Lead Like an Orchestral Conductor
4 minute read
What if leadership looked less like control and more like conducting? That’s the question Pegram Harrison, Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Oxford Saïd Business School, explores as a contributor to The Arts of Leading: Perspectives from the Humanities and the Liberal Arts, edited by Edward Brooks and Michael Lamb.
In this interview, Harrison reflects on how music and physical movement can challenge traditional ideas of authority – and reveal leadership as something more embodied, collaborative and alive.
Read an adapted excerpt from The Arts of Leading.
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Why do future business leaders need this type of creative immersion?
Leaders in the business world – indeed, any leaders – have always needed creativity. But it’s often difficult to access – in oneself, in other people or elsewhere.
So, instead of really leading, people with responsibilities often end up managing: reducing complexity, maintaining efficiency, lubricating the machinery. That’s fine, until it isn’t – until something happens that you can’t manage, when a more creative, visionary, courageous response becomes necessary.
If leaders haven’t spent time developing their creative abilities and those of others around them, they and their organisations won’t be ready to step up when the time comes – to point the way out of a crisis or into an opportunity. Immersion in the arts emphasises the importance of this readiness and of responding to the world creatively and proactively instead of merely reacting to it.
In your lively leadership classes where you invite students to loosen their bodies with choral music and singers, you note “I want to start detaching the notion of leadership from the notion of control.” What do you mean by this?
Control is a part of leadership but not the whole of it. A musical conductor can’t control every player in an orchestra any more than a coach on the sidelines of a football game can control every player on the field.
The conductor and the coach need to enable and empower the expertise, so that control is not necessary. Leadership – especially in turbulent environments – is about enabling and empowering instead of controlling.
“Immersion in the arts emphasises the importance of responding to the world creatively and proactively instead of merely reacting to it.”
Why is it necessary to prepare your students to dissect something as mysterious as music? How does deep observation prepare the best leaders?
We limit ourselves if we assume leadership is a technique to imitate or a recipe to follow. Its technical aspects are necessary but not sufficient. You need more to lead truly well. The mystery is that everyone needs something different and personal.
Artists know this: they master technique, then find their own ‘style’ or ‘voice’ – that mysterious extra that elevates art from decoration. It’s the same with leadership.
Working with music makes this point well: most people don’t understand how it works, and it’s obvious when it doesn’t. If you can’t ‘do’ it, you need to empower others – which shows leadership as enabling, not controlling.
But how? Be yourself, earn trust, ask what people need, listen, deliver. Everyone does this differently. The lesson is: “Do what I do, until you figure out how to do what you do.”
If you see music as merely technical, you’re missing the music – AI could do your job. Artists aim for technical excellence to enable unique creation. The best leaders are like that too.
“Artists master technique, then find their own ‘style’ or ‘voice’ – that mysterious extra that elevates art from decoration. It’s the same with leadership.”
Pegram Harrison is a Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School. He is a contributor to The Arts of Leading: Perspectives from the Humanities and the Liberal Arts by Edward Brooks and Michael Lamb.
