Leadership and empathy: looking through the eyes of another

Blog: Having a career with overlapping activities in today’s multi-faceted professional music practice requires musicians to exercise many roles at the same time, roles which extend beyond their artistic skills. Musicians need to be innovative, entrepreneurial and communicative, they need to be able to create sustained partnerships, and collaborate with an eye for the contexts they relate to. They must be reflective, aware of what is needed in order to generate their work and to produce work of high quality. This includes that they recognize their individual needs for learning and development. In sum, musicians need to exercise leadership, which is, quoting David Myers: “…a very different message from the frequently unspoken subtext that if one expects to survive as a musician, he or she will necessarily piece together a potentially random group of jobs that have the cumulative effects of compromising lofty ambitions and perpetuating the view that one is undervalued” (2007: 4).