Let’s Face the Music and Dance: Practicing Leader-Follower-Ship Through Dancesport Exercises
Fides Matzdorf and Ramen Sen
Leader-Follower-Ship and Humanistic Management
This chapter is based on a series of experiential workshops and exercises to help leaders and followers to be more mindful about their leading and following styles, and the impact that has on their followers or leaders. This approach has emanated from the authors’ experience as academics, practitioners, and dancers. It focuses on management learning in a holistic way, and as such differs from management training that tends to focus on skills in a rationalist, often utilitarian way, providing “toolkits” to achieve simple cause-and-effect chains. This workshop has the potential to be enlightening and empowering, both for leaders and followers. It helps people to understand better the “lead” and “follow” roles and their mutual dependence, as well as to understand the implications of different leadership styles.
The workshops are based on the view that leader-follower-ship is seen as relational, mutually constructed, and mutually enabling, rather than hierarchical and based on power and authority (Mary Parker Follett’s “power with” rather than “power over,” see Follett 1949, Melé 2007). At its best, a dance partnership is not a hierarchical relationship that is built on power and authority, but on mutual consent, mutual respect, mutual understanding, and the willingness of both leader and follower to make a contribution to achieve the best possible performance or outcome for them (and get the best possible result in a very competitive arena).1
The leader-follower-ship workshops on which this chapter is based take a “whole-person” approach, encompassing body and mind, and encouraging self-awareness, mindfulness, reflexivity—all relevant aspects of leadership within a humanistic management framework (e.g., Euler and Seufert 2011; Euler and Feixas 2013; Amann et al. 2011). Mutual understanding of roles and mutual respect for “person-in-role” are as important as responsibility and responsiveness. The authors’ experiences confirm Rouhiainen’s conclusion that “working with the body through a socially informed somatic approach benefits our self-understanding and capacity to relate to others in an ethical and integral manner” (Rouhiainen 2008, p. 251). This links the exercises in this chapter to the three dimensions of the humanistic management framework, and in particular, humanistic management education (Amann et al. 2011).
In ballroom dancing, frequent mention is made of leadership and followership, and many people (especially nondancers) assume that this is a hierarchical relationship, with all the power (“remember that I’m in charge here”) but also all the responsibility (“if things go wrong, it’s always the leader’s fault”) residing in the leader’s role, while the follower is seen as submissive and compliant. The authors will take a radically different view.
Modern competitive Ballroom dancing (also known as International Standard in the United States), a form of dancesport, is fast, powerful, and dynamic—it can be viewed as a conversation in space and time between two bodies that share equal responsibility for producing a top-class performance. In that respect it is a highly physical, mental, and emotional experience that encompasses aspects of leadership and followership that are deeply relevant for leadership and followership roles in organizational life.
The immediate bodily experience of leading and following, the bodily experience of moving in and through space in a leading/following role, combined with reflection on those experiences, can help people to become more aware of their own behavior in such roles. It stimulates reflection on their own behavior, as well as understanding of how they might want to embody these roles in the future for example, whether to change, improve, and/or clarify.
In dancesport (depending on skill level and envisaged outcome), the leader’s responsibilities are (see Matzdorf and Sen 2016):
The follower’s responsibilities are:
In workshops with managers and postgraduate business school students, the authors have used competitive ballroom dance as a metaphor and medium to explore leader–follower relationships, creating and facilitating an experience of leadership/followership—a context that poses tasks/challenges such as decision making, relationship building, building trust, leading, following, listening, responding, initiating, navigating, planning, and so on, in a real-time situation at a physical, sensory level. These are all activities that happen in organizational life as well as in dance and thus offer the opportunity to explore those parallels.
These highly experiential workshops are not training courses taking an uncritical view of leadership or claiming that participants will be “better” leaders and/or followers through following prescribed behaviors, but about giving participants opportunities to gain a better understanding of their own actions/behaviors/choices, and the consequences and implications of those actions/behaviors/choices. Where people choose to engage, their deepened understanding is likely to lead to different leadership and followership interactions and relationships.
Indeed, instead of theoretical discussion or prescriptive teaching, the workshops facilitate experience and reflection that allows conceptualization to “emerge.” This work takes a relational–processual approach: in dancesport, leadership and followership are clearly mutually enabling, requiring a high degree of nonverbal “listening” as well as decision making on both sides. Equally, awareness of and interaction with the situational context (rhythm of the music, floorspace, other dancers) are the requirements of a high performance (Matzdorf and Sen 2005, see Figure 8.1).
For participants, the experience raises important issues between self and others, such as responsibility, trust, assumptions, (dis)harmony, (dis)agreement, teamwork, common rhythm, pleasure, and discomfort. It explores crisis management, dealing with mistakes, misunderstandings, and unexpected situations, surfaces “gut reactions,” and an understanding of the “power of the follower.”
