17
Hearing the Music
Leadership and the Inner Work of Art

John J. Cimino and Robert B. Denhardt

Building on Jironet and Stein’s focus on fostering deep attunement, where two or more people find that their rhythms are suddenly in tune, John Cimino and Robert Denhardt explore musical analogies to help engender a level of group performance that is comfortably aligned and where individuality is applauded. They reveal how leaders can promote deeper connection with a group by attending to its rhythm, and how they can enhance group effectiveness by encouraging shared leadership that releases a sense of collective spontaneity and enjoyment, similar to what musicians experience in jazz improvisation. Similar to Taylor’s focus on freeing our mind and spirits through withdrawing projection, they open the possibility that leaders like you can experience greater ease in their work through reimagining their roles as being similar to that of an orchestra conductor, a member of a jazz improvisation group, or any musician who helps people experience emotion or mirrors their experience in ways that inspire or heal.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Music and leadership are rarely considered side by side, much less as integral aspects of a more comprehensive way of understanding human thought and human action. But we hold that music and transformational leadership shape and are shaped by similar patterns of human experience and human energy, that the best leaders display a certain “musicality” that distinguishes them from others, and that actual musical expressions, skillfully facilitated, can be employed to tap and evoke significant aspects of the leadership experience and help to unveil its mysteries. In other words, our leadership can be enhanced by recognizing and drawing upon our aesthetic makeup. To turn our opening quotation from Shakespeare around, the best leaders do have “music in themselves” that moves them to think and to act, engaging emotion, imagination, and will. If this is the case, then locating and bringing forth the aesthetic element of leadership can be extremely helpful in the practice of leadership.

Transformational leaders engage others in a very special way, touching elements of desire, commitment, and possibility that are deeply seated in the inner lives of potential followers. They connect with us emotionally in a way that energizes us and moves us to act. In addition, these leaders provide the assurance that we often need to pursue important values. They facilitate a reshaping of human energy, restructure the narratives of human experience, and bring alive a new progression of possibilities, even in spite of ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2005).

Interestingly, this is similar to the role of music in our lives. Music connects with us emotionally and communicates a certain energy that resonates with one or another emotional state. It touches us physically, emotionally, even spiritually, and primes us for what might be called a feeling-based exploration of our personal condition. In this way, music relaxes us, reassures us, consoles us, inspires us, excites us, or calms us as its rhythms and harmonies interact with our own. In a very real way, we are moved from wherever we might have been to a new condition noticeably more in tune with something we value and definitely a couple of notches removed from any of our default states. The music’s progressions and transitions—its changes in harmony, melody, and rhythm—become progressions and transitions in our own feeling states, and, indeed, over time we are primed for analogous progressions in other aspects of our lives, becoming more or less at ease with complexity, dissonance, ambiguity, dramatic emotion, and more.

Many have illustrated leadership by reference to the role of an orchestra conductor or the leader of a jazz ensemble. But leaders are rarely able to write and conduct a symphony that others play. More often they are called on to be fully integrated into the performance themselves, to play along with others, like the leader of a jazz ensemble improvising a tune.

By establishing the theme, the leader of the ensemble … can chart the basic pattern and direction in which the performance will move. By setting the tone and the tempo, the leader gives focus to the spirit and energy of the group. By modeling effective and responsible performance in their own solos, leaders can energize and articulate the performance of others. But it is the performance of others that is critical. (Denhardt, 1993, pp. 180–181)

More important, leaders confront many of the same issues faced by musicians and do so in ways that go beyond metaphorical parallels. For example, leaders, like musicians, are concerned with rhythm and timing, and leaders can learn a great deal about rhythm and timing from musicians. Groups and organizations have rhythmic patterns and varying paces that organize the experience of those in the group. Many have experienced the chaos and frustration that occurs when a group accustomed to a particular rhythm in their work gets a new boss, someone with a completely different rhythm.

Both music and leadership are concerned with shaping human energy, energizing people, and encouraging them to new horizons. Both are concerned with summoning things into existence, with enlivening and deepening the human endeavor. In this way, both music and leadership participate in the same philosophical tradition, not the tradition of physical or empirical thought, but the tradition of aesthetic thought, that field of study concerned with the exploration of mind, body, and spirit in relation to art, beauty, and imagination—the world of possibility and potential.

Leadership

Leadership for us is not associated with positions or power, but rather with the act of leading. The one who leads is not necessarily the king, the queen, the boss, or the manager, but one who energizes others in a group, an organization, or a society. Leadership is not the result of hierarchical position, but of a human relationship between the potential leader and potential followers. Transformational leadership does not direct followers to do something, but engages with them in such a way that the full potential of the group is brought to bear on the choice of its future activities. While “management” may be concerned with agency and desired outcomes, transformational leadership is more concerned with creating a narrative that portrays the group’s future and compels movement in that direction. In this, the leader doesn’t exert power or control, but is more concerned with facilitating an ongoing dialogue that enables participants to explore possible values they might pursue and, when they find those values compelling, to act in their pursuit. In this way of thinking, leadership is not only about “getting things done” but also about developing meaning, insight, and choice.

