Eighteen years ago I tripped upon something profound when I was speaking at a leadership conference in my Great Place to Work Institute days, before founding Leadership Landing. One of the sessions at the conference was led by Roger Nierenberg and the Music Paradigm. At this point in my professional life, I’d already begun imagining how I might cross the streams of music and leadership that were so much a part of my own experience. I had studied music and conducting in college and graduate school, and leadership had become a passion during that time.
Eighteen years later, sixteen of which has been dedicated to building Leadership Landing, I found myself living in Telluride, Colorado with the very part-time but wildly rewarding gig as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Telluride Choral Society. It was in this role that my own great crossing of the streams began to materialize, and this past spring I was able to run a pilot of Leading Performance in Telluride for local leaders and invited guests from afar. Leading Performance is now a live, immersive and experiential workshop I offer to others, that leverages the relationship between the choir and their conductor as a metaphor for what it means to lead teams at work.
The vision and potential of Leading Performance was made even more clear in Boulder, CO a few months following the Telluride workshop. In partnership with Ars Nova Singers, the best choir in the region, I took the top 25 leaders from TRUEWERK, the Denver based high-performance workwear company, through an immersive evening of leadership lessons, articulated through live demonstration: the interaction between the conductor (as leader) and the choir (as team). Workshop participants were interspersed among the singers for the whole evening. With in-depth discussion amongst all present, we illustrated live the importance of such principles as Self-Awareness, Setting the Vision, Honest 2-way Communication and Cultivating Collaboration.
Here are a couple of video clips from the workshop:
And here’s what attendees said about their experience:
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- Emotional and powerful. I didn’t expect it to have such a profound impact on me.
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- My best experience ever with an outside consulting/coaching/leadership group. I expected it would be quite a creative experience, and it exceeded my expectations.
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- Unexpectedly profound – it was engaging and interesting to see the inner workings of a choir rehearsal with elite performers, and the ties to business leadership were both relevant and enjoyable. And to receive what was effectively a private concert made it feel even more special.
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- Loved watching strategies in action, hard to think about what would be another equally effective way to see leadership modeled live in such a short amount of time. As someone who unofficially manages a couple of full-time employees and a large team of contractors, I found a lot directly relatable to my day job. Really effective to see the splintering/clique dynamic that happened when we all turned away from the conductor, watching the giving and receiving of feedback, and observing how cluing into the mission of the piece (thinking about the text) lead to a much more moving performance.
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- Extremely relatable and very actionable. I have found myself thinking to myself “how do I help them sing” and it’s a great mantra.
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- The examples/exercise provided the opportunity to watch and experience how the various parts of leadership can impact, direct, change, increase speed, trust and direction of the group.
I’m grateful to now be able to offer this deeply immersive learning experience that resonates with two of my great lifelong loves – leadership and choral music; and I’m grateful to Roger Nierenberg for showing me the way. My deepest satisfaction comes from knowing that we are offering a depth of learning that few other training environments can achieve. Be on the lookout for future news about Leading Performance! And if you are interested in offering this powerful experience in your organization – drop us a line.