An Omni-American Ensemble

Hold my Drink Podcast Blog, Episode 57

Excerpt taken, with permission, from the Free Black Thought Interview with Greg Thomas: Jazz, the Omni-American Ideal, and a Future Beyond Bigotry.

The Jazz Leadership Project is a for-profit business that uses the principles and practices of jazz music as a foundation for leadership and team development and training. We have done work with a variety of organizations, from Verizon, to JPMorgan Chase, to the Center for Policing Equity, to NYPD and TD Bank. First, we demonstrate how everything is built upon the foundation of individual excellence. If you play jazz, you must develop your chops, your sound, and your technical skills. You’ve got to have your skills down on your musical instrument, so, by analogy, or by extension, in the workplace you’ve got to really know what you’re doing; you have to have your skills down just to be able to interact with colleagues on projects. And that’s true not only in the workplace but also in civic life, in social and political life.

Shared leadership is a foundation for jazz. So, even if you have a band leader whose name is on the marquee, each person on his or her instrument has a responsibility to be the best they can be, to contribute to the whole. That’s the foundation for understanding how we should be working together and communicating together, where each individual…