Frans Campher: Why leaders must stop playing and conduct?

Frans Campher is a leadership educator, executive coach, and former corporate leader, and we spoke about the shift leaders must make from managing work to leading people. After 30 years in insurance, risk, and global corporate roles, Frans moved into executive education and leadership development, shaped by a personal turning point where he realized that “who I was was sufficient” and stopped “bending myself out of shape” to fit different expectations.

At the heart of his work is a simple but demanding transition: moving from expert to orchestrator. Frans uses the orchestra metaphor to explain why leadership stalls when people cling to expertise. Leaders are often promoted for how well they “play the instrument,” but real leadership begins when they accept “putting down the instruments” and focus on conducting others. Drawing on Benjamin Zander’s idea that the conductor creates “shiny eyes” in the orchestra so the audience has shiny eyes, Frans frames leadership as creating the conditions where people think, create, and perform at their best.

Practically, this means adopting a coaching mindset. Frans explains the difference between directing and coaching as “impart” versus “elicitation”: instead of giving answers, leaders ask better questions, clarify outcomes, and let people own solutions. He argues that leaders must become facilitators of thinking, innovation, and delivery, because people stay and grow where they feel seen, where “their ideas matter,” and where they are coached to excel. For listeners, this conversation offers a grounded, experience-based guide to leading authentically while scaling impact through others.

Key takeaways

Leadership fails when experts refuse to put the instrument down.Managing is doing; leading is orchestrating others.Authenticity increases influence and accelerates promotion.Coaching is elicitation, not command or control.Shiny eyes in teams create shiny eyes in stakeholders.