The funky professors
Straitjacket. Earlier this year, Stanford attended a Music Paradigm workshop in New York for McGraw-Hill executives. The organization brings a full orchestra into a conference room and then invites the executives to sit next to the musicians as the conductor demonstrates various leadership styles. During the session, the conductor, Roger Nierenberg, former music director of the Stamford (Conn.) Symphony Orchestra and the Jacksonville (Fla.) Symphony Orchestra, exaggerated every beat and nuance in a passage of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Then he asked the musicians what they thought. A cello player, for example, said he felt as if he was wearing a straitjacket. Another musician said he felt the conductor didn't trust him. "That knocked me over," says Stanford, who hired the group to train 250 of his managers in Chicago. "That's what micromanagement is all about--not trusting people."
Morgan Stanley regularly uses the Grammy-winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to demonstrate leadership by committee. Instead of using a conductor, the ensemble assigns a small group of musicians to pick a musical approach for each new piece in its repertoire. Participants watch the musicians brainstorm, critique one another's ideas, share the final musical direction with the whole orchestra, and produce a polished piece. Initially, participants resist the idea of group leadership, says Don Callahan, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. But by the end of the sessions, he says, "they've realized they're going to get much better results if they make every person a leader."
One aspect of arts leadership makes it particularly effective for bright, sometimes impatient executives: The lessons aren't spoon-fed. "If people can get the point on their own instead of you lecturing them, then they own it," says Tracey Draper, an organization development specialist at Northrop Grumman, which has used Movers and Shakespeares about 40 times. "What people get out of that short eight-hour day would take a lot longer to learn in a traditional setting." A discussion of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, for example, quickly opened the eyes of Northrop Grumman's Gray to a critical gender divide. While talking about the play's heroine, Isabella, who is forced to choose between her chastity and her brother's life, "all of the women in the room saw Isabella as being taken advantage of," says Gray. "But some of the men, although certainly not all of them, thought perhaps Isabella was the one taking advantage and using her feminine wiles." Gray says she has since become more aware of multiple points of view regarding issues that may at first have seemed clear-cut.
While such insights can have a lasting effect, the value of teaching them can be difficult to quantify, says Pat Galagan, a vice president at the American Society for Training and Development in Alexandria, Va. With arts-based programs costing $20,000 to $100,000 per engagement, she says, "you risk looking frivolous if you can't make a good business case for this." Galagan advises firms to ask training organizations how their sessions helped other clients boost sales or save time.
Jacqueline Martini, senior manager of sales training at Lucent Technologies, ensured that Movers and Shakespeares would successfully link high drama to high tech by arranging extensive briefings for the group's principals. The training team explained the company's strategies and objectives, so Movers and Shakespeares could tailor its session to the specific needs of Lucent's sales force.
Often, companies help clarify those parallels by incorporating arts-based workshops into larger training events. WPP, which owns Ogilvy & Mather, Burson-Marsteller, and numerous other communications firms, has used Music Paradigm on the third day of a weeklong program for senior executives. "The rest of the lessons during the week were taught for the mind," says Samantha Lucas, managing director of Burson-Marsteller, who took the course last year. "But this was a lesson that was heard by the body as well."
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