Orchestrating the Organization – Leadership and Team Work

We’ve all seen conductors doing their job – but apart from waving their hands in the air, what were they really up to? Many famous organizational management writers have used the metaphor of the orchestra in the past - Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg, to name a few. We decided to fully explore this metaphor.

And this is how what originally seemed like a good idea for the leadership program that IESE Business School leads for Visteon, soon become a scary reality: we used real orchestras to create live metaphors for understanding leadership, teams and organization. This required hiring an orchestra and getting our senior management participants to understand what leadership means from the point of view of a conductor. To make things more complicated we repeated this experiment to varying degrees in several places – Monterrey, Shanghai, Budapest and New York, where segments of the Visteon program were carried out.

Communicating the Vision

Which brings me to a wet Wednesday afternoon in Monterrey: I was standing in front of a full orchestra with its 70 musicians playing Brahms’s First Symphony and I came to the realization that conductors are definitely underpaid for what they do. Who cares that they earn 10 times as much as the first violin? This job is definitively intimidating.

Initially, the conductors were rather wary of taking on an experiment such as this, but in Monterrey we found Felix Carrasco, musical director and conductor of the Monterrey Symphony Orchestra. Felix is probably one of the gentlest people you could meet, but when he is on the podium, he projects energy and excitement. He knows what he wants and he gets it.

“Maybe the conductor’s job,” he says, “is the last refuge for dictators. You really get everything you want.”

A dictator? Maybe, but that was not what our management participants saw when they observed Felix and other conductors at work. What they saw was a leader who knew every instrument intimately. They also saw a leader who knew every musician intimately. When combined, musician and instrument, the leader knew the limitations of the combination and got the most out of them. His encouragement, support, advice, admonishment was immediate. Performance, appraisal and feedback were interwoven to improve output on a second by second, minute by minute basis. It was clear, directed and aimed at improving the performance of a musician, a section or the whole orchestra. There was a total communication system in process, one that was two-way. It involved verbal and non-verbal signals and was specifically aimed at performance.

The simple observation of the management executives in the program was: “Do we give rich face-to-face feedback to our followers that will improve performance immediately?” Most discovered that they didn’t. And the performance appraisal system of most organizations probably does quite the opposite: it’s written, it’s pedantic and often irrelevant.

In Shanghai, we found Russian concertmaster George Maxman, ending his session with the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra with this simple line – “Tomorrow we will do better.” The sentiment expressed the faith of a true leader, who believed that his team can reach higher levels of performance and will do so in the near future.

In New York at the Metropolitan Opera, Maestro Joseph Colaneri spoke of the implicit contract between conductor and musician, struck during rehearsal to deliver a specific performance. We were discovering that conductors and musicians through a combination of interesting ideas and powerful music provide an extremely strong emotional learning experience.

Our first attempt at this exercise took place in Monterrey. Participants of the Visteon Accelerated Leadership Program - 25 of the company’s best and brightest - were interspersed with members of the orchestra. Some of the participants had played in orchestras until their university days, while others didn’t like classical music at all. Some sat near their favorite instrument, some watched the musicians, and some watched the reaction of their peer group. We hadn’t warned them of this session, so it didn’t really matter much whether they liked music or not. We were there to discover the parallels between the role of the conductor and company leadership.

What I had learned in my first lesson of “Conducting for Dummies” was that a conductor did not wave his hands randomly in the air. There are controlled movements, which have to studied and perfected. A conductor slices up time in a pattern that indicates different beats of the music:

The first thing that was patently obvious was that the orchestra’s performance improved noticeably under the baton of the conductor. Even to the untrained ear, this was clear.

Then we watched the conductor taking his musicians through a rehearsal. All the time, our participants were seated in the orchestra pit, beside the working musicians. It was clear that some of them struggled to articulate the feelings they had as they sat there. Others immediately connected the learning experience to their own work environment and started the process of discussion.

Watching the conductors, we learned some interesting things about being a leader. While their actions portrayed an intense involvement with the entire orchestra all the time, few conductors speak about their visions – they feel them.

“It is hard to explain,” said Carrasco, “But I don’t tell musicians my vision. I want them to feel it. I project my vision through my body, my gestures, my eyes, my voice.”

Maxman spoke about his vision even though he felt as if he is in the middle of a quest for perfection. He used as an example Antonio Stradivari, who spent a lifetime searching and experimenting to create the perfect violin. He gained perfection only when he was 60 years old and sometimes took a year to make a single violin.

Freedom and Direction: A Delicate Balance

Several musicians spoke about their own vision and the necessity of integrating that with the vision of the conductor. We heard them describe their visions in terms of the “color” of the music. The color of the music? Could we describe our management visions in terms of color? Is the culture of our organization to be understood in terms of “color”?

