The Third Dimension of Leadership - Leading from the Side

My grandfather was a professional jazz trumpeter, so I’ve always loved jazz.

One jazz album stands out to me, though, above all the rest. It’s Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I remember the first time I heard it. Shelly and I were newly married and living in a small home.

We were in that early, beautiful, disorienting season of marriage where you are learning how to love another person, not in theory but in practice, day by day, in a small house with thin walls and a shared life that you are still figuring out how to build together. I still had one of those early 2000s big CD changers. I remember loving having the autonomy of our own place and playing our own music in our own home in that season. That’s when I found A Love Supreme.

The first track on the record, “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” is a jazz fiend’s dream. What we hear is four musicians listening to each other so completely that they are inside one another’s music. It’s a total mindshare. You couldn’t point to any one of the quartet and say, that’s the leader. The music was between them.

I remember having some house guests at our house during that time. They asked me what kind of music we were playing. I told them the history of the album. Their response was interesting. “That doesn’t sound like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at all to me.”

Dear reader, order is important, but life is wild.

The story of our life is something we co-create in a dance with others. We are improvising something with those we love, we work with, and, in a way, with God.

Just as some people cannot stand the dissonance, the improvisation, the unpredictability of free-form jazz, some people cannot handle the uncertainty of leading from the side.Life is actually more like jazz improv than I think we care to admit.

This type of music is a powerful metaphor for our next discipline: leading from the side.

The Multiplier

What Coltrane and his classic quartet produced on A Love Supreme cannot be fully explained by their individual gifts.

Keith Sawyer, a creativity researcher and former professional jazz pianist, spent years studying what happens in moments of genuine group improvisation like these. In his book Group Genius, Sawyer documents something that challenges almost everything our culture believes about creativity: breakthrough ideas almost never come from solitary genius. Instead, they emerge from collaboration, from the back-and-forth of people who are fully present to each other and responding in real time. He calls it “collaborative emergence.” Groups who learn to improvise together consistently out-create individuals working alone, even brilliant individuals.

The technical term for what a jazz pianist does while a soloist is playing is “comping.”

The comping musician isn’t accompanying in a passive sense. They are actively shaping the music, responding to where the soloist goes, holding the harmonic foundation so the soloist can take risks they couldn’t take alone. The entire discipline requires you to be completely tuned in to the person beside you. Leading from the side is, in its essence, learning to comp. True leadership happens in teams. And great teams improvise together.