The show’s guest in this episode is Jeffrey Pollock. He was chosen by the League of American Orchestras as a featured conductor for their prestigious National Conductor Preview. He is known for his musical versatility, his innovative concert programming, and for his ability to make connections with audiences.

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Leading the Way with Music with Jeffrey Pollock

Hi, I’m Melanie Parish and I’m thrilled to be here with you today. I think there’s some things that we really get wrong about leadership. I think that one of them is that I think that when we identify sort of kids in school that are natural leaders, I think what we’re actually seeing in them is that they are bossy, or that they’re confident or that kids tend to follow them naturally. But I don’t think we’re actually seeing leadership from them. So, so kids get identified for behaviors, that may not necessarily be good leadership behaviors, later on. And then I also think that, you know, it’s really easy to see ourselves as leaders when things are going really well. And sometimes things don’t go so well. Sometimes things go poorly or not as expected.

I just spent the weekend at a swim meet with my son. And he’s trained really hard. He’s provincial level, athlete, top athlete like so he would be at the sectional level in the US. He’s a swimmer, and I was at a swim meet, and he just didn’t swim. Like he expected. He didn’t swim like the coaches expected, he didn’t swim like we thought he would. And he was super disappointed. But it was also super confusing to him, because he didn’t know what was wrong. And I think that that is some of the hardest. He’s sort of leading his own life, his swim career, as his mom, I’m sort of helping him make decisions about his path. And those are leadership moments for me. And I, it’s easy for me to choose on my podcast and my social media to talk about when things go, Well, this didn’t go well. And and so I had to try to think about what, what I had to offer him from a place that things weren’t going well.

So I asked a lot of questions like I asked him, how he wanted to make decisions. I asked him a lot about shame, and a lot. But a couple of times, I asked him about shame that he feels shame that he didn’t swim the way he expected. And I think that shame is an interesting question to ask people from a place of leadership, like, how do they let go of shame? I don’t think shame is very useful for people when they’re doing their best. It. I don’t think it’s very useful when they’re doing their worst either. I think shame really kind of belongs out of the world of leadership. I asked, I asked him, what he could learn from either option. And I also let him make one decision and then sit with it, and try it on his body, and then asked him to read, you know, rethink about it. And did he want to change it, so he wasn’t locked in. So I left him lots of options. And I was pretty happy about all that from a leadership perspective. He didn’t get what he wanted. But we don’t always get what we want in life in business and leadership. We don’t get to order up from the universe what we want. Sometimes we have to grapple with things we don’t want. And so it was a really interesting exercise to do to be with Him and to think about who I am. As we went through all of that.

On a completely different note, I’m super excited about my guest today. Excuse me. I’m super excited about my guests today. My guest is Jeffrey Pollock. And he is a conductor. He was chosen by the League of American orchestras as a feature conductor for their prestigious national conductor preview. He’s known for his musical versatility, his innovative concert programming and his ability to make connections with audiences.

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Jeff, welcome to my show.

Thanks, Melanie. Good afternoon.

Well, I am super excited to be here with you today. And and we’ve had lots of we’re doing a little bit of book club on my book club right now on the podcast. And I know you and I’ve had lots of conversations about bottlenecks, and we are doing the chapter in the book. We’re gonna get to all sorts of things all about music in a minute. But testing bottlenecks, any thoughts on you know, what sticks, like if you apply this to you, or thoughts you’ve had, what thoughts do you have about bottlenecks and…

Well, I think it’s been really wonderful working with you to figure out about about identifying what bottlenecks are, sometimes not. I’m particularly remembering conversations you and I had about I think this is also an In your book about a restaurant you went to with the grill master. And and that the the what they might not even seen that the bottleneck was the was the was it the speed of the grill from making burgers, what’s been really useful working with you is reflecting when you reflect with me to try to even make me see what the bottlenecks are, because sometimes I find that we may not even know what the bottlenecks are.

Well, and if we think about a bottleneck, I think it’s it’s useful to sort of talk about what do we mean, I mean, we know, we talk, it’s almost like common knowledge what a bottleneck is. But when we think about it, it gets a little more complex, especially when we start to try to improve something. Because our tendency is to try to improve a whole bunch of things at one time. And it’s really bad for data collection, actually, to try to change a whole bunch of things because you don’t actually know if anything worked. If it works great, then you can leave everything the same. But you don’t know if you need to leave everything in place if you if you do everything. And then the other thing that I think is interesting is about bottlenecks is if you find the bottleneck and experiment in that place, you’re likely to have the best results. So yeah, the this was Weber’s, this is a hamburger place in Ontario, that people drive like used to cross the highway, they eventually built them a bridge across the highway. So they would stop, you know, stopping traffic on this highway up to the to the Muskoka is, and and they have, you know, line out the door and watching, it’s like, you can see where the bottleneck is, because you see where they’re waiting, where, where things stop. And so if they, they don’t have to fix everything, like they might think, Oh, we have to hire people at every station in order to to improve our throughput. So if you think of work flowing through, you don’t have to fix everything, you only have to fix one thing. So they might need two people on the grill. And they’re able to double their productivity. If you know, if you will always have a new bottleneck. So if you, if you fix one bottleneck, you’ll find out what the next one is. So in any business, knowledge, work, factory factory work, it’s easy to see because there’ll be a backlog right before it. But knowledge work has the same things. And it kind of makes me curious about like music, like what are the bottlenecks for music?

