Flow in Leadership

Awakening the passion for performance

Activities that produce flow create a strong natural motivation to immerse one’s self more deeply and refine the skills required for those activities. They elicit intrinsic motivation.

Motivation and engagement

Intrinsically motivated people do not engage themselves for fear of punishment or the prospect of reward, but primarily out of personal interest, enthusiasm and voluntary commitment. They are the most valuable assets of any company, any team, any ensemble.

Therefore, the key topic of this seminar is how to create the conditions which generate flow in employees. The seminar is based on results of a scientific study on flow-experiences of orchestral musicians as well as findings from motivational psychology and behavioral biology.

Leadership condensed: the conductor

Nowhere can leadership be experienced more vividly than in a conductor standing in front of an orchestra. The analysis of flow-furthering and flow-impeding leadership behavior of conductors immediately highlights the consequences of different leadership styles on the commitment and motivation of employees. Flow-furthering and flow-impeding factors are analysed and transferred to leadership in business.

Using different well-known conductors as examples, different leadership styles will be clearly illustrated. Flow-enhancing and flow-hindering factors will be drawn from these examples, and the transferability of those factors to daily working life will be demonstrated.

The fundamental human motivations

Findings from motivational psychology and behavioral biology have shown that flow is mainly produced in activities which allow the satisfaction of fundamental human needs:

• The desire to experience oneself as competent and efficient
• The desire to indulge in one’s interests, to follow one’s curiosity, to explore and discover
• The desire for affiliation, identification and social belonging
• The desire for appreciation
• The desire for autonomy and self-determination

Leadership behavior which respects those fundamental human needs creates genuine commitment in employees.

The purpose of this seminar is to sensitize managers for these correlations; it shows ways to model leadership style and procedures in such a way that performance and job satisfaction of executives and employees alike are enhanced by experiencing flow more and more frequently.

“The same analytic categories developed for deep-flow activities should be applied to occupations. We ought to find out how many of a person’s skills are actually utilized by any given job, and hence how much flow can be expected to be produced by the task, and for how long. A job in which people cannot experience flow should receive a high social-cost rating, in that it contributes to human stagnation and a consequently heightened need for external rewards, or for ‘cheap thrills’ that stifle the growth of skills.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi