My Turn

Managing the Dream

I joined ASTA twenty-five years ago because I needed instrument insurance. Out on my own with a modest income and a new career as a teacher, I gave little thought to belonging to a fraternity of professionals who share a dream and a vision for our profession. I was after inexpensive, good-quality insurance, and ASTA could provide it. My motivation for membership was entirely consumer-oriented, and I was pleased to learn that my dues bought me not only the insurance I needed, but also a host of unexpected member benefits and services.

Back then I may have viewed my annual membership fee only as a payment for ASTA services, but through the years more profound and less tangible benefits of ASTA membership have become more important for me. The services ASTA provides its members today may be very much better than they were twenty-five years ago, but nonetheless, for me, they are of secondary importance. Today, I see my membership in ASTA with NSOA as a gateway into a vision for the future of our profession. As a member, I am a part of a community actively involved in providing opportunities for everyone to participate in the glory of string playing. I may have joined ASTA for the insurance, but I stuck around for the dream!

Warren Bennis, who has authored or edited more than twenty-five books and 1,500 articles on institutions and leadership, stresses that a primary role for leaders is to “manage the dream” and to “communicate the vision.” In the book Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, Bennis and co-author Burt Nanus explain that choosing a direction for an organization is dependent on a leader developing “a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement…. With a vision, the leader provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization” (p. 82-83).

A crucial result of leaders articulating a vision and a dream, according to Bennis and Nanus, is that to do so empowers members of the organization to become actively involved in the organization's work. My own path as an ASTA member and leader bears this out. As I have become more involved in the shared quest for the betterment of our profession, my relationship with the association has deepened: what began as consumerism —dollars for services—has broadened into an understanding that my membership is a gateway into a community's quest for a better world for string teaching and playing.

Bennis and Nanus tell us that when leaders clearly articulate an organization's “desired future state and when this image is widely shared, individuals are able to find their own roles both in the organization and in the larger society of which they are a part. This empowers individuals and confers status upon them They gain a sense of importance…. When individuals feel that they can make a difference and that they can improve the society in which they are living through their participation in an organization, then it is much more likely that they will bring vigor and enthusiasm to their tasks and that the results of their work will be mutually reinforcing … a major precondition for success has been satisfied.”

When our future aspirations are well articulated, our dreams are attainable. Expressing and encouraging the pursuit of our shared dreams is perhaps the primary mandate for our national and state leadership.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to express ideas on leadership to ASTA with NSOA's new state presidents, at a retreat held at the National Office. I asked each of our new leaders to express a personal vision for a perfect world of string education. Our state presidents' eloquent and moving statements expressed a powerful shared belief in our profession's future. I encouraged each state president to review this personal vision statement every day, and I challenged each of them to find ways to communicate this personal vision as a realistic goal for the future. Together, we explored Bennis's assertion that “Great groups are optimistic, not realistic,” and that an important mandate for leadership is to first clearly believe in our own vision for the future and then to express this vision not as an abstract hope for the future, but as a clearly attainable and reachable shared goal.

As a student, I was fortunate to work with a profound teacher for whom keeping the bigger goals of string playing was always a primary goal. When his students would become overly enmeshed in the details of technical study, he would remind us of the story of the three brick layers, each of whom was asked to describe what their work was about. The first bricklayer, looking surprised that the question needed to even be asked, said he was laying bricks. The second asserted that he was building a wall. The third, filled with purpose and with pride, asserted that she was building a cathedral.

When, as leaders, we clearly articulate our own dream for the future, we help elevate our colleagues' participation within our profession, and we enhance their understanding of membership in our association. By articulating a vision, we are inviting our membership to join with us in the building of cathedrals for the future.