Trends & Issues

Working Smarter in HR: 5 Lessons from Jazz

Dr. Brian Fraser

Dr. Brian

Fraser

Dr. Brian Fraser is lead provocateur of Jazzthink, a company based in Vancouver that uses jazz to provoke better leadership, teamwork, and governance. He has worked and taught in the non-profit sector for his entire career. He currently speaks, consults, and coaches in the areas of leadership, teamwork, and governance. He is a trainer with Volunteer Vancouver and sits on several non-profit boards in the Greater Vancouver area.

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Author's Note: Your experience of this article will be enhanced if you take a couple of minutes to watch Louis Armstrong's group play on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959. Note what qualities of great teamwork you see in this performance.

People practices will be crucial to survival in the turbulent and trying times most non-profits are entering. Now more than ever, working smarter to motivate and mobilize the discretionary effort that every employee and volunteer has to offer is the key to exceptional mission-based stewardship of your organization's vision and resources.

Whether your organization has formal HR systems or not, you are involved in creating people practices and managing human resources that change people's lives, both those you are serving and those who are doing the serving. You have the potential to offer a quality of leadership that will improve the ways your employees and volunteers serve your mission. You have the potential to find your groove in creating and supporting great performances with your colleagues. That's the kind of smarter work in human resources that your organization needs and deserves in the tough times ahead.

This article will explore five different elements of that quality of leadership. It is designed to provoke your thinking about how you can help your organization find and maintain a powerful collective groove through its people practices. It will use the image of a great jazz performance to generate a different perspective on these crucial HR issues.

The kind of leadership I am proposing does not require a position or a title. Rather, it requires showing up in the roles you have accepted, whatever they may be, in ways that have a powerful positive influence on those with whom you are changing lives through your organization.

This kind of leadership exercises its influence through the conversations you convene in your organization. And that's where there is a direct connection to jazz. The most common form of improvisation or jazz among human beings is conversation. Every conversation is a collaborative jazz performance. So you are all jazz musicians. Your instrument is your voice (and if you are over the age of 13, you have the required 10,000 hours of practice needed to master its use), your band is your colleagues, and your audience are those whose lives you strive to change.

Finding your groove in this kind of leadership involves discovering intense enjoyment in what you do really well. It involves celebrating and aligning with others in rhythmic patterns that bring deep pleasure through harmonious results. For jazz musicians, it's that propulsive feel that really gets things swinging. What a great ideal for non-profit leaders in their support of their human resources!

Let's take a closer look at what elements of great people practices go into creating the groove of a great performance both in non-profit organizations and in jazz. To help keep our focus on the theme of working smarter, I will use an acronym for SMART. Working smarter involves working more soulfully, mindfully, astutely, responsibly, and trustingly.

Soulfully relates passion and purpose

Mindfully relates to awareness and attention

Astutely relates to analysis and alignment

Responsibly relates to action and assessmen

Trustingly relates to collaboration and consequence

Soulfully

Jazz is an emotional act. Jazz musicians love their work so much they can't imagine doing anything else. People working with non-profits feel the same. They are there because of their passion for the purpose the organization serves. You cannot afford to take that for granted. It is the base upon which continuous improvement is built. It is the living centre of the conversations you will convene on how to best serve your purpose with the passions you have attracted. This is the soul of your work and it needs to be highly visible and foundational in everything you do.

Mindfully

The work of your organization deserves careful thought arising from dialogue about how best to manage your passions and talents to serve your purpose. Collectively, people can become aware of a remarkably broad range of factors that influence the success of the organization. When properly convened, they can have constructive conversations about how what they are aware of deserves the attention of those governing and operating the organization. They can enter into respectful dialogue about the fiduciary, strategic, and generative responsibilities and possibilities that the organization enjoys. Jazz musicians rely on these kinds of conversations. They have mastered their instruments and honed their voices to offer their best. They have become aware of how their colleagues have mastered their instruments and what they can best contribute to the performance. They pay attention to their audiences and venues. And they have carefully chosen what to play. This range of awareness and attention is essential to a great performance in both organizations and jazz.

Astutely

A jazz band and an organization are both complex systems of human interaction that generate an impact on the participants and their surroundings. Realistic analyses of that system and concerted efforts to align resources to serve its purpose better are essential. Jazz musicians are constantly checking with each other, especially by listening and looking, to pick up signals about where the performance is going and what they can do to help it get there. They bring an astute understanding of the traditions and conventions of jazz that enable them to play together. They know the core chart or piece of music being played. And they value innovation and experimentation to find the best way of creating the desired impact. As they align their efforts in the performance, a design emerges that will enable them to work more effectively together in pleasing both themselves and their audiences. The same dynamic of analysis and alignment would benefit non-profit organizations as they seek to serve their core purposes in rapidly changing environments. Instead of accomplishing this through the playing of musical instruments, the leadership of these organizations does it though conversing with each other.

Responsibly

I can't imagine the owner of a jazz club imposing a performance management system on a jazz group. It would be an insult. The group would rebel, resisting and sabotaging from the very beginning. Responsible performance arises from within. It involves a clear and willing commitment to be mutually accountable for the results. That must be created and fully owned by those willing to be held accountable for creating the right results. Jazz musicians bring the attitudes and behaviours that make great music happen into the club with them. Nothing imposed by a coercive owner will improve their performance. I don't think imposed responsibilities monitored through performance management systems created by outside experts work in organizations either. People collaborate responsibly when they engage in conversations that create mutual accountability.

Trustingly

Trust is the oil that makes organizations and jazz bands as the conversations flow smoothly. Trust is the key to finding your groove in people practices. Trust is a catalyst in getting great things done well. It emerges in a jazz group or an organization as people come to realize they can rely on the integrity, capacities, and strengths of those with whom they are playing and working. And trust is built one conversation at a time.

I hope this article has provoked you to pay more attention to the conversations you have in and about your non-profit organization. Through the conversations you choose to convene, you have the power to create an atmosphere in which people are inspired to work smarter. Good people practices and processes are essential to organizational success, but their effectiveness lies on a deeper foundation - the quality of the conversations that create your organization.