The podcast by project managers for project managers. Learn from the intriguing parallels between a jazz ensemble and an effective project team. Gerald J. Leonard demonstrates that music and project management share common principles as he offers a unique perspective on fostering a high-performing project team through the integration of music, productivity, workplace culture, and neuroscience.
Table of Contents
01:41 … Combining Jazz and Project Management05:12 … Gerald the Author07:31 … Incorporating Jazz and Project Management09:39 … A Cadence to Managing Projects11:50 … Recognizing the Traits13:57 … Mentoring and Coaching14:52 … Kevin and Kyle16:10 … Jazz and Productivity20:01 … Gerald’s Recovery Story23:04 … The Pomodoro Technique and Flow26:03 … Motivation and Accountability31:23 … Employee Burnout34:33 … Getting into the Right Rhythm36:08 … Contact Gerald37:42 … Closing
GERALD LEONARD: ...it’s like playing jazz where things are moving quickly, meeting every day, things are happening. Every two weeks you’re delivering something. So things are happening really rapidly, and they can adjust because the customers say, “Hey, I don’t want that. Let’s move to this one. I want this requirement now.” And you have to move and adjust. Well, that’s like playing jazz. Again, the song is moving pretty quickly. So everyone has to, one, know their part, but also really lean in and listen.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome, fellow project champions, to Manage This! I'm Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the harmonious studio adventure today is Bill Yates, and Danny Brewer, our sound guy.
Hold onto your project plans, because today we're diving headfirst into a fusion of beats and business. You heard it right – jazz and project management are about to collide in a symphony of ideas with a trailblazing maestro of maximizing potential, Gerald J. Leonard.
Gerald is an IT project management consultant; but he also has two degrees in music and is an accomplished bass guitarist. As a professional bassist, he uses jazz metaphors to illustrate how to build supportive and effective team cultures. Creating successful projects and high-performing teams is much like building a jazz ensemble.
This isn't your average podcast – it's a symphony of ideas, where project management meets the jazzed-up art of success. So, buckle up, hit play, and let the show begin!
Hi, Gerald. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you so much for being our guest.
GERALD LEONARD: Wendy and Bill, thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here.
Combining Jazz and Project Management
WENDY GROUNDS: Can you tell us, just as an introduction, how you’ve combined your dual careers as a professional jazz musician and as a project management consultant?
GERALD LEONARD: Yes. I had done my bachelor’s and master’s in music, studied through the Manhattan School of Music with a gentleman at Juilliard, and played professionally in the city. And then I did some ministry work back in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and I wanted to get back into music, but now I was married with two kids.
I was kind of done with clubs and those kinds of things and thought, “Okay, so how can I keep playing and also make a good living and raise my kids?” So I got into IT at a time where, if you could spell IT, they were letting you in. And so I got in. You know, and I had my master’s already, so I thought, “I’m not going to go back to school for another degree.” And then I realized they had all these certifications out there, the Novell certifications, the Microsoft certifications, the MCSE certifications, and all these different things like that. So I just started going that route.
That led me to a place where for years I was doing project work, became a project management consultant with a number of different companies, did work for the National Archives and major corporations, helping them at the enterprise level. And then I would go and play shows, or I’d play a concert, or I’d play a recital. And I started noticing that sometimes I’d go into a gig, and I have no idea who the musicians are. After the second rehearsal, we’re all best friends, we’re hanging out, we’re showing each other’s family pictures, and we’re talking about our careers and where we went to school, and we’re just connected emotionally.
And there are a number of projects that I was on. I remember one with the National Archives, we had a great team together. And I thought that this is like playing jazz. This is like playing music because everyone on the team, the developers, the business analysts, the testers and so on, me as the project consultant, we all kind of brought our expertise to the table.
And working with a gentleman named Larry Hines, his name’s popped in my head. He was like the executive sponsor, our main audience, and he gave us the big picture of what we were trying to accomplish, and everyone just kind of subjugated their expertise to the focus of making this a great project.
It actually turned out to be a really, really great project back in the day with the National Archives when they were doing, like, an electronic archiving system.
So that started the germination for me of seeing how music and what I’d learned as a kid playing music and all the things I’ve learned as a musician were being applied into my business world. And then after that, all the other projects, there were elements of the vibe, or a feeling like I was playing music or a feeling like I’m working with other musicians.
Then I’d go do music, and I was able to take the things that I was working with from business and apply them to my music so I was like running more efficient rehearsals or more profitable concerts and so on. So it just all kind of tied together, basically culminated into me and around 2015 meeting with a gentleman named Dr. Willie Jolley and his wife Dee.
Willie’s one of the top five speakers in the world when it comes to motivational speaking. Dee had her master’s in education.
And I went to them for like a weekend workshop. They honed in and said, “You know, you really help companies with their culture. And at that time, the song “All About That Bass” was out. And Willie said, “If you could write a book and incorporate your bass with your consulting,” and he’s just, “Man, you’re going to make millions, do amazing work.”
Gerald the Author
I took that idea, and over time that book became “Culture is the Bass.” You let that settle. Just think about your favorite song where you’re kind of like bopping your head and listening to it. When it starts off, you hear the drums and the bass. And that bass sets the tone for is it rock? Is it funk? Is it R&B? Or is it country? What is it? You can tell right off the bat based on the bass line.
And I always thought you walk into Nordstrom, or you go shop on Amazon, or you go into your favorite local store, it has a vibe. It has a feel. And there’s something about it that you like that keeps bringing you back. It’s the culture, which is kind of like the bass line. And so my second book turned out to be “Workplace Jazz” because a lot of work went from really large project teams back in the day.
I mean, sometimes you’d go on a consulting engagement. There’s 20 people, and companies were paying for it. And pretty soon it whittled down to where you go on a consulting engagement, and there’s three of you. Or there’s four of you. And it’s like, we’re it, guys. We’ve got to make this thing work. We’re the quartet. Right? So that book was about what I learned from playing in small ensembles, and how it would mimic the concept of agile work as a project manager.
And then in 2015 I wrote a course, because I had done some work with the Center of Medicare & Medicaid Services where I helped oversee two major programs in project management where we did certification courses. And so I then wrote a course for myself to take the PfMP certification because I already had my PMP, the Project Management Professional Certification, and I had already spent my 10 years doing it, and I wanted the top certification, which is the Project Portfolio Management. I had been doing that work for a while. But at that time there were very few books around that are courses. So I wrote my own course and took the exam and passed it.
And so a lot of my material now is based on that. And in fact my last book, which was a business novel, called “A Symphony of Choices,” where a bass player becomes the orchestra manager and has to manage the orchestra. So he reaches out to an old professor to teach him how to do that. And the old professor, Dr. Carl Richardson, teaches him my course in small bites, all about Project Portfolio Management, decision-making, workplace engagement, and project management. And basically mentorship saved a concert season
Incorporating Jazz and Project Management
BILL YATES: That is so cool. Well, I feel like we’ve got a sense for who you are. And your right brain and your left brain are at 100%. They are kicking along, man. This is so cool. So we want to go deeper into this topic of music and draw on the parallel of music and project management. What are the key benefits of incorporating jazz music into project management practices?
GERALD LEONARD: Well, you know, when you listen to jazz, what you’ll notice is that they always start off with some kind of a melody; right? And it may be a short melody, maybe a blues type of melody. But they have this theme of music, right, that they keep coming back to. But then once they play that, one of the musicians steps forward, and they start soloing.
And soloing is simply, they’re not just like making this stuff up. They understand the patterns of what they’re playing against. They understand what they’re playing and how it correlates to what’s being played.
