The Star Online Leadership lessons from an orchestra conductor The Star Online According to Talgam, the best orchestra conductor understands his people, allows them to develop, treats them with respect, and yet gently nudges them towards the goal...
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By Billy Bennett
The Orchestra Conductor Model
This article reminded me of a paper I presented at the Work Teams Conference sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Studies at the University of North Texas. It was 1994 and we were looking at how the organization might evolve beyond the self managed team structures that were becoming more popular. In that paper I compared the evolution of organization strucutures to the evolution of groups of musicians from orchestras to jazz groups. In my view, Jazz collaboration was... and is still one of the most collaborative forms of group structure.
The article reminded me that two things have happened since then... Orchestras have become much more collaborative - while most corporate strucutres have become much less collaborative. Hmm. Not what I expected. However, much has happened in the last 20 years. Fiscal control legislation has had a tremendous impact on organization policies and procedures. IT systems have driven organization design to fit the system rather than the organization. Put these two things together and you see large organizations with more managers making decisions two to three levels below their own - "micro managing" because they think they can and should. The problem is that while they are doing the jobs (badly) of those reporting to them, they fail to do their own.
In this article, one example was of the 700 person orchestra that asked their conductor to resign. That is much more freedom and unity than you would think to find in a "top down" leadership model. So in that respect orchestras have changed. The reason given by the orchestra members... they failed to be developed by their leader.
If your organization was an orchestra how well would you survive the vote of confidence?
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