Within this way of working, the potential leader must be keenly perceptive of the dynamics, traditions, and structures native to a particular group. He or she must engage the group at its own tempo, in its own language, and via its own mechanisms, channels, and structures. This is careful, measured, and intuitive work. It means living and working with large helpings of ambiguity, and shifting and often competing perspectives—the full panorama of human emotions, virtues, and frailties. Like an artist, the potential leader must excel at seeing what is in all its complexity and richness of context in order, gradually and painstakingly, to envision what might be. Like an artist, the potential leader must assimilate the structures, boundaries, and limits of the field of action, the better to know its potential for renovation, renewal, and creativity. The leader, like the artist, must sense this in his or her bones.

Leadership dialogue that is capable of birthing a group’s emergent narrative is both time intensive and time sensitive. It is necessarily an affair of great patience, subtlety, and skill. It is almost always more about listening than it is about speaking, and more about feeling than it is about reasoning. The leader here is artist personified, music maker, and evoker of new visions and stories.

In April 2007, Michael Gold was asked to present his Jazz Impact program to a gathering of IBM’s thought leaders who were exploring the relationship between transformational leadership, creativity, risk, and innovation. Jazz Impact held an appeal for a number of reasons. First, jazz is an art form based in the essentials of collaborative transformation: generative growth, integrating change, and the ability to sustain innovation. Second, jazz musicians know how to work with ambiguity, how to take action despite uncertainty, and how to challenge the status quo.

When the executives entered the meeting space, they were, of course, surprised to see a jazz ensemble. Before any words were spoken, the musicians engaged them with their music, prompting their minds in a way entirely unexpected. Incoming information in the form of music was captured and stored as somatic experience, coded into the body’s senses and feeling states, with the result of intensifying its capacity for recall. Longer recall would also facilitate the possibility of integrating this new experience with deeply seated existing knowledge. Over the next two hours, the model of the jazz ensemble would push them further still, helping them to frame discussions of organizational dynamics difficult to address in ordinary language. Jazz, however, provided the perfect vehicle because it was made of the same stuff—our key point.

Gold placed the executives in what he liked to call liminal situations and challenged them to work creatively and collaboratively. The term liminal refers to the threshold between what we do and do not understand. In jazz, as in life, we are constantly moving back and forth across that threshold. We discover new knowledge and, via the cognitive process known as transfer, we integrate our new knowledge into our existing knowledge. The most useful integrations (those actually facilitating transformational change) take place only when our new knowledge has been retained in a deep and meaningful way—and for long-enough periods—to allow transfer to happen. This is why the experiential and somatic aspects of musical engagement, and jazz in particular, as well as other art forms if done correctly, are so important. They have the durability and potency to serve as catalysts for shifting our perspectives and our organizational cultures toward new states and, potentially, more flexible and sustainably innovative states.

When an ensemble is playing jazz successfully, we say that it “swings.” Lovers of jazz will tell us this happens when the boundaries between the players and their roles appear to dissolve. We might say that leadership and support flow spontaneously among them. How can there be such clarity of shared intent, such collaborative definition of ideas, such momentum and passion, all without a score? In fact, there is a score; but it is not a literal one. The score is internalized by each of the musicians and works as a set of minimal guidelines for working toward, achieving, and then creatively sustaining the incredible balance that is swing. In jazz, as in leadership, the goal is the process, not the score, the process of finding and sustaining a high-functioning dynamic balance. The result is an ability to embrace ambiguity, interdependence, inner directedness, and an appreciation for unique ideas.

Creativity

Both music and leadership are concerned with summoning things into existence, with enlivening and deepening the human endeavor. This is, of course, the realm of creativity. But how does it happen? To begin with, creativity demands a level of mastery in a domain. Before one can be creative upon the violin, for example, one needs to learn quite a lot about it, but not just about it; one must, in truth, “learn the violin.” Moreover, the great artists are not only masters of their technique, they are vulnerable before their art. They learn to risk everything to go right to the edge of what is possible and then just a bit farther, breathing life and their own life’s blood into their creations and performances.

Creativity is clearly transformative for the artist. It is also transformative for the leader, and anyone who harnesses himself or herself to the task. Its demand for mastery is matched only by its demand for self-knowledge, risk taking, passion, constant challenge, and stimulation. Creativity is fed by imagination, new experiences, and new connections. Priming the mind for creativity means activating its capacities for connectivity and meaning making—connectivity in the realm of ideas, most certainly, but also in the realm of sensation. We must literally come to our senses in order to tap our creativity, senses both external and internal, sight both through the eye and in the mind’s eye. Relentless attention to this formation and transformation of the self—the constant making and remaking of the eye, the mind, and the senses—is the artist’s and leader’s price of admission to the domain of creativity.

