• Have a clear and vibrant vision for your people's success
Leaders who have not yet done the hard work of imagining a best-case scenario for their organisations will inevitably default to leading through correction and criticism. But when your highest priority is developing the right goals and strategy, you will spend most of your time inspiring people about them and guiding them towards successful achievement.
• Listen carefully to your people
A maestro listens "microscopically" to the orchestra. She uses the special perspective of her podium to take in both the big picture and the relevant details. In her imagination she juxtaposes the reality of the orchestra's playing with her best-case vision of how they might sound. Subtracting one from the other shows the crucial gap she needs to narrow or even eliminate. Armed with this knowledge she can focus the organisation's attention on those few crucial points.
• Translate your agenda into directions that can easily be understood and executed by the players
It is a major accomplishment to devise the right goals, but that is no guarantee they will be achieved. Only your workforce can accomplish that, and the leader and the worker will have vastly different understandings of the vision. The leader's understanding is based on the pressing strategic needs, as seen from the podium. The worker's view is shaped by the chair he occupies, where the big-picture view of the organisation is very much in the distant background. So the leader needs to translate the vision so that it makes sense from every chair. The workforce cannot act effectively until the leader expresses directions and assignments in the language they understand.
• It's not about you. It's about how the orchestra sounds under your direction.
It's very easy for a conductor to personalise the orchestra's behaviour and see it as reflection on him or his abilities. But the orchestra is not nearly so concerned with what a conductor does or says as they are with how they sound. Therefore sharpen your focus on simply getting the best results, and don't get distracted by interpersonal dynamics.
For more, see - http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/guestinsights/2009/10/leadership-secrets-from-a-maestro.html
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