Everywhere I turn, business is full of talk about collective or shared leadership, the creativity and productivity it can yield, the way it rises to the challenges of unfamiliar and unpredictable situations. This connects with a growing interest in what can be learned from musicians, actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, and artists in general about how they work together. How is it that the members of a string quartet can coordinate seamlessly and start a piece together without saying a word, without even looking at each other? How do jazz musicians launch effortlessly into performing together without previously having met? How is it that actors allow themselves the vulnerability of failure, over and again as they experiment in rehearsal, trusting this is an essential part of the journey to great performance?
These are the kinds of questions we explore, for example in “The Art of Development”, a distinctive new learning and development programme offered by the Guildhall School in collaboration with the Barbican Centre.
There’s a certain mystique in the processes of the performing arts. Opening a window onto them can be great fun, and undoubtedly those in business who are interested can learn a lot from being exposed to them. But at the heart of this kind of work, there’s a fundamental principle that is perhaps even more important to grapple with: that to build a believable artwork of quality, those collaborating in its making rely both on individual skill and on authenticity shared between them in a process of reciprocal exchange. Seen from this perspective, leadership clearly emerges from a complex and fluid balance between playfulness, creativity and innovation; openness and receptivity to others; individual offers and collective identity; personal ownership and shared responsibility for action.
I think that it is essential for us to open up this principle in our increasingly complex and confusing world - and it goes way beyond experiencing some “tricks of the trade”. It’s time to move beyond one-way traffic: old models of artists providing services in the form of bite-sized training packages on communication skills, or corporates providing business mentoring for artists. These have their value, but there is a more compelling agenda to pursue.
It’s time to collaborate across the arts and business to develop authentic and responsible leadership. This is the moment to identify shared questions and interests around the principles of authenticity and responsibility, how we create the conditions for these to flourish in individuals and organisations or ensembles, how we enable leaders to acquire the skills they need, and how authenticity and responsibility at different levels may influence outcomes: artistic, cultural and bottom line. Such initiatives in essence are a form of creative entrepreneurship, one that can contribute positively to evolving paradigms of leadership and management, and one that will dig deep into the connections between the arts and our daily human interactions, igniting a different confidence in artists and their places in society. In fact this could be an important way to see just how close arts and business might come.
By Professor Helena Gaunt, Vice Principal and Director of Academic Affairs at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
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