Jazz: A Cultural Technology for Leaders and Teams

By now, it’s almost a cliché to say that blues and jazz are like the roots and trunk of America’s musical tree, with branches flowering into various genres and styles. Yet as regular readers of this newsletter know, the utility and power of the music extend into many dimensions of American life, including business, leadership, and team effectiveness. The work of the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP), which sponsors this newsletter, supports this claim.

If you lead or work in an organization and coordinate and collaborate with others on teams, then the jazz paradigm can elevate your perspective and provide practical tools for growth and advancement. We’ve found this to be true in our work with Google over the past four years, where we’ve coached leaders and facilitated numerous live workshops with our JLP Jazz Trio.

Step Up to the Mic

A few years ago, we worked with a professional services leader who immigrated from a country with a communal cultural style. It felt natural for him to share credit with his team and reports. Yet his colleagues also wanted him to become more comfortable with taking solos in the spotlight. We employed a shedding practice we call Step Up to the Mic, in which we asked him to define his leadership style, integrating his unique background and personal strengths. For homework, he wrote a “Your Sound” statement, which we prompted him to read aloud with passion during our virtual call.

As a result, he “gained grounded confidence" in bringing all aspects of his cultural experience to his leadership style, with "new perspectives and ideas to experiment with."

From Planning and Strategy to Product Creation and Delivery

Earlier this year, we conducted a workshop with the cross-functional leadership team of Google Beam (formerly Project Starline). This AI-first 3D video communication platform has been in development for nearly a decade. After setting the stage and tone via live music, we presented the results of a 10-minute workstyle assessment that visually displays the preferred operational styles of the team members. Here’s a general sample of the four zones, with colored dots representing people. As you can see, each zone aligns with the function and orientation of a musical instrument in a basic jazz quartet.

In the sample above, the distribution across the four zones is balanced. Most of the leaders for what was then called Project Starline were concentrated on the right side of the matrix, which aligned with the workstyles needed in the R&D phase of the project. Discovery-driven Innovators would ask questions such as “What should we do and why?” while analysis-driven Integrators would ask “How should we do it?”

Yet the team’s mandate was to bring the product to the enterprise market, in partnership with HP, this year. They needed more emphasis on the left side of the matrix, focusing on operational productivity and reliable quality. As with a jazz band, where the drums and bass power the swing, providing rhythmic forward motion and momentum, the leaders of this project needed to shift into an up-tempo cadence of product creation and delivery.

To facilitate this shift, we provided exercises to strengthen communication across the zones and leverage operational tensions (via Antagonistic Cooperation). We explored ways to fill operational gaps while supporting their colleagues in the Stabilizer and Improver zones. We also bolstered transparency of shared vision and an aligned narrative through JLP’s highest principle, “Ensemble Mindset.”

In follow-up meetings, the project leader observed "a noticeable shift in communications" and increased confidence in managing complexity through open inquiry.

An Innovator or a Stabilizer?

Managers, Directors, and C-suite executives have various operational and leadership styles, but often people assume that leaders must be visionary Innovators. When we asked a Director of Partnerships to guess which zone he’d land in, he presumed the upper right Innovator zone of the workstyle matrix. However, our assessment revealed his true strength as a (lower left) Stabilizer, with operational and tactical mastery, ensuring productivity targets were met like a steady drum roll.

A 360-degree feedback survey revealed that his leadership edge was to become more inspirational and cultivate better communication, so we centered on those areas of improvement during our three-session cycle.

Employing our Tuning In Shedding Practice, this leader recognized a tendency to jump to solutions in his communication. Going through our three-step process of soulful, generative listening, he came to view listening as "the positive intent to hear what the other person is saying and to understand what's important to them," and communication as a "two-way, dynamic volley of ideas that is engaging and enthusiastic." Such a call-and-response, trading fours mode, in which he played behind the beat rather than ahead of it, improved his one-on-ones and team meetings.

Outchorus

In this budding age of AI, human creativity and cultural expression are a premium. Jazz is an art form par excellence for individual and ensemble creativity, characterized by an ethic of purposeful improvisation. When applied to the workplace, and even to the practice of democratic capitalism, jazz becomes a cultural technology whose reach extends into organizational transformation, collaborative leadership development, cross-functional team effectiveness, and a fundamental reimagining of how humans coordinate to create value together.