What do music and leadership have in common?

Many MBA students and professional managers have experienced workshops involving music to develop leadership skills, drawing on similar inspirations and working in similar ways. In the main, these workshops assume that musical ensembles provide examples of highly expert, high-performance, dynamic human systems akin to professional teams in business, and that the leadership skills necessary to assemble, motivate and coordinate them are transferable. 

This process is neither mechanistic nor straightforward, though. Leadership is assumed to be something that – like creativity – can be learned if not taught, fostered if not commanded, so the format of these experiential workshops aims for a learning experience that is more emotive than cognitive. And though there is not much rigorous evidence about their effectiveness, there is research on the practice of arts-based leadership learning, as well as on the mechanics of leadership in orchestras.1 

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Outside the formal academy, anecdotal impressions about the effectiveness of such interventions are plentiful. In the US, for example, Boston-based conductor Benjamin Zander has run successful workshops with business leaders and managers for many years. In Europe, Danish conductor Peter Hanke has developed superb activities with small groups of executives, delving into many aspects of leadership and innovation, “transforming knowledge and experience from the performing arts into core leadership principles that can be understood and used across any industry”.

These instances use mainly classical music; others use the improvisatory nature of jazz, the rhythmic drive of drums, the physical immediacy of dance and so forth.2 All add nuance to the general idea that performance – in artistic as well as professional contexts – has some relationship to leadership, and that leadership effectiveness can be enhanced by involvement with musical performance, just as musical performance can be enhanced by leadership.