I have a friend who works at a big software company. She recently told me that she had a “performance review.” Given my symphonic background, I made a joke about the local paper coming in and writing a review about how she did her job, as that was the only kind of “performance review” I had ever experienced. But then she showed me all the paperwork involved.
If you’ve never seen a “performance review,” well, I’ve only seen one, but basically, one’s boss writes extensively about how you could do things better. You also write about what you could do better, and even some of the people who report to you talk about how you could do things better.
I have to tell you, when I read this thing, it made my skin crawl. You could never do a “corporate performance review” of someone who plays a major symphony orchestra. You would risk getting a serious punch in the nose, or at the very least, you would be strongly encouraged to perform an autoerotic act that, for most people, is physically impossible.
People who are very good at what they do are very emotionally involved in their work. They have to be. Hence, they don’t take criticism lightly or calmly.
Back in my playing days, I used to have to put up with various young conductors who tried to conduct us in the obedience mode. They of course failed miserably. Once I got over my own visceral disgust of their presence, I would feel bad for them. I did not understand the big picture back then. They weren’t “stupid” and they weren’t untalented. They had all been trained in an “obedience” management model. They had absolutely no concept of managing people who possessed mastery. It is a night and day/ oil and water difference in culture.
One of the biggest problems in teaching people how to manage mastery is, there are so many plus sides to the obedience model. In a mastery environment, the “leader” tends to be demoted to “facilitator.” There is often considerable discussion as to whether or not a leader is needed, period. Thus, there tends to be little motivation to create mastery environments.
There really isn’t very much institutional motivation to instill mastery in a student, because once they achieve it, they no longer have any need to purchase lessons or training. Also, people who are pushing themselves to their absolute limit of their own endurance tend to have “attitude problems.”
I strongly suspect that many people have never experienced a mastery environment. Going to school is actually a hindrance in this regard, because achieving mastery requires that you work on one skill all day long. Generic course requirements and homework get in the way.
I do think one of the biggest hindrances to many organizations is the lack of “mastery management” on the part of leadership, i.e., knowing how to manage people who are already highly motivated and working at their extreme end of their potential output. Sadly, most “obedience model managers” automatically establish a second-rate bland obedience “presumption of laziness” system, forcing people who are masters to become emotionally detached (thus no longer working at peak performance level) or just give up and leave. It is a fractal that I see repeating itself everywhere, not just in symphony orchestras. There is no organized effort to teach “the management of mastery” that I know of. It only occurs as a statistical outlier in people who have figured it out all on their own, and who then have the confidence to go against the conventional wisdom.
© Justin Locke
