127: Roger Nierenberg on Leading by Listening

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. So what can we learn as leaders of business from the conductor of a symphony orchestra? There's a really interesting opportunity to enhance and develop our leadership by learning to lead with deeper listening skills. The conductor listens for something and elicits a whole other level of performance from his team. And that's what this show is all about. We'll be talking with a symphony conductor about his experience of taking business leaders through the experience of being in a symphony and being led by the conductor in different ways and what they can learn about themselves and their own blind spots. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling at Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is an unusual guest, a man with a musical background, a symphony conductor who has a surprising message for business leadership. His book is Maestro Leading by Listening. I want to welcome Roger Nirenberg to the show. Welcome, Roger.

Hi, Bill. How are you?

I'm good. Where are you today?

New York City.

Oh, New York. And I'm in Los Angeles, so we're on the two coasts. I normally live in San Francisco, but I'm down here because the air is so bad in San Francisco. So we came down to spend a week down in Los Angeles. So I'm glad to get you on the show. Your book topic was interesting to me. Maestro Leading by Listening, as is your background. A little atypical of some of the things we talk about. So talk to us about how your career gets started. You said you were a symphony conductor. Tell us a little bit about the arc of that career.

Yeah, well, my whole career I was a. I was an orchestra conductor. That was what I did. I was music director for two orchestras and I guess conducted in many places around the country and eventually around the world. And I thought that was all I was ever going to do. But in the 1990s, the mid-1990s, while I was kind of scratching my head about. About how can you build or can you build.

Hang on one second. You know, it just occurs to me, I know you're going tell that story in just one second, but what does the conductor do? I know that on one level, like, a little kid thinks he just stands there and waves the baton. But talk to us about what does that actually mean?

Well, the little kid is right, that you stand there and you wave the baton. But the thing is, what does the baton mean? So basically, what you do is you're charged with making the whole thing, the whole musical piece with all these different parts, making it coherent, finding the message behind it, so that all those musicians can buy into that message and can take it on as their own. In the same way that a director who's, let's say, directing Hamlet, which could go many different ways, he has an interpretation, and then all the lines that are spoken are some way informed by that interpretation. So your job mostly is to have a success picture for what the piece of music could mean and how it could relate to people, and to work with the people, your musicians, in order to get them to realize that vision. And all that is translated by these simple movements of the baton, which means that you have to be able to take big messages and simplify them to such a degree that. That you're able to convey them with the simplest kinds of means.

I think as you go through the rest of it, we'll continue to hear the parallels to running a business. Right. To orchestrating the cohesive work of a team. So to go back to your story in the 90s before I interrupted you.

Yeah. So I wanted to challenge myself to see if there's a way that I could get the people in our population who were curious and intelligent, but for whom my kind of music, classical music, didn't really play much of a role in their lives. And they felt that it would be perfectly fine to live their lives without really being exposed to it. My challenge was, was there a way that I could give them a kind of experience that would open up their hearts to what this music can mean? That was what I wanted to challenge myself with. And I thought about it for years, and finally, I invented this kind of learning experience in which I kind of stitched together many aspects from my entire career. And then when I launched it, I discovered the reaction was way bigger than I had anticipated. And especially business audiences, I was getting feedback like, this is the best leadership Training we've ever had in our lives or the kind of thing. In two hours, I learned more from you than I did in the last 20 years. Those kinds of things, they happened a lot. So I began to think that there was something really important here. And I started getting asked by business organizations to present this at their meetings. And then that was when I began to realize the opportunity that there was. So I just followed the opportunity. And now, even though I consider myself a conductor, this makes up the largest part of the way I spend my time.

So what's the experience like? What are you actually doing with people?