Using dancesport elements as a leader-follower-ship exercise assists leadership learning because it is an enjoyable exercise, which can be done in a “safe” environment,2 but it also challenges preconceptions, boundaries, assumptions/interpretations and encourages personal risk-taking. It is an opportunity to explore one’s own actions, reactions, behaviors and behavioral patterns. As it involves hands-on, practical leadership/followership tasks and roles, participants have to use their whole body and “think on their feet,” making decisions with and through their bodies and emotions, as well as their minds (Jordi 2010, Finlay 2006).
People “live” in organizations not just as abstract “human resources” but as physical and emotional beings, and their bodily experience is relevant to how they experience and carry out their day-to-day work.
While management research and education has for a long time behaved “as if leadership was degendered and disembodied” (Sinclair 2005b, p. 388), there is now a growing trend to take a more “holistic” view. Sinclair (2005a) complains about “disembodiment in management” in that “the taboo around the body supports a construction of rational and controllable management” (2005a, p. 93) and asks for “new ways for bodies to matter in management education” (2005a, p. 92).
This is echoed in a whole field of research that has grown noticeably since the turn of the century, linking management learning to the arts and humanities. Only fairly recently has dance been used as an embodied metaphor or even a “sandpit” for practicing leader-follower-ship (e.g., Peterson and Williams 2004; De Graaff and Mierson 2005; Matzdorf and Sen 2005 and 2016; Hujala, Laulainen, and Kokkonen 2014; special issue of Organizational Aesthetics 2016).
Matzdorf and Sen (2016, p. 115) “argue that dance can provide a vehicle for immediate, implicit ‘insights’ and even ‘aha effects’ through sensory, bodily experiences.” The underlying premise is that cognition is embodied, in that cognitive activities (such as thinking, perceiving, interpreting, assuming, judging, etc.) are inextricably linked to physical existence (Wilson 2002, Wilson and Foglia 2011). Given that the body can be seen as the basis of cognition (cf. Hanna 2014, Sheets-Johnstone 2011), this then means that “our own ordinarily kinaesthetic experiences essentially frame the acquisition and development of cognitive structures” (Wilson and Foglia 2011).
While the authors agree to some extent with Mintzberg’s statement that “no one can create a leader in a classroom” (Mintzberg 2004, p. 3), the sensory, rational, as well as affective experience of leading another person with one’s body is far away from a mere lecture or presentation and “hits home,” the immediate experience, responsibility, discomfort, as well as the sense of power and satisfaction that these exercises conjure up.
Exploring the complexities of shared leadership, changing roles, crisis management, space management, navigation, and nonverbal communications through interactive workshop sessions allows participants to experience and explore this embodied metaphor for themselves as “improvisation as enactment of inter-practice in leadership” (Küpers 2013).
Spillane’s use of the dance metaphor mirrors the authors’ take on leadership:
[...] the dance is in-between the two partners. Hence, an account of the actions of both partners fails to capture the practice; the account has to focus on the partners in interaction. Moreover, the music—part of the situation—is also essential to the creation of the practice [...]. The same holds for leadership practice […] (Spillane 2004, p. 3).
He concludes that leadership practice is “distributed over leaders, followers, and their situation” (Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond 2004, p. 11). Figure 8.1 (Matzdorf and Sen 2005, p. 2) details this relationship further in diagrammatical form. It also highlights another aspect emerging from this “journey of discovery”—the fact that the leader is not the “boss,” but has to follow the rhythm of the music: it is the rhythm that “governs” the communal movement that constitutes the dance. A third important aspect is the power of the follower: “Followers are active agents in the leadership relationship, not passive recipients of the leader’s influence” (Rost 1991), and a successful dance partnership would require a “star follower” (Kelley 2008), a “partner” rather than a “resource” or “implementer” (Chaleff 2009). It is worth mentioning that Chaleff also uses the dance metaphor in an online talk, where he reflects on examples of dance partnering that two dancers demonstrate: “Leadership and Followership: What Tango Teaches Us About These Roles in Life” and “Is the Follower Role or the Leader Role More Difficult?” (The links to these videos are in the “general background resources” section at the end of this chapter.) The main difference between Chaleff’s approach and this chapter is that he uses dancers to illustrate his insights, whereas this chapter aims to encourage people to experience the roles for themselves and generate their own personal insights, without having to be dancers.
Follower and leader have to manage themselves in their respective roles (Lawrence 1979), but also manage their relationship to each other (trust, acceptance, allowing mistakes), as well as a set of interrelated spaces: “private space”; “communal space”; the space around them; and other dancers’ space.
Apart from the dancers’ own bodies and the rhythm of the music, the main “ingredient” of a ballroom dance performance is the space that the dancers occupy, create, move into/through/out of, and “hold” between them. In analogy to this, in most organizations space is an inherent ingredient of people’s working lives, but it is often paid little attention. Using the—both “playful” and “stressful”—medium of dance and giving the spatial complexity more focus enables awareness of these issues to grow, through the sensory experience.
Of course, it is not possible to reconstruct all the conditions of a full dance competition day for a management learning situation. It is questionable whether this would even be desirable—it would probably add too much complexity to a situation that potentially pulls participants out of their “comfort zone,” challenging their personal boundaries and getting them to focus on their physicality in a way and to a degree that most people are not used to.
