Why Great Leadership Works Like an Orchestra | Eva Rothwell, Spark Hire

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Hey Adam, it's Eva Rothwell, Head of Marketing at SparkHire.

Sorry I missed you.

I just wanted to leave a quick note and share some thoughts on leadership and for me, how my background in classical music has taught me so much about leadership and how I lead my teams today.

It's the kind of thing that you don't even realize how much it's teaching you until years later.

And the first one really being about mastery.

The difference between Taking something from good to great, being around absolute mastery of the details, right? It's those countless, really minute details that really turbocharge something and can take it from an okay result to a real success.

I remember a very spirited rehearsal where we probably spent half an hour discussing whether or not we should use vibrato.

There were very strong opinions about whether or not using that articulation would suit this passage.

And so those choices, when they're intentional, that's where the mastery starts to come together.

The second thing really is around leadership and coordination between teams or in an orchestral context between the sections.

It's how do you bring that together and combine that with the sections around you.

And when you think about it from a go to market perspective, if sales and marketing are even a few beats apart, that motion is really not going to land.

And then if you expand that across more of the organization, product, customer success, the dissonance can just compound if we don't have that alignment.

So this can be as basic as making sure feedback loops are in place between the teams.

I remember certain performances or rehearsals, like during really tricky sections, locking in visually on the other leaders, like very, very intentionally looking across the stage, looking at the principal cellist, looking at the concertmaster.

And it's this unspoken, like, are we good? Are we using the same bow stroke? Are we coming into this passage with the same dynamic at the same tempo? Like, I know you have this thing coming up, so I'm setting up this phrase for you.

And when things get really hectic or if it's a really tricky passage, there's a temptation to just bury ourselves and kind of stick your head in the sand and just muscle through it.

And we can connect when we get through it and we'll just get through it and do a retro and it'll be fine and we'll do it better next time.

But in a performance situation, there is no next time, right? So making sure that we have that alignment and that rock solid sync is something I definitely learned so much about from classical music.

And then the last one that I think is internalizing the standard of quality.

Obviously, as AI becomes more widely used, we now all have the ability to create mass amounts of stuff at scale.

content, campaigns, whatever.

And so it's becoming even more important to have this internalized standard to know if something instinctively, is it good? Does it meet the mark for what our brand standard is, our copy standard, our campaign standard? And really being able to identify if it doesn't and identify that quickly and almost viscerally.