Redux: Role Players in Jazz and Business
The final weeks of August, for Jewel and me, are focused on time with family; exhaling from an intense few months of client engagements; and gearing up for some free events, in September and October, and a course that we’re launching in October with our colleague, Amiel Handelsman. Last Friday, we asked you to save a date—September 14—for a free event about the course. We’ll share much more in coming emails.
Here’s a blog post from late 2019 that demonstrates the depth and value we strive for no matter the project, forum, or platform. It’s one of the evergreen pieces intended to give a perspective on collaborative leadership for the 21st century to move us beyond the command-and-control model of yesteryear. The focus is on roles and becoming a player in jazz and business, but also applies to civic life and how we can be better citizens together—a theme that will be prominent in the free events and course alluded to above.
Intro: Role Players
We all play various roles in our lives, as actors play roles in movies and in plays for theater. As athletes called “role players”—not franchise stars but nonetheless important to team results—serve a special purpose on the field or court of play. As do musicians who play an instrument or sing in a certain register—soprano, alto, tenor, bass.
At home, those roles may be as a son or daughter, mom or dad, brother or sister. At work, we give titles for roles from assistant and associate to a supervisor, manager, and executive.
What follows is the challenge and promise of the role-player-to-leader dynamic.
The Leader-Role Player Dynamic
Trumpeter Etienne Charles with bassist Michael Olatuja
In jazz, the leader-role player dynamic is fluid. Of course, it’s the band leaders’ role to lay out the group’s vision and to enact a cultural vision. The so-called “sidemen” are, from an organizational chart view, in a secondary or support role. But we reject the term “sidemen” as inappropriate for 21st-century collaborative leadership, a context in which leadership is shared and distributed among the players in a high-performance group or ensemble.
Specific examples in recent posts include Wynton Marsalis distributing arranging and musical director concert duties among the players in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter discussing Miles Davis’s “equal partners” approach.
Now let’s generalize. Typically, a jazz ensemble group plays a song’s melody, with supporting rhythm and harmony performed by the drummer, bassist, and pianist, as the horn player, usually a saxophonist or trumpet player, states the melody. (If it’s a jazz trio, the keyboard or guitar player will perform the melody.) One or more players improvise on the song’s melody, harmony, rhythm, and mood. As the player improvises or solos, the other players support by playing their role, while the soloist is out front.
When you solo, you, in that moment, are leading. And the soloist passes off the lead to the next person, like runners in a relay race who pass the baton to their teammates, striving to win a race.
In jazz, though, winning the race comes from bringing pleasure, fulfillment and delight to yourself, your bandmates, and an audience of listeners. Each artist plays a role based on their instrument’s function, but the playing as a player in a collaborative ensemble is the key.
Becoming a PLAYER in Business
We’ve focused mainly on “role.” But the player dimension is where we start to groove uptempo. In jazz, one’s ability to play is fundamental, a prerequisite, with technical skill on your instrument, expressive range, and an ability to perform with sensitivity to mood and other band member’s styles.
But being a “player” in business isn’t as well known. Two authors with decades of experience as executive coaches use the term in a high-performance context: Howard Guttman and Fred Kofman.
In Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance, Guttman focuses on high-performance teams that function like excellent sports teams and jazz ensembles. Athletes and musicians are players; in great business teams, the team-members are players too. Rather than a top-down, command-and-control style, the examples of high-performance and teams Guttman discusses as clients are more horizontal.
Within high-performing organizations, power flows not so much up and down as across the organization, and it is distributed to players and teams that have been aligned.
—Howard Guttman
To regular readers of this blog, Guttman’s statement should sound familiar. In Guttman’s model, leaders are those who architect a team or organization’s vision and operationalize values and mission through culture. They change and uplevel their own mindsets and skillsets as members of the team, with players on the team who are expected to do the same. There is a high bar for interpersonal relationships, where candor, feedback and transparency are embraced as essential for victory.
These values are far from pie-in-the-sky; indeed, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates investment firm is grounded in such values and practices, as revealed in Dalio’s best-selling work, Principlesand his recent appearance on the podcast Masters of Scale, hosted by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
Guttman’s Levels of Accountability for High-Performance
Players on high-performance teams exercise almost radical accountability. Most organizations are familiar with the first two rungs of Guttman’s Accountability Ladder above. The very best include 3-5.
Holding one another to account at these levels is enacted through:
1. An agreed-upon commitment to the strategic direction
2. Operational goals, driven by the strategy, which guides daily decision-making
3. Clear roles and accountability
4. Ground rules (or protocols) to play by as a team
5. Open, frank business relationships and interdependencies
From Victim to Player
Fred Kofman, author of Conscious Business and The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership
In business, on the field or court of sports play, or on a jazz bandstand, players take responsibility to strive for excellence. A victim mentality points outward to external factors.
A victim pays attention exclusively to factors he cannot influence, seeing himself as passively suffering the consequences of external circumstances. The victim wants to avoid blame and claim innocence ... When things go wrong, the victim seeks to place blame on anybody or anything but himself. Consequently, since he is not part of the problem, he cannot be a part of the solution.
—Fred Kofman
Kofman equates the qualities of what he calls “transcendent leadership” with being a player rather than a victim. Players are aware that there’s much beyond her control, but she steps up anyway. The ability to respond—response-ability—rather than merely react is a stance of free will and empowerment.
It’s true: you’ve got to pay to play. As relayed above, accountability is the price of the ticket, and for collaborative leaders striving for high-performance, it’s a price well worth paying.
We’ll continue pursuing these themes in future posts because this nitty-gritty is where the rubber begins to meet the road to high-level collaborative leadership. This short video powerfully demonstrates Kofman’s framework. We urge you to check it out, player.