Jazz and Leadership
I’ve been playing jazz longer than I’ve been in the workplace. From early on, using jazz analogies to describe effective, heart-centered leadership and teamwork made sense to me. As both my understanding of leadership and my responsibilities increased, so did the richness of this analogy. More and more often, my work required me to lead adaptive change - the kind of change made in response to a problem or challenge that has no known solution. Jazz, with its centering of improvisation and group cohesion, gives us a deep well of meaning to explore in relation to adaptive leadership.
But, like the famous Miles Davis tune says, “So What?” Why use jazz as an analogy for leadership and teamwork? Why use analogies at all?
Analogies help us relate to big, complex phenomena. By relating different topics to one another, we gain access to new words, images, and feelings. We can use these to communicate things that may be hard to put into words.
Analogies help us envision and feel our way into new ways of knowing, relating, and behaving. Comparing leadership to jazz will lead to different behaviors than would comparing leadership to, say, machine maintenance.
In coming posts, I’ll be sharing my article series, “Playing the Changes.” I invite you to follow any sparks it might generate and improvise in ways that are meaningful to you.
(Photo: At the piano when I first started playing (left) and at the piano in 2023 (right))
Listening: “So What” by Miles Davis
