Music as work?
During the pandemic, musicians found themselves having time to reflect on their life and work. I attended a webinar with orchestral musicians around the U.S. talking about their pandemic reflections. During the conversation, they found that they all shared a common experience of realizing that the stress of high standards in performance and busy schedules of churning out program after program have caused them to lose touch with why they fell in love with music in the first place.
For a lot of us, music becomes work over time. It became a chore. This is how Hubert Joly described what work has become in our world in his book The Heart of Business: a burden, a means to an end, and something you do so you can do something else.
I realized that we believe we are lucky to love what we do for a living. In other industries, work may literally be the thing you do from 9-5 so you can do something else - like spending time on a hobby. As musicians, we normally don't do our work so that we can do something else. Sure, we want to do our job so we can go on vacation. And at the same time, we usually want to do nothing else than to perform!
So we assume that our innate love for our work means that our lives are great and we should feel nothing but happiness in doing the work. The truth is that we are not immune to feeling lost or unfulfilled like in any other profession. It is possible to forget why we love it.
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It struck me that we should put mechanisms in place to measure and improve our connection with this love of our work. We should not tolerate falling out of love to be an expected side effect of rigor, stress, or the bottom line.
We should regularly evaluate via anonymous surveys how many people in our organizations feel like work is a chore. We should find out the reasons and then put action plans in place to seek improvements.
We should also regularly have discussions among our people asking ourselves:
Why did you fall in love with music in the first place?
What drives you?
What gets you out of bed each morning?
Then, we should evaluate how these responses are directly linked to the activities we do at work. If they are not linked, what can we do to link them?
The happiness and fulfillment within the people of our organizations has direct ramifications on the quality of our businesses. The pandemic gave these challenges a chance to resurface so we can see them, and now we need to do the hard thing to not sweep it under the rug as we go back to business as usual.
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