The Leadership Ensemble

“There is a difference between a group of people who work together and a group of people who trust each other.”

“In strong cultures, people find safety in relationships. Strong relationships are the foundation of high-performing teams. And all high-performing teams start with trust.”

-Quotes from Simon Sinek’s “The Infinite Game”

The Music

“Music and mathematics are deeply interconnected,” my grandfather said softly into my right ear. I jostled uncomfortably on his lap, my impatience getting the better of me as I tried to position properly behind the tabla in front of us. The tabla are a pair of drums designed to be played at the same time with individual movement of both the left and right hands and their individual fingers. Tabla are designed to deliver the complex rhythms required in North Indian, or Hindustani, classical music. “Think about the teentala,” my grandfather continued, “it is a sixteen beat cycle, while the ektala is a twelve beat cycle. The tabla player can play three cycles of teentala, but the accompanying sitarist can overlay a melodic phrase of four ektala cycles on top and both instrumentalists will stop at the same place in exactly forty-eight beats.” My six-year old mind was blown. Insert exploding-head emoji here. Not because I understood the wonder, beauty and complexity of what such a musical conjoining of melody and rhythm meant. Far from it, I simply was a poor tabla student, who had very little patience to give the daily dedicated practice the instrument required.

Hindustani classical music finds its origins in the twelfth century and combines two important sub-disciplines of raga, the melodic component, and tala, the rhythmic pattern on which the raga resides. In business, I describe the purpose, the “why,” of an enterprise, or business, as the raga. The tala is the “how,” the integrity, the financial controllership, the compliance to the law and the tempo at which we play the game of business. The raga, roughly speaking, is a set of at least five different musical notes arranged in an ascending and descending pattern. Within that defined scale, intentional arrangements of phrases of those very notes are placed in a way that are uniquely identifiable to that particular raga. The raga, when played or sung, allows for an almost infinite number of improvisations within those patterns in a way that the various moods of the raga can be conveyed. The same raga can be melancholic, joyous, romantic, frantic or meditative, and sometimes evoke all those emotions at-once. Imagine The Giving Keys, a Los Angeles-based jewelry company as a raga, their stated purpose being “ending homelessness through employment.” Their jewelry products, made from keys, and inspirational words stamped on those keys, offer an almost infinite number of combinations to support their cause. The resulting jewelry improvisations are the vehicle through which they live their values to dream, create, and inspire, all while helping the homeless to find a way out of hardship. If the business is a raga, and the way we conduct business is a tala, the role of those of us who enable or lead the business is one of a performer. The raga, just like the game of business, is infinite, and only limited by the performer’s ability to convey it. 

The Performer

“Music is not just made by the notes I sing, it is also made by the silence or gap between the notes,” said Arati Ankalikar, a renowned Hindustani classical vocalist, to me after a scintillating performance in Cincinnati, Ohio. “As a performer, I use the power of the space between the notes to evoke the suspense and the anticipation of the forthcoming note, and that adds to the pleasure of the music you hear” she added. I had a different question for her in mind, though. While performing the majestic raga Bageshree, that evening, she was having a meditative moment. Her eyes were closed, as she sang a phrase, and her body slowly rocking to the tala being performed by the tabla player seated at her right. Her singing slipped for a split second, almost as if being beckoned by another raga, another melody, altogether and a word not belonging to the composition spilled out. This startled her, and her eyes flashed open, darting quickly to her right to look at the tabla player, who, having noticed the slip, was already smiling at her. Blushing the color of her vibrant red sari she mouthed that she was sorry, to the tabla player. He gently shifted his chin up, encouraging her to continue and get back on track. A fleeting moment, which in no way hampered the mesmerizing evening, but an uncharacteristic error for a maestro. I asked her what went through her mind at that moment. She graciously responded, “I am in service of nada, the all pervasive sound of the universe. Music is my prayer in search of the one true note, which is hiding somewhere in our universe. Today, in that moment, I got called by a note that was off my path. I err because I’m human. I realized my error, I asked for forgiveness from my fellow musicians, who granted it with grace, allowing us all to fulfill our duty to the raga.”

As a performer in business, in a corporate setting, I have made my fair share of errors. In my first real job, I had the opportunity to work with a wonderful team consisting of my colleagues Julie and Tracey and our boss, Andrew. As the rookie on the team, I made an egregious budgeting error in the first annual planning cycle I participated in, effectively causing our business to aspire to an unachievable profit target for the year. I discovered my error just before the first quarter closed for the year, and in my panic, sought Julie and Tracey’s advice before I went to Andrew, who I was sure would fire me. Both Julie and Tracey listened to me carefully. Tracey’s advice was clear, tell the truth, own the error, and go in with clear ideas on how we could potentially close the planning gap. Julie, a chain smoker, with a wicked sense of humor, quipped between puffs of her cigarette, “well, he’s going to fire you alright, but think of the upside, that’s an error you’ll never make again.” The reality was that no one would work harder to help the business fight to the profit target that year than Julie. Andrew treated me with grace when I explained my error to him. If he was upset, he never showed it, and we have not spoken about my error after that year. He encouraged me to learn from my error and asked for my leadership in driving the gap closure ideas we would all work through together. We kept our eye on the ball, and not my fumble. When the year ended, we celebrated with a lunch at a local Thai Restaurant, where we would return often to share war stories and to watch Andrew sweat through his shirt as he worked through the spiciest entrées on the menu. Beyond building a tremendous amount of professional trust and respect that we developed in each other as a high-performing team, because of this one error and their response to it, these three people remain my go-to advisors for my toughest professional challenges to-date.

