{"id":199,"date":"2008-12-01T10:06:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T10:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/i-hear-a-symphony\/"},"modified":"2015-04-09T02:32:41","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T02:32:41","slug":"i-hear-a-symphony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/i-hear-a-symphony\/","title":{"rendered":"I Hear a Symphony!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/Sunset.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;\" src=\"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/Sunset-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274767545109793282\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/>So many times I&#8217;ve heard (often in my own mind!) the analogy of a fantastic leader as a symphony conductor.  I thought of this last week while I was at the ballet, where there were two groups of performers: the orchestra and the dancers.  It seemed to me that the job of anyone leading or directing a group endeavor would create the greatest synergistic achievement by coaching and inspiring the greatest performance from each participant.<br \/>Then I read a passage in the book <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Success Built to Last<\/span>, by Stewart Emery &amp; Jerry Porras, that tells a story about this very thing.  Porras, Emery, and their co-author Mark Thompson interviewed Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Bostom Philharmonic.  Zander saw a study done at Harvard that showed that <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">orchestra player<\/span> came in just below <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">prison guard<\/span> in job satisfaction.   Turns out, most orchestra conductors are &#8220;the worst examples of dictatorship&#8221;&#8230;sounds like a lousy leadership example to me.<br \/> Zander had an epiphany&#8230;&#8221;the conductor is the only musician who doesn&#8217;t make a sound&#8230;the meaning of &#8216;symphonia&#8217; is &#8216;voices sounding together&#8217;.  So the job of the conductor is to make sure that every voice is heard.  Not only heard but beautifully expressed.  Music is about getting people to be fully expressed&#8211;passionately engaged, giving their all&#8211;and still enabling everybody else to be heard, too.&#8221;<br \/>Now THAT sounds like a nice definition of effective leadership.<\/p>\n<div id=\"themify_builder_content-199\" data-postid=\"199\" class=\"themify_builder_content themify_builder_content-199 themify_builder themify_builder_front\">\n\t<\/div>\n<!-- \/themify_builder_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So many times I&#8217;ve heard (often in my own mind!) the analogy of a fantastic leader as a symphony conductor. I thought of this last week while I was at the ballet, where there were two groups of performers: the orchestra and the dancers. It seemed to me that the job of anyone leading or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-symphony-conductor","has-post-title","no-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abundancecoaching.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}