Well, it's part of a meeting and a business meeting, and there are lots of other things on the agenda generally. But at a certain point, they come into a room. Often the participants don't know what's going to be in that room, but what they discover is it's set up like a symphony orchestra, except they're sitting inside the symphony orchestra next to the musicians, which is a strange place to find to. To be, you know, discover yourself. And then the musicians come in and I get introduced. And then we play a little music. We don't say a single word, and then we play some music. And then I introduce them to. To. To the orchestra and ask them to conceive of the orchestra as a kind of a metaphor for a successful professional organization.

But they're literally sitting next to the members of the orchestra facing you. You're facing the orchestra, right?

Exactly. So you might be sitting next to the bassoonist or you might be sitting next to a cellist. They're all sprinkled around. And then I begin to. And what's important to know is that I just met the orchestra like an hour and a half before, then spent an hour practicing the music. But the orchestra doesn't know what I'm going to ask them to do. So very spontaneous. And then I began to ask the orchestra to. To do some role playing exercises. What if this was your mindset? What if this was our culture? What if we behave this way and they begin to hear the relationship between behavior and results? And, you know, that's very difficult to do in real life, but because it's music and it connects behavior to results so quickly, it's easy to see. But it turns out that the behaviors I'm choosing are ones that I know from having consulted with the organization. These are the ones that the whole meeting is about. These deal with the success picture for the organization and also with the challenges and impediments, what stands in their way. And the orchestra is role playing these various behaviors, so they are getting a very. A very vivid and emotional kind of picture of what kind of organization they could become and also of what the behaviors are that. That are the pitfalls and they want to avoid. And. And everybody realizes, without being told anything, that these things are alive in their organization. So the orchestra ends up being kind of like a mirror, a metaphorical mirror that's being held up to the. To the organization in which they can see themselves both as they don't want to be, as they are and as they could be. And as such, that's a kind of magical and powerful experience to have.

And it's fully experiential. Right. It's a. We're just. We're. We're seeing it, we're living it. We're not talking about it like we are in the show.

Well, we're reflecting on it. For example, if I model a particular kind of leadership behavior, I will likely hand the microphone to one of the musicians and say, what's it like to work with a leader like that? What was that experience like? So the musicians talk a lot about what just happened and what it meant. The participants, sometimes they speak a little bit, and then afterwards, of course, we talk about it. But you're right that it's mostly experiential.

Mm.

And it's. It's. It's great music. So it's vivid, it's powerful, it's. It's beautiful, it's stunning, it's impressive. You know, and because a lot of people aren't musicians, they don't really know how to experience music. But I make that. I make it very easy for them. I show them things that are easy for them to understand and easy to grasp. And even the people who walk in with the most cynical attitude, after a little while, they're just completely disarmed because it's so fascinating and it's so clear that it's unscripted. And then a lot of times it's very funny. So it's very appealing.

Yeah, I got it. I hear. So what are the kinds of things? Well, so talk to us about what are the lessons from this? Maybe share some of the work that you've done with others. Let's take it into the application then.

Yeah. Well, I'll give you an example of a client of mine that was nuclear power plant, and they. They had done a lot of improvement, and they had, you know, everything in the nuclear industry is. Is rated and measured and benchmarked and all that. And they were. They were improving a lot on. On, you know, elimination of error and on, you know, getting things to function in the right way. But there were certain things that they were. The score was not particularly high, and that was on the employee engagement scale. And it was because they had this pattern of the senior leaders just making sure that all the junior managers were always coached on what they did. And they would be told what to do and how to do it and when to do it, and then be. They'd be evaluated on it. And that made. What it eventually developed was a kind of very passive attitude and people withholding information, even valuable information that they had because they weren't called upon to do it. So that was a way in which this. This plant wanted to change its culture. And that was what the music paradigm was about. It was about how the conductor, by being extremely. What would I say? Just very engaged and always feeling like if he participated in something, that would automatically add value. And then the musicians would talk about how difficult it was working with a conductor like that, how squashed they felt, how they didn't feel like they could use their full artistry. And it wasn't just the musicians saying it, but they could hear it. Because I would do demonstrations, kind of like, take on this mindset. Let's say that you. You just want to make sure that nobody sees you making any kind of mistake. And. And you don't want to. You just don't want to do anything that jeopardizes your job. And they hear the orchestra play that way. And then I say, what would it be like if you took whatever risk was necessary in order to make this music come alive? And then they hear the orchestra open up, and it's the very same music that they just heard a couple of seconds before, but it's so alive, and everybody is stunned by it, that the same notes could sound so different. And it begins to paint the picture of, is there a way that we could preserve accuracy, but at the same time liberate this kind of energy and participation? So it conveys the message that they wanted to get across in a much more direct way than if you were to explain the message. And the other thing about the music paradigm is that I never say what anything means. We just do demonstrations. And the participants are left to figure out whether there's any application, but they all discover it. And because whatever it is that you've discovered, you take much greater ownership than if somebody tells you.

You know, so I love music, but I'm not well trained in music. And I definitely. When you say that, I can think of moments when live performances had all sorts of technical flaws to them. Things would go off, but there was an aliveness and a richness to them that wasn't present or is missing in a, you know, an endlessly produced recording where all of the thing is there, but there's nothing. There's nothing dynamic about. Could feel a little flat sometimes.

Yeah, well, there's this, this. This element of spontaneity, even, Even in symphonic music, where the music is. Is all written down, the notes are going to be the same, but the energy and the communication of the performance is going to be very different. Now, of course, we in the symphony world, we don't really welcome errors, we're not afraid of errors, but we're careful to be accurate. But even within that context, there's the release of imagination and creativity and especially collaboration, the joy of collaboration. But with the nuclear power plant, I showed how. How a leader can kill collaboration and do it in the interest of. Of adding value. You think you're adding value, but actually what you're doing is you're killing people's initiative. And that's very audible. As a matter of fact, you can't argue with it because you were sitting there and you saw it happen.

You know, I'm immediately reminded of another experience. I very, very briefly served in the military as a young man. And when you join most any branch of the military, any place in the world, one of the things that they first do is teach you to march. So you come in often at night, they shave your head, they take away all your clothes, they put you in a big room with other people, they. They alter you a bit, and then they make you march, which, unless you have some, like, band practice or something like that, you don't have any particular background. So everybody kind of marches. And you find yourself roughly in a line moving in the same direction and all of that. And on the surface, you're all doing what you're supposed to do, and yet there's nothing magical about it. But there is a moment when a unit comes together and people do something like that, when all the heel strikes fall together and you have a. An auditory and physical sense that you are now part of something bigger than yourself, where you're working together. And the difference between a little bit off and together is real and vivid in that moment. I remember that one of the most valuable things of that whole time in the military, much of which kind of sucked, but that moment of like, oh, this is powerful, and it's like in your body sensation. I would imagine that the music. And when the symphony is off versus when the symphony comes together and when everyone is just doing their thing versus everyone is really bringing some passion, aliveness that you could feel in the same way.

That's right. It's beautifully said, what you just said. And that, of course, that marching is a musical thing. And with the demonstrations that I do, it's not just a question of things being one wrong and then being right. I can do a demonstration, for example, in which everything is right, but the life is drained from it because it's done out of obedience rather than inspiration. And you can also have. You can have the orchestra model belligerent obedience in which they're following the directions, but they hate it so much that they're showing how empty the directions are by the way that they play. And that's audible, too. But there are hundreds of demonstrations that I've evolved after customizing these things for every client, because I invent new exercises for each client so that it's customized around the particular goals that they're striving to.

Right. And they can feel it, you know, so as a leader of companies, and I've been CEO a number of times, I know that there are times when I walk out and I can feel something's off, but I don't know what it is. There are other times when I'm so in my own world, I'm not paying attention. I'm clueless. But there's definitely times where you feel something's off and you're not sure what it is. And I think that's what you're speaking to. When there's something off in my leadership, in the way I'm relating to it, and I don't know how to address it, is that it?

Well, there's that. It's not. Only one doesn't know how to address it, but one isn't really sure even how to think about it. You have that feeling that something. Something is not right in the culture or in the behavior or in the reaction to what you had. It's that feeling you, you know, you have. Like you walk into a room and everybody stops talking. You know, you feel that there's some dynamic there and you're part of it. It's about you or your behavior or your leadership, but it's very hard to find a framework for understanding it. And that's kind of what my book is about. It's a fable, but it's based on the experiences of my clients and the protagonist in the book is somebody who has stepped up to or has been promoted to a much higher level of leadership. And he finds that the very skills that made him successful in his previous position, they're not working now. They're not working at this newer position because things are different. He has people who are specialists in things. They know much more about their specialty than he does. They've been there a lot longer. They're stronger personalities. They feel they know the company better, and his leadership is not having any leverage. And then he gets a warning about it that his leadership is not working. And he has no idea where to turn to because he's only doing the things that got him to the promotion in the first place. But then he becomes acquainted with a conductor, and he starts sitting in on the conductor's rehearsals and then having conversations with a conductor about why he rehearsed this way. Why did he do things that seemed completely counterintuitive to the executive? Like at one point, he tells the orchestra, don't watch me here. Don't watch me. And he's saying, well, why didn't you ask them to watch you? And the conductor explains this kind of framework he has of leadership, which is much more empowering, is much more helping people to. Around their blind spots and building a culture of collaboration and the tools of collaboration, and then elevating the leadership up to a higher level so that the workforce is taking care of the things that they can take care of, and the leader is then taking them to places that they couldn't go without the leader. Whereas the default behavior for leaders is often that you get involved in the things that they don't need you for, and you're giving. You're telling them directions about things that they already know. And that erodes the effectiveness of both your leadership and the way the workforce works. It distracts them from what they could be doing.

Well, let me underscore a couple things there that I think are really relevant. So, as coaches, we encounter this all the time, that leaders arrive at their position for any number of different circumstances. And. And then if they engage a coach, they engage the coach to work with them and the team. In our world, we're working with the teams, not just the leader themselves. And there's a considerable uncoachability of an awful lot of human beings, maybe all of us at one point or another, where we're like, wait a minute, I got this business to this place. I have these inherent skills. I know what I'm doing. You know, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You don't even know my industry. You don't know my business. You know, my. You know, and. And none of that actually matters because that. And we've heard this right before, is what got you here, won't get you there. That all of the things that you got you to this first point aren't going to have you level up into the next place or even the next challenge at hand. And there's something that has to shift, and it often comes from one of these blind spots that you talk about, right?

Yeah, well, yes, of course. And then also, because leadership is very counterintuitive, that you would think that by. By giving people feedback, by telling them the right things to do and by supervising them closely and giving them all. Right. Messages that that would add value. But sometimes that completely destroys the value. It destroys the relationship. It destroys the initiative and the energy that your people have and the inspiration that they might have about the work. And you think this isn't fair. I'm just telling them good stuff. But that's not the way leadership works. And so I got really fascinated in this, in this phenomenon. What is it that makes some people so capable of drawing the best results from other people? And, you know, certain people, they speak, and the room is silent and attentive, and other people, they speak maybe even the same words, and. And the room is restless and people aren't paying attention. What is that? And so that's what. That's what all of my work explores.

So maybe one of the other examples, the elder care, the high tech or something like that would help to bring that to life.

Well, sure. Some of my clients were like elder care franchises. And those people are in a tough industry. You know, caring for the elderly. It's not a pretty thing. And the kinds of people who end up giving the care are frequently, you know, people who are not. They're not executives. They come from a part of our culture where kindness and where training, like nurses, is very important. And the caregivers, not the caregivers, but the people who are running the business, they know that they're running a business, and they're frequently looking at numbers and they're looking at figures, and they tend to lose sight of how it is to enable these caregivers to do their best. And so they tend to not even understand that their behavior is broadcasting a message that, I don't really respect you, and I don't really respect what you're doing, and I don't trust you either. And those messages they're unconscious. The leaders don't even know that they're sending them. And they don't know how that erodes the quality of the organization and ultimately the quality of the care. Now some of the enlightened people who are looking at the industry, they understand these things and so they have meetings and try and get it across. And that was one function for which I was brought in.

So the thing that I'm left with a lot is that a lot of this is listening. And we talked about this as we were setting up for the show, that there's a kind of a listening that certainly the conductor has, the audience has, as well as the musicians. And that there's. You say in the book title, leading by listening enhances the whole thing.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, leading is that listening is at the heart of it. And a lot of people don't understand the power of listening. But that's one of the things that's really easy to demonstrate with the orchestra. And people are fascinated when they hear what the orchestra can do. There's, in many sessions, there's one point in which I'm asking the orchestra to, to play without conductor and. And then I'm asking them to change it spontaneously and do it one way and do it another way and then finally ask them to do it with their eyes closed. And, and what they have to do is they have to all begin together and. And there's nobody, there's no visual. And what they discover, I mean, what everybody hears, is that the orchestra can do that. Their listening is so acute and it's so detailed and it's so empathetic that they're capable of doing that. And it's a real wake up call for leaders when they see that this particular workforce can accomplish most of what it does without any conductor. And that raises the question, well, what is the conductor for if they can do all this stuff without a conductor? And then you begin to see that there is a place for the conductor in adding value and elevating the whole thing to a higher plane, bringing, liberating, a kind of inspiration which the workforce can't do by itself. It needs a leader, but needs a leader who understands what that role really is. That's why I say it's a very counterintuitive role. But there's a lot of wisdom about it. And that's what I convey in the sessions that I do and in the book too.

Well, I hear in that the idea of servant leadership. So there's a certain kind of leadership that's based in authority. Right. I can fire you, I can hire you, I'm in charge. I can fund or defund, I can punish, and I have certain authority. And that's great. It's somewhat Machiavellian. It's useful. But then there's another kind of leadership that influences and engages people, inspires them, calls them to do better work. We often think of that as inspirational leadership. But I also hear in what you're saying the servant leadership, where the leader is in service of the orchestra and of the piece of music and they're listening for and coordinating the actions of the team of the orchestra to achieve something that on their own or left to their own, they might not achieve together.

Yeah. There was one musician who, after I had modeled a conductor who basically micromanages the orchestra. I'm role playing that and I'm conducting the orchestra that way. And then I handed the. The microphone to one of the musicians to react. And he said, there are many conductors who come to this podium and some of them treat us that way. And he said, when we have a conductor who does that, we will give him or her exactly what they're asking for and nothing more. He said, but if we have somebody who understands what we can do and creates a space where we can do it, he said, there is no limit to what we will give that conductor.

Yeah, there's a whole other level. There's that richness that's really great. So leading by Listening, bringing something, elevating something, imagining your leadership from this thing, from this other place. The book is Maestro Leading by Listening. Roger Nirenberg is the author. If you want more info on the programs, the experience. If you want to learn about the book, go to musicparadigm.com where you'll find all of that there. Roger, I want to thank you so much for being on the show with us today.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun talking to you.

Yeah. And I want to remind all of our listeners that we bring something interesting in the world of Growing youg Business and the leadership required every week here on the Scaling Up Business podcast. And you'll find all of our episodes. You can subscribe if you want@scalingcoach.com we also have free downloads of tools. You can get a copy of the book and so on. So worksheets and agendas and things like that that relate to and help you to get your business, scaling up and get it and use all of that stuff. So lots of that stuff for free on our website. @scratch scalingcoach.com Go there and find that all of that that you need. Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you all next week. I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Shannon Amos with audio production by Podfly. Audio editing is done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today, please share it with somebody else. Pass it along and let us know if you parts you loved with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing the Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.