The OffBeat #54: What's in Your Stick Bag?
Drumsticks, brushes, mallets, and more
You know how Padma Lakshmi (moment of appreciation for her 19 seasons’ duties) used to boot out eliminated Top Chef contestants with the line, “Please pack your knives and go”?
Professional chefs hand-select, care for, and transport a personalized set of knives in a knife roll or bag. Chefs’ individual curation of knives is honed by their ergonomic needs, tastes, preferences, and style.
Serious musicians are the same way with the portable tools of their trade—reeds for saxophone players, strings for guitarists, and cymbals and sticks for drummers. In my playing days I may or may not have transported my whole set to a gig, but I’d often bring my own cymbals and always bring my stick bag. Inside: a combination of collected implements for different sounds and types of tunes. Various styles of drumsticks, plus rods, brushes, and mallets. Also a drum key for adjusting drum head tension, plus spare washers and felts for cymbal stands. And a pencil to mark up sheet music.
Other stuff drummers may have in their stick bags: earplugs, metronome, tuner, dampening gels, spare cables, extra snare wires, gaff tape.
Workplace leadership calls for the same approach to assemblage of tools and materials. Over years of experience and practice, we collect and catalogue a custom toolset that serves our style of leadership and suits our needs.
For example, if you’ve been on a journey to combat impostor syndrome you may have implements in your stick bag to preserve self-confidence. If you have a fine-tuned approach to kicking off with new direct reports you may have tools in your stick bag for onboarding and acclimation. If you use a mental model for how you think about leadership (like Frank Blake’s inverted pyramid), that belongs in your stick bag. Same with frameworks, like the incredible Kat Cole’s Ask / Answer / Act. And rules of thumb. And exercises for team all-hands and offsites.
Thinking of your personalized leadership toolkit as a chef’s knife roll or drummer’s stick bag provides the remove to, paradoxically, both simplify your approach to leading and lay plain how nuanced leadership is. No two drummers’ stick bags look precisely alike, nor should yours for leadership.
What’s in your stick bag?
Have a great week,
Allison