Stan and Chet: Star-crossed Jazzers

"I got tired of calling him Mr. Getz:

Chet Baker on Stan Getz

"He was like a spoiled child and very insecure"

Stan Getz on Chet Baker

Hardly the stuff, one might imagine, that would make for a creative collaboration. British jazz writer Mike Hennessey reported that, among other things, their relationship was characterized by what he described as "a conflict of addictions: Getz was drinking heavily and Baker was using heroin." And as jazz arranger and pianist, Jim McNeely, observed, "Stan had a real attitude about Chet using drugs. Perhaps if they had both been doing the same substance they might have got along better together.” And yet, at the time as they were behaving badly, they made some wonderful music together. Check out the Stockholm Concerts.

Several years ago a colleague and I were planning a weekend retreat with the governing board of a college and its senior management team. Over a number of years, the relationship between these two groups had become, to put not too fine a point on it, toxic and dysfunctional. They had formulated the problem this way: We don’t get along so we don’t work well together. Well, that was one way of putting it: cause ― poor relationships; effect ― poor performance.

With this hypothesis in mind, we did some selective pre-retreat interviewing and discovered that there were some serious differences of opinion about roles and responsibilities, not least of which was a significant misconstruing of the nature of the governance system. In a nutshell, was the board’s responsibility fiduciary or advisory? These are significantly different ways of thinking about the matter. As it turned out, the reality was a board that defined its role as fiduciary (without having a good sense of exactly what that meant) but acted as if it were advisory. The result was that a lot of people were behaving in ways that surprised and mostly disappointed others. Small wonder they didn’t get along—their expectations of each other’s performance were constantly being unfulfilled, if not violated.

Mis-diagnosis ― they’d managed to get a firm grip on the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t “cause ― poor relationships; effect ― poor performance” but rather “cause ― poor performance; effect ― poor relationships.”

Leaders have to create the conditions for success. That’s what they’re there for. And that means getting the governance system right. If you don’t tell people what the tune is, what key it’s in and at what tempo it’s to played, you won’t get the performance you want. What you are going to get is people who are demoralized because they can’t perform. And that won’t get fixed by telling them to grow up and behave like adults. Nor will it get fixed by staging some social event that aims at promoting goodwill and happiness.

Stan and Chet may not have liked each other very much, but they were not in any doubt about what they were doing.People don’t have to like each other to perform well together; they just have to get hold of the right end of the stick!

May
24

Getting in the Groove