Thursday
Oct222009
Thursday, October 22, 2009The hidden leadership lessons we can learn from music conductors
This very inspiring video raises many questions and analogies to our technical world of leadership:
I'd sure love to sit with Itay (the presenter) for a few tough questions.
things I learned from this video:
- Enabling a team to be self directing is the true essence of leadership
- letting people grow
- control without control
a lot of the things this blog talks about, though, are about the state of a team before it is even possible to achieve these things (the team is not read).
The state of software today, put in music orchestra terms is like having an orchestra with players who sometimes don't really want to be there, or don't really care about music, most of the time.
We are not true professionals, yet.
Reader Comments (1)
" The state of software today, put in music orchestra terms is like having an orchestra with players who sometimes don't really want to be there, or don't really care about music, most of the time.
We are not true professionals, yet."
Let me start the comment with asking a retorical question: how many times do you see a violinist giving hand signals to the conductor during a song performance?
I agree that there are quality and productivity impact, having people in the team, who don't really care about their software craftmanship. However, unlike orchestra, producing software most of the time requires collaboration, individual creativity, adapting to change and not just interpreting a given sheet.
Some member of the team who are not passionate with the technical side, may treat that role as a stepping stone towards a project management or other role that he/she is interested in. It's up to us as team leads to recognize this passion and harvest it. The picture that you painted on those 2 paragraphs is too black and white.