A Jazz Culture of Leadership

Over several months, we have emphasized the collaborative nature of jazz leadership. Yet leadership, jazz style begins with the individual artist honing his or her craft for co-creative engagement in musical performance and conversation with other artists. The privilege to improvise their identities in the moment, enacting delight for themselves and a receptive audience, is grounded in the responsibility of leading oneself.

Likewise, personal mastery is a responsibility we embrace to bring our best selves to situations, a key component of the practice called situational leadership in management literature. There’s no guarantee that others will also bring their best self, of course, but as leaders it’s an imperative to continually develop our skill set, mindset, heartset, and soulset as both an example to others and to level up the field or environment within which a team, group, or ensemble works and plays. If others do indeed bring their best to the table, stage, or situation, then the chance for the quality in jazz called swing is heightened.

Such heightened cultural and social interactions become what we call an ensemble mindset not just in music but life. In restaurateur Danny Meyer’s best-selling Setting the Table: The Transformative Power of Hospitality in Business, he writes that his “greatest joy comes not from going it alone, but from leading an ensemble. Hospitality is a team sport.”

Group Flow, Group Genius

Moreover, an ensemble mindset triggers group flow, a state of collective groove that can advance to what creativity scholar and jazz pianist Keith Sawyer calls group genius.

Sawyer’s PhD advisor was the famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term “flow” to describe a state of heightened awareness. Jewel’s recent essay “The Timelessness of Flow” focused on the impact of this state on our sense of time. Csikszentmihalyi found that people were more likely to get into flow with a combination of four factors: one, their skills meet the challenge of the task; two, goal clarity; three, consistent feedback on how close they are to achieving the goal; and four, freedom to fully concentrate on the task.

Whether as an individual or a group, flow is based on focus, on being skillfully immersed in the moment, without distractions, having a sense of challenge, with some risk of failure. When jazz ensembles syncopate, swing, and improvise, they challenge each other while cooperating to play and communicate, writing the score as they innovate in the moment. By so doing, they balance their individuality within a collective, realizing the democratic imperative of a unity within difference and diversity.

Helen Sung

This focused foundation for personal and group flow is enhanced by close, deep listening, which, as in jazz, is a common trait for best practices in leadership. Such listening, such “present awareness,” is one of ten conditions Sawyer lays out for “group flow.”

The Ten Conditions for Group Flow 

1.    A group goal, in a problem-solving or problem-finding mode. With the latter, problems are located and identified as they’re being solved. This occurs in jazz and improv theater ensembles, where diversity is key.

2.    Close Listening with an open attitude of full engagement in the moment.  

3.    Complete Concentration with a boundary between the group’s activity and everything else.   

4.    Being in Control: feeling autonomy, competence, and relatedness. 

5.    Blended Egos: each manages the “paradoxes of improvisation by balancing deep listening with creative contribution.” The Bill Charlap Trio is a prime example of a level of deep listening and creative contribution in which egos are blended for the sake of the ensemble.  

6.    Equal Participation: final performance and collective creation shared equally among the participants, which resonates with democracy as a social ideal. 

7.    Familiarity: sharing common language and understandings, an example of “culture” as shared agreements. 

8.    Communication: constant and spontaneous communication 

9.    Moving it Forward: building on the contributions of each other, to extend and elaborate growth and development

10.The Potential for Failure: “During rehearsal, jazz ensembles rarely experience flow; it seems to require an audience and the accompanying risk of real, meaningful failure.” A feeling of psychological safety is key to maintaining group flow amid failure. The Herbie Hancock-Miles Davis representative anecdote shared in our “Miles Davis: A Leader of Leaders” post is exemplary of this final condition.

As deep listening is one of the primary practices of our collaborative leadership model—we call it “Big Ears”—let’s take a closer look.

Listening and Leadership

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization: “Real leadership always starts with listening.” Best-selling leadership expert John C. Maxwell declares in Five Levels of Leadership: “Great leaders are first listeners, then they’re learners, and then they’re leaders.” None other than the greatest American composer of the 20th century, Duke Ellington, once declared: “I am the world’s greatest listener.”

Jay Abraham, Marketing Grandmaster

Business and marketing guru Jay Abraham, in The CEO Who Sees Around Corners, advocates what he calls whole brain listening for top leaders.

The importance of social intelligence and listening–for your organization and for your career–cannot be overstated. Listening is paying attention to and acting on what someone important to your organization says – a CEO, a customer, a prospect, or a stakeholder.

—Jay Abraham

Abraham’s characterization of whole-brain listening is similar to what Danny Meyer calls “listening with every sense.”

Abraham’s listening as both focused hearing (paying attention) and acting for stakeholders also comports with Meyer’s “virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality,” first mentioned in our “Capitalism vs Free Enterprise” post. “Enlightened Hospitality” is Meyer’s catchphrase for the way his team goes the extra mile beyond basic “service.” The “virtuous cycle” prioritizes hospitality in the following order: employees, guests, community, suppliers, then investors.

Getting “Jazzed” for Work

As the workers on the front-line of listening and acting on behalf of guests, employees are the very lifeblood of their hospitality business. Meyer’s team knows that “the only way we can consistently earn raves, win repeat business, and develop bonds of loyalty with our guests is first to ensure that our own team members feel jazzed about coming to work. Being jazzed is a combination of feeling motivated, enthusiastic, confident, proud, and at peace with the choice to work on our team.”

Let’s close this post with an example of music that displays, in sharp, swingin’ release, the qualities and flow we detail above. One of our favorite contemporary pianists and band leaders, Helen Sung, is accompanied by bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash on a marvelous trio number, (re)Conception. As you tune into their shared leadership, we’re confident you’ll feel the interdependent coordination and fluid collaboration through masterful skills, deep listening, and the shared values and meaning we call a jazz culture of leadership.