Directive Leadership
Ensembles don’t have leaders, in the normal sense.
Ensembles don’t have leaders, in the normal sense.
There may be someone who is the titular ‘leader’. If a jazz band is called The Miles Davis Quintet, you get a sense of who is the driving force. It’s clear who defines the musical direction of the band (and is the biggest box-office draw). But when the Miles Davis Quintet performed, it performed as an ensemble.
In ensembles, leadership is passed around. Even if Miles Davis is your trumpet player, in performance everyone works together and leadership is passed around from member to member.
In dance, leadership is actively ‘allowed’ – otherwise one partner is being pushed or pulled around.
In theatre, actors can be said to ‘lead’ various scenes: their character is at the heart of the scene, and the other characters’ role is to deliver the support they need, while keeping the audience’s attention fixed on the main character.
You wouldn’t want a supporting character doing cartwheels in the background while the heroine delivers her big speech but, later in the same play, the supporting character may indeed be doing cartwheels, getting the laughs and applause and ‘taking centre stage’.
It’s an ensemble performance.
These aspects of leadership within ensembles are ‘shared, allowed and passed around’. They are interactions between equals whose prominence at any part of the performance is dictated entirely by the needs of the piece.
Leadership from outside an ensemble comes in the form of a ‘creative director’ of some kind: a theatre director, a conductor, a choreographer or a music producer. These ‘directive leaders’ make key decisions on form and structure before the ensemble starts working within those constraints. They decide on the shape and form of the piece and perhaps on its setting. They ‘set the stage’. As the ensemble begins to rehearse, looking for the best way to deliver their performance within these creative constraints, the director may step in to select a particular direction as the most promising – or the most challenging or provocative.
This ‘directive’ leadership is the model for all forms of ensemble leadership. Ensembles can’t be managed; it takes away their creative freedom.
Directive leadership can be described as being ‘in charge but not in control’.
Piers Ibbotson began his career as a geologist in the oil industry, but moved into theatre in the 1980s as an actor, working with the UK’s Royal National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 1990s, he became an Associate Director with the Royal Shakespeare Company and began to work closely with some of their corporate sponsors. He went on to set up his own consultancy, introducing business leaders to concepts and techniques used in theatrical performance in connection with leadership, communication and creativity.
Ibbotson is now Principle Teaching Fellow at the UK’s Warwick Business School and a leading figure in the movement to make the insights and skills of performing artists available to the business world.
In his book, The Illusion of Leadership: Directing Creativity in Business and the Arts, Ibbotson writes about his realization that the best theatre directors don’t try to set out in detail how actors should perform. Instead, he said, they set up the action and then “select from the stream of invention […] pouring from the group.”
“When we are working in groups,” writes Ibbotson, “someone needs to be in charge. But they need to be in charge with an understanding that they are not therefore also in control. Power in all social animals is mobile. It is handed around the troupe depending on what is to be done.”27
Ibbotson talks about his transition from being an actor, under the guidance of a director, to becoming a theatre director himself:
I made a surprising discovery when I became a theatre director. Prior to my first attempts to direct, I had been an actor. I had been led by others. In the process of being directed, I had always assumed that I was, at some level, being manipulated or coerced into doing what the director wanted. Only later in my career did I discover an interesting secret: the best directors did not know in detail what was going to happen in the play until they saw me do it. They didn’t tell me what I should do because they didn’t know. This ability to carry on being in charge and maintaining the trust of the company, when you do not and cannot know in detail how things will turn out, seems to me to be at the heart of creative leadership in business
and the arts.
I believe that many people outside the arts misunderstand the creative process and the behaviours necessary to encourage creative teamwork. If the right culture were in place, innovation would not be an issue; the function of managers would be like the function of a director of a good ensemble: merely to select from the stream of invention and suggestion pouring from the group as they engage
with the tasks they have in hand.28
Piers Ibbotson, The Illusion of Leadership
Within an ensemble, everyone is equal before the task.
Ensembles need direction and guidance, but as we’ve said, they cannot be ‘managed’. The very concept of ‘management’ assumes that the manager knows the outcome that the team has been assembled to deliver and instructs and enables the team to achieve that outcome.
The whole point of an ensemble, in stark contrast, is to surprise us; to collaboratively find a creative solution to the challenge they have been given that no one was aware of before the ensemble set to work. And it is the nature of ensembles that the solution they collaboratively find will be unique to that ensemble. No other group of people would (could) come up with exactly the same solution, because the solution depends on the unique interplay of the ensembles’ members at that point in time.
As a result, ensembles need a unique kind of leader – a creative director.
The creative director is part of the process of creating and delivering a performance, but not part of the performance itself. They set challenges and guide the ensemble through the creative process, but they are not ‘in charge’. Their choices and their guidance will have a radical effect on the success of the performance, but it is the ensemble, not the creative director, who will find the solutions to the challenges.
The presence of a star in an ensemble certainly has an effect on the group. It is likely to galvanize the rest of the cast into ‘raising their game’, but this is not the same as ‘taking charge’.
A ‘star’ who tries to take charge will soon find themselves having a quiet word with the director (and probably with the rest of the cast).
Star performers don’t do that. They join the ensemble on an equal footing and inspire it with their presence and technique.
The actor Hugh Bonneville talks about working with Dame Maggie Smith on the set of the long-running TV drama series Downton Abbey:
I can remember the very first scene I did with her and I was absolutely terrified, and I think I can remember the last scene with her
and I was absolutely terrified.
She is the most astonishing actress. Her wit is legendary, as you
say, and she doesn’t suffer fools.
And you raise your game, you have to. It’s great acting opposite her because she’s got extremely high standards for herself and expects
them of others.29
Hugh Bonneville, interviewed on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs
In business, it may be impossible for some senior leaders to become part of any ensemble – they simply bring too much implied status with them. Other members of the ensemble will find it difficult or impossible not to leap on any suggestion made by the senior figure as being the best, most marvellous suggestion. With this dynamic, what is created by the ensemble is no longer a unique product of a unique collaboration; it is being led by one person, albeit unintentionally.
Such senior leaders probably need to back out of the ensemble. They will almost certainly want to contribute to the group’s ‘creative constraints’ and they may well want to give the ensemble a different, less ‘awe-inspiring’ directive leader. But they probably need to recognize that they can’t actually be part of that particular ensemble – they belong to the ensemble of the organization’s senior leaders.
Sadly, many far less senior managers actively prevent the formation of ensembles because they think that their role is always to be ‘in control’.
There are scenarios in life and in business where someone does need to be in control. Conflicts, emergencies and other dangerous situations are an obvious example.
There are many more scenarios where directive leadership – the leader as creative director – is a far better model: setting the team a well-chosen challenge and encouraging them to use their creativity to the full in the search for a collaborative solution.
In these situations, it is essential that the ensemble be left alone to work their magic – under the non-controlling but watchful gaze of the director.
Notes
- 27Piers Ibbotson, The Illusion of Leadership (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p 16.
- 28Ibid. p 2.
- 29‘Hugh Bonneville’, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 4 March 2016.
Reprise · Chapter VII
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’).
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