leadership - Ben Zander

Business pundits still view what an orchestra conductor does as a model for leadership. Is that a good model?

It's the worst! The conductor is the last bastion of totalitarianism in the world -- the one person whose authority never gets questioned. There's a saying: Every dictator aspires to be a conductor. I practiced that model of conducting for years. It wasn't until I was about 45 that I realized something amazing: The conductor doesn't make a sound. The conductor's power depends on his ability to make other people powerful. That insight changed everything for me. I started paying attention to how I was enabling my musicians to be the best performers they could be. My orchestra noticed the change immediately. They asked, "What happened to you?"

The first rule of leadership is what I call Rule Number Six. There's a story about two prime ministers who are sitting in a room, discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts through the door, screaming and shouting. The prime minister who's hosting the meeting says to the man, "Peter, please remember Rule Number Six." Peter is immediately restored to calm. He apologizes, bows, and walks out. About 20 minutes later, a woman comes flying in. She's beside herself. The prime minister says, "Maria, please remember Rule Number Six." Maria apologizes and walks out.

The visiting prime minister can't contain his curiosity: "My dear colleague, what is this Rule Number Six?" The other prime minister says, "Very simple: Don't take yourself so goddamn seriously." The visitor replies, "That's a nice rule. What, may I ask, are the other rules?" The prime minister answers, "There aren't any."

I have a technique I use to reinforce Rule Number Six for myself. I put a blank sheet of paper on the stand of every musician at every rehearsal. That paper is an invitation to the players to inform me about how effective I'm being at making them the best that they can be.

How do conductors coax great performances from musicians who don't seem so capable?

Never doubt the capacity of the people you lead to accomplish whatever you dream for them. It's a principle that leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela have all embodied. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, "I have a dream -- I wonder if people will be up to it?"

I'm amazed by the number of people who tell me they're tone deaf. Nobody is tone deaf. But a lot of us had an experience when we were about seven or eight years old, and a teacher said, "Shhhh, don't sing so loud. You're spoiling the sound of the choir."

Those children later grow up to think, "Classical music -- I can't do that." Of course, they can! In 11 minutes, I can transform a roomful of business executives, or school kids, into a roomful of people who not only love classical music but also understand it. You see, I have a dream too. In my dream, everybody can sing. I don't mean that they can sing with New York's Metropolitan Opera, or even that they should go around singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." I mean that everybody has the capacity to flow with the forces of life, to be fully expressive. Everybody. As a leader, I help people to realize that capacity.

Even talented performers struggle with anxieties about whether they're up to certain challenges. How do leaders move people beyond fear?

My job as a conductor, as a leader, is to teach musicians to be expressive performers of great music. The problem is that often they cannot let that music through to the audience -- because of what I call the "conversation in the head." In any performance, there are always two people onstage: the one trying to play, and another one who whispers, "Do you know how many people play this piece better than you do? Here comes that difficult passage that you missed last time -- and you're going to miss it again this time!" Sometimes that other voice is so loud that it drowns out the music. As a leader, I'm always looking for ways to silence that voice.

I teach students at the New England Conservatory of Music. I've developed a simple technique to quiet that second voice. Every fall, on the first day of class, I make an announcement: "Everybody gets an A." There's only one condition: Students have to submit a letter -- written on that first day but dated the following May -- that begins: "Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because . . ." In other words, they have to tell me, at the beginning of my course, who they will have become by the end of the course that will justify this extraordinary grade.

That simple A changes everything. It transforms my relationship with everybody in the room. As leaders, we're giving out grades in every encounter we have with people. We can choose to give out grades as an expectation to live up to, and then we can reassess them according to performance. Or we can offer grades as a possibility to live into. The second approach is much more powerful.