Lessons of leadership from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Our next article is about what businesses can learn from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and their self-managed, conductor-less leadership. Everyone plays an important role, leadership rotates, and there is a strong sense of accountability and transparency. Read more to learn about how they do it and how to adapt their lessons in the corporate workplace.
Holacracies, self-managed organizations have had a lot of hype around them, if and how they could work. It was unclear if they were a ‘disruption’ in organizational structure and design or a temporary fad only to be replaced with the age-old hierarchy soon after. The general consensus among the business world now is the latter – even Zappos, one of the highest-profile holacracies, had to add some management and hierarchy into the mix. However, one environment in which a self-managed approach has thrived is the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Though Orpheus is not a holacracy, it is a self-managed, elite orchestra without a conductor, which is very nontraditional. While the holacracy hype may have passed, the corporate sector can still adapt critical elements from Orpheus’s success with regards to organizational design and leadership –
· Creating transparency
· Rotating responsibilities and roles
· Understanding cultural fit
Creating transparency
Transparency is difficult to action - how transparent should an organization be, with whom (leaders, all employees, other stakeholders?), about what. Pay is an especially touchy topic, with some companies prohibiting conversations on pay, meanwhile countries like the UK require gender paygap reporting. Unlike traditional orchestras where certain instruments or certain ‘positions’ (e.g. ‘first chair’ or the section leader within an instrument) are paid more than the person in the back of that section, every full-time member of the orchestra earns the same for each concert and is part of the creative process and decision-making. It’s a clear signal to every member of the orchestra (‘employee’) about how much they are valued relative to their peers. This isn’t to say that everyone in a large organization should be paid equally, but that decision-makers should clearly be able to articulate pay differences between and across teams, departments, or functions. That transparency goes a long way in building trust and creating a supportive and collaborative environment.
Rotating responsibilities
Because there is no conductor, Orpheus rotates leadership roles, such as ‘conductor’ or section lead. The rotation of leadership roles creates a greater sense of respect from everyone, since everyone can relate to that level of responsibility and treat the role with humility, rather than authority. Additionally, rotation of roles provides everyone in the orchestra an opportunity to build and develop skills over time, rather than promoting someone to manager or team leader who has had no previous experience leading teams. Because everyone has held and will hold a leadership role, the orchestra has built an entire organization of leaders in the truest sense of the word. These leaders aren’t just leading from the front but can also lead from the back of their section or even from an outsider’s perspective. Similarly, by building leadership talent within an organization, firms would be grooming and preparing talent for leadership roles long before they have to fill such a position.
Understanding cultural fit
The phrase ‘cultural fit’ is the bane of every person working in diversity and inclusion. It’s often the excuse given to hire someone similar to the interviewer or the reason to reject someone they are not, without any concrete, clear basis. In fact, traditional orchestra selection processes are often seen as models for how to recruit – blind auditions listening to a musician where you can’t tell their gender, race, or ethnicity. In contrast, at Orpheus, candidates perform and travel with the ensemble before being selected. This process of gauging ‘fit’ works because it's fit-for-purpose – because the orchestra isn’t hierarchical and requires leadership from every single member, it’s important that the other members can see and evaluate more than just the candidate’s musical talent. The closest thing in a corporate process to this is the idea of a work sample – see how someone might complete a task or project as part of the interview process. By taking a moment to reflect on the hiring criteria and what success will look like in a role, interview process can be better designed for the final goal in mind, rather than adopting interview ‘trends’ such as game-based assessments or personality quizzes which might not be as relevant to the end role.
In summary, organizations need to first know themselves – what it is their goals are, how they want to achieve them, and then design a structure that can meet those goals. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra provides an example of an organization that chose to do things differently than others around them, while taking the time to design process guardrails within which they are immensely creative. In that way, they can be a model for organizations everywhere of how to think creatively about living their values while doing meaningful work, and the different ways we can reach them.
Photo by Alberto Bigoni on Unsplash
