When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(45)
Put another way, groups must synchronize on three levels—to the boss, to the tribe, and to the heart.
THE CHOIRMASTER, THE COXSWAIN, AND THE CLOCK: SYNCHING TO THE BOSS
David Simmons is the same height as Ahilu Adhav, but the resemblance dissolves where the tape measure ends. Simmons is white, American, and a law school graduate who spends his days not lugging lunches but corralling choristers. After escaping practicing law twenty-five years ago—he walked into the office of his firm’s senior partner one day and said, “I just can’t do this”—this musically inclined son of a Lutheran pastor became a choir director. Now he’s the artistic director for the Congressional Chorus in Washington, D.C. And on a frosty Friday night at the end of winter, he’s standing in front of eighty singers at the city’s Atlas Performing Arts Center as the chorus performs Road Trip!—a two-and-a-half-hour show of more than twenty American songs and medleys.
Choirs are peculiar. A lone voice can sing a song. But combine a few voices, sometimes lots of voices, and the result transcends the sum of the parts. Yet bringing all those voices together is challenging, especially for a chorus like this, which is composed entirely of amateurs. The Congressional Chorus earned its name when it began in the mid-1980s as a ragtag group of twelve Capitol Hill staffers seeking a platform for their love of music and an outlet for their frustrations with politics. Today, about one hundred adults—some congressional aides still, but also plenty of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, marketers, and teachers—perform in the choir. (Washington, D.C., in fact, has more choruses per capita than any city in the U.S.) Many singers have experience in university or religious choirs. Some have genuine talent. But none of them are professionals. And because all of them have other work obligations, they can rehearse only a few times per week.
So how does Simmons keep them in synch? How, during the evening’s California surfer medley, does he get six dozen amateur singers swaying on risers and a half dozen amateur dancers performing in front of them to switch seamlessly—in real time and in front of an audience—from “Surfer Girl” to “I Get Around” and conclude with everyone singing the final sound of the final syllable of the final word of “Surfin’ U.S.A.” at precisely the same moment?
“I’m a dictator,” he tells me. “I work them really hard.”
Simmons auditions each member, and he alone decides who’s in and who’s out. He begins rehearsals precisely at 7 p.m. with each minute mapped out in advance. He selects every piece of music for every concert. (To be more democratic and let members choose what to sing, he says, would turn a concert into a “potluck dinner” rather than a three-star Michelin meal.) He brooks little dissent from the singers. But the reason isn’t some deep-seated authoritarian impulse. It’s because he’s discovered that efficiency in this realm demands firm direction and, occasionally, gentle despotism. As one of his choristers who initially bridled at such leadership once told him, “I always find it amazing that it starts off with nobody knowing anything at the first rehearsal. And by the last concert, you can flick your wrist and we all put the T in the same place.”
The first principle of synching fast and slow is that group timing requires a boss—someone or something above and apart from the group itself to set the pace, maintain the standards, and focus the collective mind.
In the early 1990s, a young professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management was frustrated by a gap in the scholarly understanding of how organizations functioned. “Time is arguably the most pervasive aspect of our lives,” Deborah Ancona wrote, yet it “has not played a significant nor explicit role in organizational behavioral research.” So in a 1992 paper titled “Timing Is Everything,” she borrowed a concept from the chronobiology of individuals and applied it to the anthropology of teams.3
You’ll remember from chapter 1 that within our body and brain are biological clocks that affect our performance, mood, and wakefulness. But you might not recall that those clocks typically run a bit longer than twenty-four hours. Left on our own—say, by spending months in an underground chamber not exposed to light or other people, as in some experiments—our behavior gradually drifts so that before long we’re asleep in the afternoons and wide-awake at night.4 What prevents such misalignment in the aboveground world are environmental and social signals such as sunrise and alarm clocks. The process by which our internal clocks synch up with external cues so we wake up in time for work or go to sleep at a reasonable hour is called “entrainment.”
Ancona argued that entrainment also occurs in organizations.5 Certain activities—product development or marketing—establish their own tempos. But those rhythms necessarily must synchronize with the external rhythms of organizational life—fiscal years, sales cycles, even the age of the company or the stage of people’s careers. Just as individuals entrain to external cues, Ancona argued, so do organizations.
In chronobiology, those external cues are known as “zeitgebers” (German for “time giver”)—“environmental signals that can synchronize the circadian clock,” as Till Roenneberg puts it.6 Ancona’s thinking helped establish that groups also need zeitgebers. Sometimes that pacesetter is a single leader, someone like David Simmons. Indeed, the evidence shows that groups generally attune to the pacing preferences of their highest-status members.7 However, status and stature are not always one.