And as they look inward, they must also look outward to the world and its systems, structures, forms, and limits. The form or the genre, be it a sonnet or a multinational corporation, is the grounding bedrock for the creative impulse. The leader and the artist must be students of the world, the better to serve as vectors and catalysts for its future. The leader’s dialogue with a group is precisely this: an exploration of existing values and commitments and a simultaneous and mutual process of building possibilities for the future. Like the artist, the transformational leader is midwife to the “not yet,” bringing into concert the existing and the imagined, the mundane and the exciting, the old and the new.

Vision inward and wonder outward are, therefore, the sine qua non of transformation. Leaders and artists must be dedicated to this discipline: that knowledge of the world and self-knowledge are each critical and ultimately inseparable.

Miha Pogacnik is a concert violinist, entrepreneur, and cultural ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia. In the past twenty years, he has worked with the leadership of more than 100 world-brand companies, delving into the life force and inspiration of classical music masterpieces. Why? “Because they are archetypal, profoundly inspired higher productions of nature gone through the genius of the composer’s individuality” (personal communication, July 12, 2010). But where’s the connection to leadership? Pogacnik’s answer is as straight as an arrow and just as penetrating. “Is not your life or your organization a potential masterpiece? This lifelong, unfinished product, with which we are all more or less consciously engaged?” Pogacnik is absolutely convinced that music, consciously experienced and keenly observed, offers us an ideal learning field for the exploration of what he calls “the biographical masterpiece.” The musical masterpieces, he says, evoke emotions that he helps leaders recognize in their own lives, and, in the process, they have revelations about those moments of life when they have to puzzle their way through a maze of difficulties, perhaps seeing the truth of themselves in the mirror, or learning something new that may change them, or steeling their resolve to take charge and act with courage. In leading participants through this process, Pogacnik takes the journey with them, a journey that corresponds to Otto Scharmer’s (2007) Theory U of transformational change. Inspired by Scharmer’s work, Pogacnik, through music, assists leaders in going down the U into deeper and deeper understandings and then emerging on the other side with applications to their leadership context, cross-sector group cooperation, and the transformation not only of their organization, but of the wider world.

Resilience

One of the most important messages that music and leadership impart is their effect on the resilience of the human endeavor. Music has a special relationship to healing and restoration. In times of crisis or disaster, music can soothe the soul and restore the spirit. It can bring us back from the edge of chaos and energize us for future struggles, often making us stronger than we were in the beginning. Fresh energy courses through us, reconditioning and revalidating us. Music helps us recover.

Creative Leaps International is a nonprofit educational and consulting group known for its innovative use of the arts, most especially music, in leadership development and organizational renewal. Their work encourages creativity, vision, and imagination through experiential workshops and a uniquely designed Concert of Ideas. Two years after Hurricane Katrina, Creative Leaps, together with leadership experts from the George Washington University Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management and the University of Maryland James MacGregor Burns Center for Leadership, were called upon to help the members of the Southeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross (SELA). The Red Cross group had been decimated, with members losing their own homes and loved ones to the storm. They had pushed themselves beyond the breaking point working for others and neglecting themselves. How to rebuild their spirits? How to rekindle hope and possibility for getting back on track for the new hurricane season just a couple of months away?

Following painstaking research, interviews, and archetypal interventions by the experts from the two universities, the Creative Leaps team mounted a special Concert of Ideas, designed, in this instance, to honor heroic service, catalyze new thinking, and gently, but surely resurface the emotional trauma of SELA’s Katrina experience. The music mirrored the bravery of the SELA staff, substituting a self-image based on what they had accomplished for the trauma-induced frozen feelings and sense of powerlessness that had overwhelmed them. The music mirrored their heroism, as well as their sorrow, and loosened what was locked away. Tears flowed, glances raced from one to another, and smiles began to break out from tightly clasped lips. Within minutes, the room came alive and the journey with Creative Leaps International was begun. Workshops combining music with leadership lessons, habits of excellence, and deep sharing followed. Finally, on the last day, the SELA participants authored their own Harvest of Learnings, a performance event created and performed with just a bit of musical and theatrical assistance from their Creative Leaps colleagues. As they concluded their heartfelt performance, participants triumphantly exclaimed, “We’re back!”—and the room shook with their life force.

What had happened? The feeling of what these Red Cross workers had been through was again palpable to them, but no longer paralyzing. The numbness (the anesthetic) had retreated, and the life impulse (the aesthetic) had returned. They had completed the inner work of art and could, once again, dare to imagine.

Conclusion

Music and leadership are easy to compare metaphorically, but we think there is much more to the relationship. We see music and leadership engaging in the same endeavor—to move us to think, to feel, and to act in new ways, ways that express the best possibilities of the human spirit. In this way, both music and leadership are elements of the aesthetic tradition, that tradition concerned with the exploration of mind, body, and spirit in relation to art, beauty, and imagination—explorations felt and sensed as well as cognitively processed.

We would argue that even in the absence of musical performance, aspiring leaders who recognize and tap into the aesthetic dimension of their work likely will be more effective in reshaping human energy. The leader who recognizes and draws upon the “music within” will be the most effective in shaping the “energy without,” and that is the essence of effective and transformational leadership.