Flutes, Guitars And Other People

I was at a breakfast meeting with some fellow leadership coaches the other day. It’s a bunch of practitioners-turned-friends with a shared interest in helping people up their game. After a lovely couple of hours of bonhomie and IPL talk, one of the coaches shared his experience with learning to play a musical instrument. The flute. He was a late starter he said, but over the last decade or so, he had managed to become quite proficient at it.

And as he talked about his learning journey, we could all see several parallels with leadership development – and some life lessons too. Like it is never too late to learn. The need for hunger, the desire to learn, to change. The frustration when things don’t go well. The temptation to throw in the towel and give up. And of course, the sense of joy at finally being able to get it right. But my favourite takeaway was something else.

We were told how the flute was a unique instrument. Quite unlike anything else. And then the friend shared an insight that made us all sit up. “It takes a host of instruments to make an orchestra,” he said. “Of course, you know that already. You have guitars, and violins, and the sitar and the veena, and the tabla and the drums. And the flute too. You would have noticed how before playing the violin or the guitar – or even the tabla – the musician tunes the instrument so it matches his or her needs. But the flute? You don’t tune a flute. In fact, you can’t tune it. You need to tune yourself, make adjustments to yourself. You can tune every other instrument, but the flute remains the way God made it.”

Fascinating thought, no? And it made me think. About the people we work with. The people we meet, the people we spend time with. In our teams – and in our lives – we have people who are like the various instruments in a band. There are guitars and sitars and tablas amongst them. And hey, there are some flutes too. We should remember that. We assume that most of them will be like the string instruments and the drums, and we get busy tuning them up to meet our needs. We forget that there will be some people like the flute. People who require that we make the adjustments ourselves. We are quick to try and change the people around us. We give them feedback and tweak their behaviours so we can work better with them. But we must remember there will be some people we can’t change. People we shouldn’t change. The flutes. People who will require us to change ourselves – rather than us trying to change them.

To make good music, you need all the instruments to come together and work in harmony. A good musician doesn’t get frustrated that he can’t tune the flute and get it to change. He doesn’t throw the flute out. If you have a colleague or a partner who frustrates you, who you are trying to change – without success – maybe you should hit the pause button. Recognise there’s a flute in your team. And ask yourself how might you change your behaviour, your approach, to get the best out of the flutes in your team.

One final thought. Which one are you? Flute or guitar?