What self-organising teams can learn from chamber music

How working in small, self-organising teams creates challenges and opportunities like those experienced when performing chamber music…

Often, leadership involves creating and working in small, self-organising teams: for example, to generate ideas, make decisions or work to bring about change. This creates challenges and the opportunities paralleling those musicians experience in chamber music.

Chamber musicians play without a conductor and one-to-a-part. Chamber groups are usually self-organising. Each player is a voice in the music and has a voice in decisions about how the music will be played. That isn’t always an easy experience. David Waterman, the cellist of the Endellion Quartet, says that “the communal nature of decision-making is often more testing than the decisions themselves”.

Similarly, there are times in other work when how we take decisions is as much of a challenge as the substance of the issues. Listening is always important.

The ego-busting art of listening
In Together: the rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation, the sociologist and author Richard Sennett draws on his own experience as a professional musician to describe what happens when skilled individuals work together.

Young musical hotshots are often brought up short when they begin playing chamber music; nothing has prepared them to attend to others. (I was like that, aged ten.) Though they may know their own part perfectly, in rehearsal they have to learn the ego-busting art of listening, turning outward. It’s sometimes thought that the result moves to the opposite extreme, the musician blending in, submerging his or her ego in a larger whole. But sheer homogeneity is no recipe for making music together — or rather, a very dull recipe. Musical character appears instead through little dramas of deference and assertion; in chamber music, particularly, we need to hear individuals speaking in different voices which sometimes conflict, as in bowing or string colour. Weaving together these differences is like conducting a rich conversation.

People in organisations have the same challenge: how to combine their individual skills and expertise in a way that creates something greater than the sum of the parts, encouraging creativity and not imposing homogeneity.

When it works, chamber playing creates a special experience for players and listeners alike. Each player is a voice in a dialogue: sometimes leading, sometimes supporting, sometimes challenging or contrasting, sometimes commenting. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Can we learn something about leadership from how that special quality of experience emerges from the individual contributions in chamber music?

Teamwork can be creative, not just people mechanically “playing their parts”. Even for musicians who know each other well, playing a piece they’ve played dozens of times before, each time is a new co-creation. Like the script of a play, the notes on the page are not themselves the music; they are the bones of the music, fleshed out anew by each performance.

In other fields of work, similar tasks and projects come round again. Leaders can help those playing their parts to come to each performance afresh.

All teamwork needs communication and co-ordination among the team players. Good chamber-music playing takes this to a high level. Though musicians discuss the music and its interpretation as they prepare their performance, communication in the act of performing is mostly non-verbal. Studying string quartets, psychologists Vivienne Young and Andrew Colman observed that the players’ “mode of interaction involves a degree of intimacy and subtlety possibly not equaled by any other kind of group.”

This kind of non-verbal communication, the ability to respond almost instinctively to what others are doing, marks high-performing teams in other kinds of work. Leaders can look to develop this skill themselves, and in others.

Teamwork is enhanced when team members respect each other’s contributions and are open to others’ ideas and feedback. As the author and playwright Alan Bennett observed of chamber musicians, “it results in them doing a better job”.

“… it results in them doing a better job.”

Alan Bennett writes in his diary of the experience of working with a string quartet on incidental music for a film:

Striking about the musicians is their total absence of self-importance. They play a passage, listen to it back, then give each other notes, and run over sections again […] And the musicians nod and listen, try out a few bars here and there, then settle down and have another go. Now one could never do this with actors. No actor would tolerate a fellow performer who ventured to comment on what he or she was doing — comment of that sort coming solely from the director, and even then it has to be carefully packaged and seasoned with plenty of love and appreciation. Whereas these players, all of them first-class, seem happy to listen to the views of anyone if it results in them doing a better job.

Leaders can learn from chamber musicians how to create the conditions for good teamwork: teams that organise themselves well, reach good decisions, communicate and co-ordinate as they perform, are open to each other’s ideas on how to improve and, together, create something not possible by working alone.

Points for reflection:

• In the work you lead, what can people do as a team, that they cannot on their own?
• How are decisions taken in teams you work in or lead?
• When does the team’s work feel creative, when repetitive?
• How do members of the team communicate as they work together at their best?
• How might you enable, influence and support team members, including yourself, to bring the best out of each other?

(From Knowing the Score, by Praesta coaches Ken Thomson and Dr. Peter Shaw, originally published on Praesta.com)