Leadership in Action

 

 

I had the experience of seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform with a string quartet made up of young musicians, most of whom have just graduated from music school. He literally plays ‘second fiddle’ in a piece for a string quartet with two cellos. Yo-Yo plays the second cello part allowing the young musician to take the lead cello.

This performance takes place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, not in the regular auditorium, but in the much more intimate space of the Rembrandt room (Before the thefts). It’s a fund raiser for Young Audiences of Mass, where I am the artistic director. It’s the end of a gala evening and this private performance is only for the YA staff and large donors.

The piece is maybe 10 minutes long. There are only about 30 people gathered around the musicians, standing with our wine glasses in hand - and it is sublime, magical, transcendent. Looking around the audience I see many folk with tears in their eyes. I am wiping them out of my own.

After the performance I ask one of the musicians what it was like playing with such a master of their art. She said, “I may as well hang up my violin right now for I have never played so beautifully in my life and I doubt I will ever reach this height again.”

Yo-Yo Ma’s Presence lifted everyone else in the group to his level of mastery. Not only his being Present in the room; his ability to Reach Out to, and connect with, his ‘team;’ his Expressiveness in playing; and the grounded confidence of Self-Knowing; his totality as a human being and master of his art. AND he did it not by shining the light on himself as ‘The Leader,’ but by putting himself in the background.

This experience was a clear demonstration of several of my favorite quotes on leadership:
HBS: Leadership is how you make other people feel by your presence (and not just ‘feel’ but how you change the quality of their performance)
Lao Tzu: A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, “We did it ourselves.”
Simon Sinek’s book: “Leaders Eat Last”