Why Emotions Matter for Choral Leaders

When your meetings are efficient but the tension keeps rising, what’s really going on? For choral leaders, the hardest challenges often live beneath the agenda and require a different kind of leadership.

January 7, 2026
Matt Taylor

Imagine you and your team planning for a big event (a concert, or a gala for example). You run highly-structured, thoroughly planned meetings where you share important updates and people report in on progress toward clear, measurable goals. The meetings are efficient and you make it through your agenda consistently. And the meetings feel tense. There are conflicts and disagreements that are elephants in the room.  You feel emotions simmering under the surface. And as you get closer to the event, the temperature seems to increase. So you double down on meeting planning and pick up the pace, right? 

No. That response would be doubling down on the most common mistake that leaders make:  treating adaptive challenges as if they are technical. When we try to take the technical route and ignore the real, deeper, messier issues, that’s when things go off the rails.  

The Most Common Leadership Mistake: Treating Adaptive Problems Like Technical Ones

To understand why, we need to distinguish between two types of leadership challenges: technical and adaptive. Technical challenges are easy to identify and can be solved by experts or authority. Technical challenges don’t push against existing organizational boundaries and people tend to be receptive to solutions made by leaders. Adaptive challenges are harder to define and they require shifts in roles, relationships, approaches and even beliefs. Adaptive challenges are inherently emotional because people are afraid of losing something important to them. And they can only be solved by the people experiencing the challenge.   

 Adaptive challenges don’t come with the kind of technical playbook that leaders desire. They’re complicated and emotionally charged. This is why the biggest mistake that leaders make is treating adaptive challenges as if they are technical. 

 I am a life-long chorister (currently tenor 1 at Cathedral Choral Society) and a leadership development expert. I operationalize Emotional Intelligence (EI) theory to help leaders and their communities thrive, and have had the honor and pleasure of working with dozens of choral arts executives. I have found that, just as performing excellent choral music is inherently emotional, leading choral music organizations is inherently emotional work. This is because emotions are contagious and the emotions of the leaders creating the space are the most contagious. Choral leaders create the conditions for making music. They also create the conditions for their teams to show up and create the right organizational environment for the choir. 

 This spring I had the opportunity to sit around a table with executive choral leaders from across the country and listening to the big challenges that keep them up at night. Some are timely, like the chaos created by federal policy and funding shifts. Most however, are perennial: managing role transitions (for self or others), creating and managing functional roles and responsibilities, managing planning cycles, performance management, juggling limited human resources to get the work done, managing co-leader and board partnerships, and more.  

 Most everyone around the table has been promoted to choral leadership because they excel in the arts, community organizing, or some technical aspects of management. As a group, we have little to no formal leadership training.  So leaders are looking for tools and protocols that they can use as playbooks to lead through their dilemma. They’re looking for “moves.”  

What’s Really Happening Below the Green Line

 Unfortunately, there is not a playbook for most of the issues we face. Leading adaptively requires us to be aware of what is happening “below the surface,” using emotional data to engage stakeholders on inherently emotional issues.  

Matt Taylor Green Line

 

In her Six Circle Model, Margaret Wheatley created the simple but powerful concept of the Green Line to illustrate this below-the-surface concept.1 The three circles above the Green Line embody the conversation we tend to focus on with our stakeholders, in essence, what’s on the agenda. The three circles below the Green Line represent another entirely different, potentially high-stakes level of interaction that may go unnoticed and unaddressed. This interaction is emotional and personal. It is the interaction of identities, values, assumptions, emotions, histories and more. What is happening below the Green Line is always in the room, whether we are aware of it and engage with it or not.  When the real challenge is below the line and we aren’t aware of or refuse to acknowledge it, we create subtext that compounds the adaptive issue. 

 When choral leaders see their teams through the lens of the Green Line, you can almost see the light bulbs turn on. Below the agenda items and progress reports are confusions and resentments about ownership suppressed by a culture of “nice.” There are fears about burnout, change, job security, power imbalances, and more. There are competing values, commitments, organizational histories, and work styles that no one has ever named. When considering their teams below the Green Line, most leaders realize that they aren’t talking about these “below the line” issues.  Their teams aren’t having the conversations about their real obstacles.  

Strong adaptive leaders value what is happening below the Green Line and are adept at surfacing these issues and engaging with them. Part of this strength is skill, and part of it is mindset.  Look for my follow-up piece on to building these competencies to engage below the Green Line.  

Matt Taylor is the CEO and founder of The Noble Story Group- a leadership coaching and training group that operationalizes Emotional Intelligence (EI). Matt has coached and trained hundreds of education and non-profit leaders over the last 15 years