence that hit me was “You cannot make great music without a broken heart” …I asked him afterwards the implications for business and he said that successful businesses have a wonderful failure behind them, otherwise they have not risked or pushed the boundaries enough…
December 11th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Following Anna here, we need to live fully. David Whyte has a wonderful expression about living both with loving and the disappointments of love. We can never have the good without the bad. To spend 8 hours a day half alive . . well least said.
I did like Zander’s phrase:
“It’s the same for parents. If their eyes are shining, you know you are doing it. If they’re not, you’ve got to ask a question - who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?” said Zander.
Colin Powell once said that the essence of leadership was “follow me”: to get the troops to follow you, even if it was only out of curiosity.