There’s a useful analogy I once heard from musicians about how orchestras really work. Officially, the conductor runs the show. They set the beat, they give the cues, and everyone’s eyes are on them. To the audience, it looks as though the conductor is firmly in control.
But orchestras have their own quiet safety net. If the conductor is incompetent, unreasonable, or simply fails to lead, the orchestra doesn’t fall apart. Instead, it starts following the lead of the “first trumpet” 1. The clever conductors will realise this, and self-aware ones take it as a sign: if the orchestra is following someone else, something has gone wrong in their leadership.
Most of the audience will never notice the shift. They’ll assume the conductor is still in charge. But the musicians know, and so do the more experienced listeners.
I think this is the best analogy I’ve ever come across for corporate projects. If you’re the project lead, the “conductor”, and you find that people are no longer coming to you with problems, or that you’re having to chase rather than being sought out for help, chances are you’ve already been quietly replaced by a “first trumpet”.
This isn’t a role that anyone really wants. It’s an extra burden on the person who has stepped up, often reluctantly, because the team still needs direction. The only real solutions are for the formal lead to:
- Step aside.
- Fix what’s going wrong,
- Replace the “first trumpet”
If you suspect this has happened to you, the best thing you can do is find out who your team is actually following and ask them genuinely where you’ve gone wrong. They’ll usually tell you, because they don’t want your job; they’d much rather you were doing it properly.
Projects, like orchestras, need a conductor. The trick is to remain the one the team chooses to follow.
Update
I got some feedback on this from an old friend and it looks like the origin instrument suffered a little bit from Chinese whispers, and rather than “First Trumpet”, it should really be “Lead Violin”
“As a trumpeter, I would love to say this was true, but it’s really the Principal 1st Violin, who also has the title “Leader” for this very reason. Three reasons for that choice:1) the violinist is at the front where everyone can see them 2) it’s easier to follow their bow movements than it would be to follow any movements made with a trumpet 3) they are playing most of the time (unlike the trumpets) so there’s something to follow”
“I’ve certainly played in concerts where this happened… if you go back a few hundred years, conductors weren’t a thing, and orchestras were usually led by someone playing – often the harpsichord. Most jazz bands still run this way. I guess you don’t need to go back that far to find a dev team without a scrum master of whatever they’re called…”
- that is the head trumpeter in an orchestra[↩]