What well, I was thinking about this, because you you speak about, you know, process oriented and throughput and output. And I’m not necessarily certain that that I mean, there’s a there’s the output, which is ultimately the performances of the musicians. But there’s also the getting there. And even though I mean, even though we may not do more performances, the way you want have more burgers or faster delivery method. It we can look at it as well, what how can we improve the experience for people who come to our concerts? How do as musicians we can we are always on the process of continually improvement our music making. But if I’m leading a rehearsal, if I leading an orchestra rehearsal, I have to make decisions. In there’s there’s never enough time for an orchestra to rehearse. There’s there’s never enough time. And that can be its own bottleneck, I suppose. But the decisions that I have to make as a leader is figuring out what is the largest bottleneck that we need to address as a group right now, what’s going to have the biggest result? And so what’s what is currently, you know, if there’s a transition musically, what is making us not being able to affect that transition, right? What is the thing that’s holding us all back or getting in our way and being able to do that? And that’s just the music making process. But then there’s the whole organization, how does the organization do things? How does the organizers market itself? What is its brand? How is it managed? I mean, there are so many different aspects within the symphony orchestra to further where there could be bottlenecks without necessarily using the lens of product output to.

I never would have thought about applying like what do you practice in rehearsal, you’re always choosing your bottlenecks. You’re not going to practice the thing that’s going really well over and over and over again. You’re always going to choose the A place that isn’t, isn’t going perfectly. So that’s a great example of, of bottlenecks. It’s fantastic.

And you know, another particularly interesting point is you’re exactly right. It’s always the working on things that need to be better, again, because of the limited amount of time. And hopefully, a good leader will be able to read I mean, people in your district know that that’s what they’re there to do. But if you are a person, as we all are, eventually, people get to a point where the constantly being pointed out the things that continue to improve, could conceivably get somebody down. Who can, you know, gee, I’m doing my best here, you know, we’re all doing our best but and so the leadership role in a conductor is to always find ways to strive for continuous improvement. But do it in such a way that people don’t feel you’re going after them, or you’re unhappy with them. It’s always about thinking about the entire product, and about what we’re doing together.

Well, I’d love to hear and just move away from you know, book club, and sure about how you’re experimenting in your life and your work right now.

Well, since I have since I’ve started with Sinfonia and caster, this is my second season with them. Boy, it has been one constant experiment one after another. I mean, I can go through a laundry list of things. First of all, I, I became their, their music director, when we were still in the thick of COVID, and trying to reopen. And so the first bottleneck that we had before anything was, we had to find a place to perform. Because the former players were to perform with the orchestra performed even before I had started with them, had closed its doors and saying, Sorry, we’re not going to do that for our health reasons for our organization. So I was so the first thing I had to do was, even find a room, find a place where we could perform. And then we had to, I mean, boy, that had to be innovative about also what we played and how we did it. In response to the COVID situation. The very first concert I gave with the orchestra was a concert, only featuring string players. Because that was a time when people were really, really worried about masking and, and those issues, and orchestras were putting up shields, people were masking. And we chose to do do a performance where the musicians could play masked, and that’s the string players hard to play. unmask hard to play masked if you’re a trumpeter, it’s just not going to happen. And so that was the that was one way we had to be innovative was first of all, where are we going to play? What how are we going to play to respond to the public health situation. And then how I’m innovating now is the luckily, there we are, we now perform in the Lancaster Memorial Art Center, which is this terrific new facility in Ancaster. And we have this fantastic space to perform in called teller Hall. And that has opened so many doors for us in terms of what repertoire we’re able to play. And in particular, want us one way in which I’m being innovative is that this concert that we have coming up, we are able to utilize the sound system in the in this state of the art concert hall to be able to play this piece of music that features the the features field recordings of Arctic birds that are played through a house sound system. At the same time as the orchestra is making its music live. And the pardoning of the dovetailing together of these two elements creates for this complete, surrounding surrounding it’s a really immersive experience for the listeners. That’s something we could not have done. When we were on our previous facility. And we’re pairing this piece, this piece, which this piece is around 140 years old now. And we’re pairing this piece with, we’re giving the Canadian premiere of a piece written by and Asian American composer. Her name is Judy Bansal. And we are give this a b that she’s interesting, our organization to give the first performance on Canadian soil of her work. And the work is called Songs from the deep. And it is work that really tries to evoke this surging, roiling ocean. So the first half of our concert is these two works that are about nature. And getting back to your point about innovation, why this is a significant is for forever, people and maybe yourself, Melanie, included, tend to think of or can think of orchestras as a relic dinosaur kind of an institution playing all the old hits playing something and it’s not a viable, living, breathing organism playing music that makes people’s ears perk up or raise an eyebrow and go, Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, I hadn’t thought about that before. We are doing something bold. Bye, bye. Know when I put forth this program, to members of my orchestra, some of the room G audience is going to want to hear music like that music, that’s new music that you know, our audiences, they want to hear Tchaikovsky, they want to hear Beethoven. And I. So as a as a leader, I’m being innovative where I say, Trust me, I want to drive no one away. I want to bring more people in. And we can do that by playing music that is written by, by bipoc composers. And we can play music that really makes the audience reevaluate what even a piece of music is, and can be in the experience in the piece that we’re playing with. With the bird recordings. I’m incredibly excited about it. And it is an experiment, Melanie, because I don’t know, I don’t know how our audience is going to respond. I have a belief, I believe they’re going to be more engaged. Interestingly, on the second half of the program, we’re playing the first symphony of classical hitmaker Beethoven himself. And so there’s, for people who want the regular classical music, which I love. There’s something for them. My, my closet belief is that people are our audience is going to like the music on the first half of war. And so but it’s, it’s, it’s innovating, by playing the unknown.

