The MBA classroom is catching up with the rehearsal room

After 20 years of inviting Oxford MBA students to conduct a choir, Dr Pegram Harrison, a former choral scholar now teaching at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, argues that business is increasingly recognising what music teachers have long understood.

I came to teach at Oxford Saïd Business School by way of a Cambridge choir stall. That musical experience informed my teaching more than my business career. For 15 years now I have been asking my MBA students to conduct a choir, applying what I learned from musical leadership to develop leadership in other areas.

Most music teachers readily recognise the key insights of this exercise: that you get the best out of people by listening to them and enabling them to listen to each other. That builds trust and resilience and leads to excellence in a musical ensemble, and indeed in any high-performing team. But MBA students are usually taught different things about leadership: rarely are they encouraged to listen, to find out what people need, or how to earn authority and respect. Instead, they have been taught to command and control and compete. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need leadership that can do better than that.

I have been making a version of this argument for most of my time in the business school. Listening across parts. Cueing without dominating. Cultivating skills to join something already in motion. These should be the working behaviours of almost every organisation. They are the behaviours of a reasonable Year 10 wind band – but not of many ostensibly “high-performing” commercial organisations.

The case has always been easier to make at a dinner party than in the workplace. Until very recently, it relied on testimony rather than data. The Curriculum and Assessment Review has opened a window – a rare one – in which the value of music in the school day is being reconsidered at the level of national policy. The question now is whether anything concrete follows the statement of intent. What would strengthen the case is evidence. We finally have some.

Trinity College London’s Career-Ready report surveyed more than 1,500 young people aged 16 to 29 and 800 secondary teachers across the subjects.

Its central number is the one every music teacher should now have to hand: young people who continued with music, drama or dance beyond the compulsory years report feeling 19 percentage points more work-ready than their peers. That is not a marginal advantage. It is a gap big enough to reframe a curriculum argument. 

Look at what sits underneath that headline and a more specific picture appears. The same young people are 14 points less anxious about sharing a different view, 12 points less anxious about presenting their work, 11 points less worried about office jargon. Put the figures together and the pattern is obvious: the specific anxieties of a young person entering work – speaking up, being heard, recovering in front of colleagues – are the anxieties a performer has faced a hundred times by a Grade 5 assessment.

One of the skills music teachers produce most reliably, and one of the least recognised outside the sector, is the ability to drop into a working group already in motion and contribute without disrupting it. In music, this happens through listening and sight-reading – and British musicians are particularly well trained in it. Almost every workplace needs people who can do it. Almost no other part of the curriculum trains for it.

The other transfer that goes unrecognised is what one might call the enabling instinct. When choral directors get it right, they aren’t driving the performance by force of personality. They are creating the conditions in which 20 other people sound better than they would without direction. That is the quieter, harder part of leadership. It is also the part the MBAs find hardest to perform. They have been trained to lead by commanding. The music teachers I know have spent their whole careers training people to lead by listening.

Consider what the young people in the Trinity survey said they feared most about starting work. More than four in ten were anxious about working with colleagues they didn’t know. Almost as many worried about small talk in person. Three in ten were nervous about making a phone call. These are not exotic fears. They are the everyday social reserves of a generation with fewer structured chances to rehearse the rituals of ensemble life than any before. Music teachers will recognise the shape of this because they have been watching it happen in their schools for years.

This brings me to what I think the Career-Ready data are actually for. They aren’t a vindication to be quietly grateful for. They provide ammunition for the next conversation with a parent, a head, a governing body, or a Year 9 who is weighing up GCSE options. The figures are clearer than the sector has ever had to hand: 19 percentage points being more work-ready. 87% of secondary teachers across every subject agreeing that performance and creative education build the teamwork and communication skills employers want. And 92% saying that schools should do more of it.

Of course, none of this is ‘news’ to a music teacher. It is the curriculum case they have always made, in the terms they have always made it. What has changed is where that argument is now being won – in business schools, in HR departments, in Treasury submissions. A generation of managers is arriving at work having been taught that leadership is less what you do to other people and more what you do with them. The MBA classroom is catching up with the rehearsal room. That is worth knowing. It is also, at the next funding conversation, worth quoting.

Pegram Harrison was a choral scholar at Clare College, Cambridge, and combines being a musician with being a Senior Fellow at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where he teaches the MBA course ‘Leadership Perspectives from the Humanities’.