Music and
Leadership
Recently, I have
had a cluster of conversations with people who expressed surprise that a
musician would or could be a university president. I usually first respond by
asking what the appropriate college major is for the role, which becomes a
great platform for the ways a liberal education prepares our students to be
adaptable and to become leaders.
Having enrolled in
a professional undergraduate music program, I frequently half joke with our
students that I spent my college years in a practice room and that I have been
catching up on a liberal-arts education ever since then. The truth is the music-school
curriculum was in many ways a specialization embedded within a deeply
interwoven framework of diverse knowledge and skills—liberal education. We
learned physics through acoustics and Pythagorean scales; we learned literature
through analyses of lyrics; and we learned history as the shaping influences of
our art over time. We also developed a range of transferable skills that have continued
to prove themselves valuable in a variety of professional settings.
The following is
an updated version of an essay, “From Practice Room to Board Room,” that I
wrote for Inside Higher Ed. The
original was published on 20 December 2006.
During the first
few weeks after I was first appointed Chief Academic Officer at Sweet Briar
College (fifteen years ago), many faculty members made appointments with me to
offer advice, encouragement, or to inform me of some promise made decades
earlier by some by-then-dead bureaucrat whose pledge I should have felt
beholden to honor. Among these visitors was the chair of our Business Program,
Bill Hostetler. For a few days prior to our meeting, I turned over in my head a
dozen possible demands that I would have to deny. When the meeting arrived to
my surprise, he entered my office with a stack of management textbooks teeming
with labeled post-it-note tabs. This man was armed.
He began what I
expected to be his pitch by telling me that I had quite a challenge in front of
me, and that institutional dynamics are difficult to reshape. I then realized
that he did not desire anything but to help. He had carefully identified and
annotated the critical passages on effecting cultural change within
organizations. “I’ve marked these because they will be necessary for you to be
able to get anything done,” he said, “and these are concepts with which you are
probably unfamiliar.” I replied that I really didn’t have any management
training. “Are you kidding? You’ve been preparing for this job your whole
life.”
It turns out he
was right. My discipline is music with a specialization in conducting. The
longer I have served in administration, the more I believe my conducting
training has provided me with the most valuable preparation for my current
career. The following examples are not a claim of mastery on my part, but
rather observations of the transferability of leadership skills from one field
to another.
Time management: Of all college students, musicians are
generally the best time managers. From the very beginning, they are inculcated
with the need to practice no matter what other competing responsibilities arise
(This is also true of student athletes.). The great music pedagogue, Shinichi Suzuki
said, “Practice only on the days you eat.” This is the creed of most successful
musicians. Conductors have the added need to run efficient rehearsals.
Ensembles have a fixed amount of rehearsal time to prepare any performance, and
in the case of professional groups, time really is money. Decisions must be
made instantly. The conductor’s practice time is score study and rehearsal
preparation: the better the preparation, the greater the likelihood that these
split-second decisions will be good ones. The conductor’s performances, in a
very real way, are the rehearsals. Concerts are a public presentation of the
results of the rehearsal.
Strategic
planning: The conductor
must plan the season, each program, and the individual rehearsals with a
complex set of goals in mind. Concert seasons must satisfy board members,
cultivate ticket sales, and accommodate the repertoire of visiting soloists.
Concurrently, works chosen should educate and enrich the players and the
audience. The conductor must navigate a balance between challenging and
comfortable works, and must do this with a goal of using these works to make
the ensemble not only sound their best in performance, but also improve through
the experience. With limited resources and rehearsal time, it is imperative to
know where the difficulties will be and how they can best be overcome prior to
each rehearsal.
Triage: One of the most important skills for a
conductor is the ability to triage any rehearsal situation. The term triage
comes from Napoleon’s medical corps who divided the injured into three categories:
those whose injuries can wait for treatment, those who need immediate care, and
those who cannot be saved. We continue to use this term in medical circles for
the process of determining who should be cared for first, not whom we neglect
and let die. It is the more modern version to which I refer musically. In
rehearsal, the conductor must prioritize what must be fixed first. In most
cases fixing the right thing will lead to the automatic correction of a number
of correlated errors. The same is true in management, picking the right thing
to fix can cause a host of other problems resolved themselves.
Listening: Every leadership text and workshop
indicates that two of the most important tools for effective leadership are
good listening skills and a sense of humor. The latter is self explanatory,
good humor is a fundamental component of a good life. Listening is more
ambiguous. Musicians are taught to listen in some unusual ways. We learn to
distinguish aspects of pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody, and structure, but we
also learn to listen to inflections. Those qualities within music that many
consider communicative can teach us to listen for subtext in our conversations
with others. Timbre and nuances of tone often betray what speakers are thinking
despite what they say. Like the next step in a rehearsal, this helps us to
choose the questions that will bring necessary truths to the surface.
Additionally, conductors strengthen their discernment of counterpoint and
balance, learning to create a hierarchy of competing voices.
Letting your
players play: I believe
the most important transferable skill is learning to let your players play. In
rehearsal, the effective conductor helps his or her players to know what to
listen for and with whom they should communicate musically at any given section
of a work. The conductor teaches the players to listen to each other. In
performance, the conductor must still shape the large structure of a piece, but
if he or she has done the job right, the players “have their heads.” This is
more than just not micromanaging; it is creating an environment that allows
collective artistry to flourish, which is a much richer product than the
dictates of an individual no matter how talented that person may be.
There are
interesting similarities between an orchestra and a college faculty (and surely
many other working communities). The constituents have all spent their lives
training as specialists in a common enterprise. The members of an orchestra
believe they know as much as the person leading them, and they are convinced
they could do a better job. In many instances they are correct, and most of
them would like the opportunity to prove it. Faculty members often feel the
same way but they rarely want the job. They do not want to give up their
teaching or their scholarship. The conductor has the advantage of still making
music and giving concerts, but the conductor is the one musician who doesn’t make
a sound.
Comparing the
roles of provost and president through the conductor’s metaphor: the provost must
coördinate more detailed rehearsals, and the president must listen and respond
to a more diverse collection of voices. For the conductor, the reward is
helping the players to function as an ensemble and inspiring them to play
better than they believe they can. This same reward awaits a leader who is
willing to listen carefully to the faculty and staff of a university and let
them play.
