Acting off a Dan Pink twitter link, I read the article from Harvard Business Reivew called the 12 Things Good Bosses believe.
I thought it might be worthwhile for choral directors, so I changed up some of the words and made it more applicable for choir directors. See what you think, and give me your thoughts or changes in the comments.
- I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to be in my choir.
- My success — and that of my choir — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
- Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my choir to make a little progress every day.
- One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
- My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my choir from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
- I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
- I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my choir to do the same thing.
- One of the best tests of my leadership — and my choir — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
- Innovation is crucial to every choir. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
- Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
- How I do things is as important as what I do.
- Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.
So what do you think?
Paula Roberts says
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between"
Martha Sullivan says
Jennifer Breedlove-Budziak says
Pam Schneller says
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is important to eliminate the negative forces that stifle learning and giving. Eliminating the negative empowers positive energies of learning, sharing and growing.
Thanks very much!
Tom Council says