Directive Leadership

To deliver winning performances, we need ensembles.

A team could put on a play – in the sense that they could learn their lines and movements and deliver a competent version of the play. You’ve probably seen a few plays like that.

A high-performance team could do better. They would work better together, rehearse more diligently and perform with more energy to deliver a good version of the play. You’ve probably seen some plays like that, too: well-enough delivered but never quite seeming to come to life.

Only an ensemble can deliver a great version of the play. The performance mindset relies on the fundamental principle that any individual performance is in the service of the ensemble’s performance. I can’t be brilliant unless you are brilliant too. Your great performance feeds my performance; we play off each other to deliver a sparkling overall performance.

All great performers have big egos. In ensemble work, the energy of those individual egos is sublimated and the ensemble comes together as one, experiencing a sense of exhilaration and creative freedom.

Teams of individuals working together who fail to sublimate their egos in this way – and who work in an environment where they are able to succeed by scoring points off each other – can’t deliver a true performance.

In business, our individualistic, competitive cultures tend to inhibit the formation of genuine ensembles, preventing us from putting on our own inventive, sparkling, audience-delighting performances.

The whole point of ensembles is to become more than the sum of their parts.

The interaction between the ensemble members’ individual contributions creates something unique to that ensemble. Performers have ideas that would not have occurred to them in any other context. Something that one performer does sparks a reaction in another performer; the chemistry between them has its own distinctive hallmark.

In business, this effect has been identified as ‘group synergy’ or ‘group intelligence’, in which specific groups of people that are working well together begin to generate entirely new ideas and solutions.

For teams to develop group intelligence and begin to become ensembles, they need a clear and challenging direction that aligns with the organization’s purpose, so that achieving the goal will be rewarding in itself. The team also needs a high level of autonomy over how they address the task, and good, accurate and reliable feedback.

Genuine ensembles have complete autonomy to develop creative solutions, addressing the challenges posed by a creative director who also guides and shapes the rehearsal process, teasing out the best possible performance from the ensemble.

To begin to function as an ensemble, performers need to be ‘attuned’; they need to have a good connection.

This demands equality before the task – no members of the group can be in control of any others – and it demands an attentive focus on what other ensemble members are saying and doing. Performers can’t become connected when they are self-absorbed or showing off.

A good connection also demands complete trust within the context of the ensemble. Working together as an ensemble, sharing creatively challenging and emotional experiences, generates this trust of itself. When an ensemble is really ‘on song’ – in a state of ‘flow’– trust becomes automatic. Performers feel a sense of transcendence and unity.

Simple exercises and routines help to generate the trust needed to enable ensemble work. In a business context – which is less emotionally intense or demanding than artistic performance – encouraging team members to ‘do stuff’ outside their usual work environment helps bring people together and creates the trusting, collaborative environment from which genuine ensembles can emerge.

Within the ensemble, leadership is shared, allowed and passed around. Leadership ‘pops up’ rather than being imposed.

Because no one must be ‘in control’ of an ensemble, ensembles need a different kind of ‘outside’ leadership – the kind of directive leadership offered by creative directors.

Creative directors are ‘in charge but not in control’. They offer constraints and challenges but cannot predict what the ensemble will do with these.

They will recognize successful solutions as they emerge – and they will guide the ensemble down that promising path – but they don’t know at the outset exactly what the final performance will be like (though they might know how it will ‘feel’).