And as a leader, so you’ve been in this role for a little over a year, year and a half, maybe now? And how do you like how do you decide how, how far to go? How to measure? How do you measure whether or not it’s working? How do you evaluate the the whether or not your innovation Your choices are? I’m not going to say good or bad, but going in the direction that you want them to go?

That’s a great question. For us to get for us to consider. The the organization board is coming up with an audience survey to see if people what people’s responses are. The orchestra welcomes all manner of social media posts, positive negative, give us your reactions, just a direct conduit. And but honestly, the most immediate and for us, the tangible result is what’s the applause like? I mean, there’s there’s there’s the first thing is are people are there people in the seats. Is our brand appealing enough to when we look out to perform, are there people in the seats who want to hear what we have to offer? And the second thing is when we’re done playing the music is the applause. Yay. Yay. Or is there palpable enthusiasm is the end. I mean this and we can as performers, we can really measure that it’s Is there a graph that we’ve calculated and done a spreadsheet on? No, we could, I suppose. But, but there’s that and then there’s the engagement after the fact. There’s the engagement, like I said, the social media pieces and this audience survey. We’re we’re struggling to try to figure out how what’s the best way to really get that audience perspective because some people don’t want to fill out surveys, somebody doesn’t want to scan a QR code and go to the trouble to do that. So we try to gather from a number of data points about how we’re meeting our mission.

I mean, I think it’s interesting for every business to figure out how they measure whether the decisions they make are working. And I mean, most businesses don’t even get applause, so or tickets. That way the sales are applause. So I, you’ve got some pretty good measurements right there. Where can people find you, Jeff?

Well, my website, I’m at pollockconducts.com. And the orchestra for with whom I work for, it’s on the music director. That’s Sinfonia ancaster.com. And we are performing our concert upcoming is on March 10. And that’s at the Memorial Art Center in Lancaster. And I think it’s Memorial arts.ca, I believe is the website where you can find that information on the concert.

Well, it has been a pleasure to have you on the show today. And I look forward to seeing many more shows with Symphonia Ancaster. And whatever else you’re up to with your interesting innovations. And thanks for being here.

Thank you, Melanie. Thanks for having me.

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It was great being here with you today. It was great talking with Jeffrey Pollock. Look for where you can innovate look for where you can measure your innovation and go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Jeffrey Pollock – LinkedIn
• Jeffrey Pollock- Website

Jeffrey Pollock

Jeffrey Pollock is known for his musical versatility, his innovative concert programming, and for his ability to make connections with audiences. Chosen by the League of American Orchestras as a featured conductor for their prestigious 2001 National Conductor Preview, he has performed with orchestras across North America including the Detroit, Houston, Nashville, Cleveland Chamber and Charlotte Symphonies in the US and the Windsor Symphony, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Niagara Symphony and the Hamilton Philharmonic in Canada. After taking a short break from conducting to raise his twin children, Jeffrey Pollock has returned to the podium as the Music Director for Sinfonia Ancaster.

A sensitive accompanist, he has performed with virtuoso artists such as Zuill Bailey, Conrad Tao, Angela Cheng and Jennifer Frautschi. While Associate Conductor with the Fort Worth Symphony and Resident Conductor of the Toledo Symphony, he worked with a wide variety of international performers, including Roberta Flack, Wynnona Judd, Randy Newman, Pink Martini, Nanci Griffith, Arturo Sandoval and Natalie MacMaster.

For the opera stage, he has conducted productions of The Barber of Seville, Cavalleria Rusticana, and The Turn of the Screw and has worked as chorus master and accompanist for a number of regional opera companies in the mid-Atlantic. When not on the concert stage, Jeff can be found mixing vintage cocktails, teaching, or exploring new hiking trails.

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