The Ensemble

Leaving our two sons, one a toddler, the other a baby, with friends for the evening, my wife and I drove fifty miles west from our home to the Lied Center in Lawrence, Kansas. This evening, one of my most memorable dates, was to attend a concert being headlined by Ravi Shankar, the preeminent sitarist and renowned Hindustani classical music exponent. The maestro was eighty-five and cutting back his concert schedule to focus on his health. This was our last and only opportunity to see him perform live at a nearby venue. My excitement and anticipation for seeing Ravi Shankar in concert was palpable, leading my wife to comment that I should calm down because we were not going to meet the man in person. The maestro would perform in the second half of the show. Surprisingly, the most memorable part of the evening ended up being the first half led by his disciple and daughter, Anoushka Shankar, and the ensemble of musicians accompanying her. The ensemble’s pièce de résistance was Sandhya Raga. Ravi Shankar had composed Sandhya Raga for his live performance at the Kremlin in 1988, seventeen years before my wife and I would see the piece performed. The unique characteristic of the eleven and half minute recording of Sandhya Raga remains that the first half presents a fixed composition, and the second half allows for the individual ensemble instrumentalists to improvise. The sarod, a plucked string instrument, begins the improvised portion, and throws a musical phrase to the flute, the flute to the santoor, then the santoor to the guitar, each one exploring the same musical idea in a different way. The performers delivering each one of these individual instrumental sounds, overlaid on the same underlying tempo, are all famous individual students of Ravi Shankar. As a listener, you hear the comprehensive music, and never discern that behind these improvisations sit individual egos.

On stage, Anoushka Shankar sat with her sitar in the centre of the ensemble as the Chief Executive. She did not conduct the ensemble from in-front, she sat among them, she offered the countdown, and the ensemble came together in performance. The Lawrence Journal-World, in its review of the concert, described it best, “Sandhya Raga, was a particularly powerful part of the first half of the show, with individual solos highlighting the emotional undertones of each instrument – isolated moments of eloquence that were eventually woven seamlessly back into a rich, collective layer of sound. These instances underscored the strong feelings of respect and goodwill shared by the musicians, who closed their eyes and really listened to one another, enjoying each other’s performances while keeping rhythm with their hands. Anoushka also frequently smiled and called out softly to her fellow players, infusing moments with strong solidarity and positive energy.” After performing the fixed portion of the composition together, just as in the recording, for the improvised section each soloist in the ensemble developed a musical idea within the Sandhya Raga framework and pitched it to their peer musician. Their peers caught the idea and developed it further or responded to the musical phrase with their own interpretation. What I witnessed on stage that night was mesmerizing and exhilarating and has shaped my view of how business leadership teams should work.

Lessons

All ensembles have a principal player to begin with. In business, the Chief Executive offers the countdown or presses the “go” button. The Chief Financial Officer, our tabla player, offers the rhythm, the cadence, the measures, the pacing … the tempo often getting more frantic as a quarter-end or year-end deadlines loom. These are the constants in a Hindustani classical ensemble. Beyond that, the performance is a game of listening, ideating, trust, support and encouragement amongst the instrumentalists, our business leaders. To achieve a mellifluous music, we have to serve nada, the all-pervasive sound, that is bigger than all of us. The same is true in business, we serve a purpose that is bigger than any one of us leaders. In performance, when one instrumentalist in the ensemble is called on to improvise, they own the stage and the raga, they become the momentary Chief Executive. Take as an example, the Product Management Leader who takes ownership of the Business Strategy and shapes it from his world view. The Product Management Leader then has to cede his time as the Chief Executive to the Technology Leader, who owns the stage to discuss the technical feasibility behind the Business Strategy now in front of her. The ideas get better over time as the leadership team iterates, call and response is employed, what-if’s are developed further. If performers lead with their own play, rather than ideas, interrupt each other or play over each other, the result is cacophony, not music. When uncharacteristic and infrequent errors occur in performance, a response of encouragement, that little nod of a head or a silent mouthing of “carry on” from a peer on stage takes the play to a whole new level. Everyone strives to be collectively better by uplifting each other through careful, deep listening, thoughtful responses and mutual respect and trust. Quoting Simon Sinek from his book, The Infinite Game, “Infinite-minded leaders understand that ‘best’ is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be ‘better.’ ‘Better’ suggests a journey of constant improvement and makes us feel like we are being invited to contribute our talents and energies to make progress in that journey.” These talents and energies, when striving to be better together, make a profound and melodious music, and a powerful business.

Gratitude

I hated learning the tabla, yet my grandfather cultivated my passion for Hindustani classical music through the recordings he shared with me and performances he took me to. For this, I am forever indebted to him. Through listening to this complex music, and paying attention to the silence between the notes, I have become a better listener in my life. I am grateful to Arati Ankalikar for teaching me, in a single conversation, that silence is merely an anticipation of the note that will come next, and that there is music in silence. I am thankful to Andrew, Julie and Tracey for being my ensemble, being there to listen and encouraging me to recover from my errors. And finally, I am deeply grateful to all the practitioners of Hindustani classical music, for keeping this old art alive so that we may all be better from what we learn from it.

You can find Sandhya Raga, translated Twilight Raga in English, from Ravi Shankar’s album “Inside the Kremlin” on YouTube. Having revisited the piece multiple times in crafting this article, I am awed with the brilliance of the maestro’s compositions. I am thankful that he’s left a lineage of disciples who will undoubtedly perform this piece, and the other amazing ragas he crafted, in the future.