Advice for Those Seeking a Place in Leadership

Date: August 31, 2010

As you seek to find your way as a new teacher, a young choral conductor entering the field, or an emerging leader in your school/organization/profession, let me offer some tips. I encourage ChoralNet readers to add the "secrets of your success" by replying below with your own advice to young teachers and conductors that would like to be you some day.

1. To Lead is to Learn-Grab opportunities to make a training presentation for any new or ongoing initiative, EVEN IF YOU DON'T CURRENTLY HAVE THE EXPERTISE. The point is, GET A PIECE OF IT, and offer to make a presentation on what you know (or will learn).

2. Offer to be recording secretary-No one likes taking minutes, so grab the opportunity to "be at the table." Take the best minutes ever taken, edit them carefully, and distribute them quickly. Further, in all your work, always use spell check, proof read TWICE, and introduce 3 and 4 syllable words into your writing and conversations.

3. Do not be the idea killer-But rather, embrace ideas and seek to improve them with any needed practicality. Treat other idea killers as a positive, and be the one to do more homework to show why the idea could work.

4. Talk in terms of the other person's interests-Hard to do in our profession, but give up on being your only cheerleader. Be their cheerleader. People do not want the arrogant ones at the top-everyone knows they will just use it for their own entitlements.

5. Collect and learn from your mistakes-Mistakes can be one of your silent mentors, IF, you take away the lesson and emerge on the positive side of the lesson learned.

6. Do not go over budget-While your intentions may be noble, going over budget negates all of your good ideas and intentions, and you are viewed as a loose canon.

7. Look sharp and be sharp (sorry for the pun)-Put on your game face, game clothes, and be ready to represent the best the organization has to offer.

8. Stay out of office politics, unless it is the official political structure-Emphasize the "why" of everything, not the human source, positive or negative.

9. Learn the difference between what can be changed, and what cannot-This includes decisions of the past, as well as decisions about future direction.

10. Make this your ongoing vocabulary-"Please", "Thank you", "Good job", "I appreciate you", "I hear great things about your work", "I am glad to be working with you", "I need your help", "You deserve this", "Congrats."

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Betty Devine on August 31, 2010 5:34am

Tim,

ABSOLUTELY wonderful and important advice! These things are so important for any young choir director who may have had a "dictator/teacher/mentor" during his/her studies AND for one who wants to learn to emulate the wonderful mentor that they were fortunate to have.

I just picked up a book that I wish I had been given when I first started leading choral groups: "Beyond Singing - Blueprint for the Exceptional Choral Program" by Stan McGill and Elizabeth Volk. It contains the nuts and bolts of logistical tasks that we as conductors find ourselves responsible for -- things we did not learn as part of our music degree. I am recommending it to every new choral leader I meet and have a copy to give away.

Thanks for all you do for us!

Betty Devine

Artistic Director

The Houston Choral Society (22 years!)

Worship Pastor

The Foundry UMC (25 years!!)

Timothy Banks on August 31, 2010 7:36am

Tim, thanks for this mentoring post. These are important concepts, and stand for all of us, new teacher/conductors as well as long-timers.

My immediate additions for consideration:

- Find mentor/models who deserve to be imitated, but work for the mental process behind the surface techniques. (How many of us have seen "Robert Shaw clones" wave and stamp and otherwise mimic, sometimes misapplying his unique techniques, with little understanding of the man's brainwork that actually led to the action.)

- Conquer fear, but honor caution. (An old carpenter's addage: "Measure twice, cut once.")

- Score study holds the major solutions for most of our problems of rehearsal planning, interpretation, and long-term joy of music making.

- Strive to be the least important person in the performance... 95% of your job as a conductor/teacher should be over as you give the downbeat in the performance or worship event.

I can't help but include one of my favorite quotes , Tim; (pardon the historic gender insensitivity, which would read now "person").

From the great mind of Theodore Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

All the best, Tim Banks

(Retired Professor, Choral Studies & Conducting, Samford University)

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