What we were observing could easily be called “leading with passion.” When asked, our business leaders were challenged to identify anytime that they had brought as much passion to their own leadership situations. There seemed to be an inherent shortcoming in the very way we were thinking about vision. As management leaders, we insist that we be able to write down the vision and we be able to sit around the table and talk about our passion. Could this be wrong? Maybe we needed to really internalize passion and make it pour out of our hearts, minds and bodies.

When we talk about leadership in business organizations, we always emphasise the element of trust. Conductors also rely on trust. Trust is a vital part of their ability to lead. The musicians trust the conductor to lead them to a successful completion of the piece. Without a leader there is no trust, with no trust performance falters. Trust here is a tacit requirement in the leader and his musicians. They do not speak about trust, they do not take it for granted. A conductor builds it up over time through close contact with individuals, sections and the orchestra as whole. Eventually they want to know that they are safe in the hands of the conductor and he in turns knows he can depend on his team.

Maestro Joseph Colaneri described the delicate balance the conductor has to achieve between giving artists their freedom and the direction and vision he sought. He spoke of being a “centered person,” of gaining confidence in oneself while the orchestra shifted its confidence in unison. All of this is achieved through improving the trust relationship. A relationship which is not based on being “nice” to one another, in fact conductors are often despised (“They earn too much,” some say. “They do nothing for us” say others. “They’re just prima donnas,” mutter some.) Rather the relationship is built on mutual respect, respect for professionalism, knowledge and experience.

During these sessions it was clear that Visteon managers were learning a lot, but we saw that learning itself was different in an orchestra. Conductors are amazingly spontaneous in their reactions – they are about learning here and now. They lead by transmitting their vision; they lead by example and let their followers know when they’re not getting the message – immediately. Learning, practice, rehearsal and performance are all wound into one so that musicians improve all the time. We wondered whether company appraisal and reward systems were so far behind what was required of a divisional leader that maybe they were useless to them in the leadership role. Often in organizations there is little time for learning and rehearsal – it’s all about performance.

Take for example the musical score – the sheets of music in front of every person in the orchestra. Conductors, like divisional leaders, work from a complex score or music sheet. Musicians actually work from a simpler score that pertains to their part of the performance. We saw the parallels between that and the mission/objectives documents sent by senior management in head office. The conductor’s job is not to rewrite this score but to interpret it for their organization or team. Each individual in the orchestra has probably played Brahms a hundred times or more, but there is no cynicism about “here we go again it’s a head office message.” Musicians like employees in a division of a corporation look to their local conductor/leader to give the lead – firstly in striking the right tempo. Important when going through change, is it going to be radical disruptive and gut retching or is going to gentle, gradual and incremental? Secondly, the conductor determines where the emphasis will be placed.

While the musical score may be perfect, the conductor still starts from the beginning with each performance. “There are disorganized organizations,” said George Maximi, “and there are organised organizations.” Regardless of what you are given, you have to start from the beginning.

The question many participants asked was: had they worked sufficiently on the composition of the organization’s score or music sheet, to give the leaders at lower levels the material to work with? In a large organization, was it better to have a well- structured “score” or did you want your managers to be like jazz musicians and improvise as they went along?

Naturally the discussion turned to the issue of how much control do managers need in their organizations. Watching conductors at work, we heard this:

“I must remember to leave my instrument (the instrument he mastered) behind. Forget that. I must stop playing that and start leading my musicians,” said Carrasco.
While the dedication of the conductor is to the development of a coherent vision over the long term, performance after performance, rehearsal after rehearsal, the musicians themselves are passionately dedicated to playing their instruments at higher levels of perfection. The conductor cannot and does not want to play any instrument. His role is to lead.

In our management discussions, we were concerned about the lack of professionalism, passion and dedication in most organizations. Do we ask our employees to seek higher levels of perfection in the jobs? Do we as leaders have a passion that will integrate all the sections of our division or department so that they all understand what everyone else is doing?

As with any organization, an orchestra is divided into sections. During the performance, within a section, each musician has to understand what the other is doing and where the section is heading. The section itself also has to be conscious of what other sections are doing and what part they play in creating the vision. A lot of this is done through subconscious alignment. Many musicians they do not “look” at the conductor, but they are constantly aware of him. They don’t look, yet they “see” him

During these illuminating sessions, we often closed with members of the orchestra reflecting on the power that conductors brought to their jobs. The music and its message had power. If one listens to Vivaldi or Mozart, there is power and it is the job of the conductor to interpret that power, to bring new energy to something that has been played over and over for a hundred years or more. There was much to be learned from watching these guys at work.

Note: This article was written by Prof. Paddy Miller, who is professor of managing people in organizations at IESE Business School. He leads sessions on leadership in key programs such as the Global Executive MBA and the school’s Short Focused Programs.