---
title: "The hidden leadership lessons we can learn from music conductors"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-hidden-leadership-lessons-we-can-learn-from-music-conduc.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-hidden-leadership-lessons-we-can-learn-from-music-conduc.html"
published: "2009-10-21T22:20:20+00:00"
updated: "2009-10-21T22:28:16.563000+00:00"
tags: ["Growing People", "Video", "people patterns", "TED"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Lessons for software team leaders from Itay Talgam's TED talk on great conductors: self-direction, letting people grow and control without control."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# The hidden leadership lessons we can learn from music conductors

This very inspiring video raises many questions and analogies to our technical world of leadership:

[Watch the talk on TED.com](https://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors) (Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors)

I'd sure love to sit with [Itay (the presenter)](http://www.talgam.com/appfiles/default.asp) for a few tough questions.

things I learned from this video:

- Enabling a team to be self directing is the true essence of leadership
- letting people grow
- control without control

a lot of the things this blog talks about, though, are about the state of a team **before** it is even possible to achieve these things (the team is not read).

The state of software today, put in music orchestra terms is like having an orchestra with players who sometimes don't really want to be there, or don't really care about music, most of the time.

We are not true professionals, yet.

## Read next

- [Video: Lejla Giske on Listening Modes and Techniques](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-lejla-giske-on-listening-modes-and-techniques.html): A video interview with Bouvet consultant Lejla Giske about listening modes and listening techniques, recorded by Roy Osherove in Norway.
- [Check-in: sharing emotions in an effective way](https://www.5whys.com/articles/check-in-sharing-emotions-in-an-effective-way.html): Yves Hanoulle explains the Check-In protocol from The Core Protocols, using mad, glad, sad and afraid to share emotions at work and at home.
- [The Core Protocols Introduction](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-core-protocols-introduction.html): Yves Hanoulle introduces The Core Protocols, team rules Jim and Michele McCarthy distilled from their team-building workshops, and invites you to try them.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/