A few years ago, a big corporation hired me to produce some orchestral recording sessions. I had to hire about 85 musicians to come in for two afternoons of fairly intense work.
Now I will let you in on an inside secret of professional music: not every performance is spectacular. The average person can’t really tell the difference on a conscious level. All you know is that you’re either standing up applauding wildly at the end, or you’re sitting down applauding politely at the end. I sought the former result.
Now in making this recording session go, I knew it wasn’t enough to just hire the best players I could find. I wanted to get that extra .2% of focus and intensity that makes all the difference between fabulous and so-so. The conductor might inspire everyone, and then again, he might not. Too many eggs in one basket. What to do?
Well, this may sound silly (any exposure of vulnerability often does), but the day before the recording session, I spent the day… baking cookies.
And I don’t mean just ordinary plain old chocolate chip cookies. I mean organic eggs, imported butter, the high-priced chocolate chips, and the $16-a-bottle organic Madagascar vanilla extract.
Now again, we all like cookies, but at some subconscious level we can all tell if they were made with the organic Madagascar vanilla extract, or with the cheap vanilla flavoring. And when the players of that orchestra walked into that session, you could smell the quality of those cookies. And it set the tone. I had gone out of my way to do something really above and beyond. And they all went onstage and mirrored that energy.
I did not invent this. Like so many things managerial, I learned this by working with Henry Mancini. When I went on a Boston Pops tour with him years ago, we were all given a generous amount of “per diem” money to buy our own food, but even so, he had arranged to have an absolutely massive spread of stupendous food set up backstage before every concert. It was a rather extreme thing to do. It was not required by the contract. He had really stepped over a “boundary limitation” of sorts, in the sense that he had gone way beyond what any of us would have expected him to do for us.
But it was brilliant. After chowing down on all that magnificent free food (and pocketing the tax-free per diem money), at that point we felt somehow obligated to respond in kind to pay him back. And the only means we had to do that was to play at our absolute tiptop level of potential. At that point, “baton technique” was a moot point. He could have waved a tree trunk at us, we were in the mood to give him our best effort every single night, and we did.
In one of the later recording sessions I did for this company, a new person was put in charge, and they could not see the importance of the cookies. They felt that it was demeaning for me, the producer, to be spending the day before the session doing “kitchen work.” I simply could not get this person to understand that the quality of the food had a subtle but immense impact on the quality of the playing. I had seen, and I had experienced myself as a player, how the slightest little act of inconsideration on the part of management had an immediate impact on my emotional state, and thus on whether or not I felt like “giving it my all” or just doing the perfunctory level of no mistakes.
I hear the phrase “well, they’re professionals” a lot, which implies that people will do their best if you just pay them to do their work. I have never seen this in real life. It is foolish to think that “just by paying the money” that a professional artist will be motivated to do their best work. It’s all personal. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve been sure that the players would have all been self motivated to do their best work just for the money, but real managers know that nobody works “for the money.” That just gets them there.
People are motivated by emotional rewards, such as mastery, recognition, meaning, and higher purpose. If you are taking their work for granted, then there is no reason or opportunity for them to “wow” you. You have removed purpose for higher effort. Your own vulnerability has to be in play for that to happen.
So as a manager, you have to put yourself in a vulnerable position where people can in fact give to you at that level. If you think it is foolish to spend $16 on the organic Madagascar vanilla extract, if you’re scared of looking like an idiot for doing something outside the realm of just barely good enough to cover it, then you’re basically telling everyone else that doing anything beyond the bare minimum– for you– is idiotic as well. Doing top work requires exposing one’s emotional vulnerability, of possibly “looking stupid” for having paid too much. But if you don’t think they deserve the organic Madagascar vanilla cookies, they will immediately sense that, and they will give you the artificial vanilla extract in response.
(c) Justin Locke