How It Works
These exercises are aimed at nondancers and dancers alike who wish to explore and understand more about leadership and followership, in an experiential and sensory way. The purpose of the workshops is not to teach dance. In fact, the avoidance of specific dance figures makes these exercises easier and more accessible to nondancers.
Participants with prior dance experience (especially social dancers) sometimes come with mental “baggage” that can get in the way of what is being explored here—occasionally they have to be invited to leave their preconceptions and assumptions outside the room! However, everybody is equally welcome, and it is important to be as inclusive as possible, and to allay initial anxieties that could stop people from fully participating.
As experienced competitors, the authors have no problems demonstrating those principles themselves. However, where this is not possible, bringing a couple of (high level) competitive dancers into the room would help greatly to illustrate some of the details. Where this is not possible, one might have to resort to instructional and performance videos, of which there are many online. Two slow-motion videos of world champion Mirko Gozzoli and his partner Edita Daniute demonstrate beautifully and impressively the skill, power, energy, momentum, and togetherness that contribute to a top performance.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=A-1ommLpNKI (Waltz) and https://youtube.com/watch?v=7i2_G3C54Tk (Slow Foxtrot).
The videos were taken at training sessions, not during competitions, which takes the “show element” out and allows viewers to focus entirely on the actual dancing. The performers are professional world champion Mirko Gozzoli and his partner Edita Daniute. Turning the sound off is recommended, since the music bears no relation to the dance (the dancing is in slow motion, the music is not, so they do not match)—the music has only been added later.
Setting the Scene
Participants should wear clothes that they feel comfortable in and that are easy to move in, and shoes that are practical and smooth-soled. Trainers and other shoes with sticky soles are not ideal as they can cause twisted knees or ankles if care is not exercised. Equally, ladies’ stiletto heels are not ideal as the majority of these (unlike ladies’ special dance shoes) are not designed for dancing or energetic movement, hence making it difficult to maintain a good, firm balance. Ideally, the floor of the room that these exercises are performed in should be a smooth, noncarpeted, nonstick surface (e.g., a wooden or laminate floor).
Exercise 1: Trust building—Giving and Receiving Weight
Instructions
A more advanced version of the exercise involves holding hands, and leaning outward (i.e., pulling apart), as shown in Figure 8.2. In this version, even more trust between participants is required that they will need to balance each other’s weight and not let go—otherwise at least one of them (mostly both) would fall over.
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Exercise 2: Leading–Following Balance—Beginning to Move
This is a simple starting exercise to introduce “lead-and-follow,” which paves the way for the more complex ones. If a partnership has difficulties in later exercises, it is often useful to return to this exercise to re-establish a lead–follow connection.
Figure 8.3 demonstrates this exercise. From left to right:
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Exercise 3: The Ballroom Hold—Finding the Dance “Spaces”
As before, pairs now have to decide about leader/follower roles. Again, it does not matter too much who leads and who follows—later on, there will be another role swap.
Discussing the “ballroom hold” or “ballroom frame” is an important part of setting the scene, and needs to be done sensitively to diffuse potential issues around the closeness and physicality of the exercises. Ways of helping to diffuse these issues are presented in the following.
The following diagram (top-down view,Figure 8.4) demonstrates the hold, and the spaces in the partnership. It also illustrates the notion of a “frame” for this hold, as it “frames” the partners and helps them to assert “their” space. Also see Figure 8.5 for visualization, plus the video in the resources section for this exercise.
What helps to move concerns away from the perceived “intimacy” of the close encounter is the notion of “shared and private spaces,” and the “communications interface” for nonverbal communications, as well as the instruction not to face each other in a full-frontal encounter, but to stand offset, connected only within the relatively small “shared space” (shape (1) in Figure 8.4). The authors have found that it is important to mention these “private spaces,” as this concept helps to put participants more at ease: it gives the reassurance that there is not what many would perceive as “too much closeness,” since these spaces are actually larger than the shared space, and provide a “safe” area for each participant.
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Exercise 4: Moving Together
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Exercise 5: Moving with Music
All of these extra factors are designed to add issues that are also met in organizational life—stress, avoiding problems (e.g., collisions), real-time reactions, keeping in tune with external drivers (in this case, the music).
Again, changing roles is important, as is the question which role people felt happier in. This can sometimes produce surprises, and often does not follow gender stereotypes!
If time allows, ask participants to swap partners. Encourage participants to pay attention to how it feels dancing with a different person.
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Relating this to the workplace:
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1 As in the corporate world, there are also less than “shining” examples in the dance world: Competitors who view their partners as mere instruments to achieve fame and fortune, who use emotional blackmail or other forms of coercion, and even those who use violence toward their partner if a performance did not meet their expectations. But we would not want to judge a whole sport purely on those who bring it into disrepute.
2 The authors are well aware that the dancesport scene is highly competitive—many aspiring champions are constantly in search for a “better” partner, and there are many instances where dance partners are “instrumentalized” to the point of being treated as commodities. However, such extremes do not invalidate the learning/relationship potential, just as the reality of dysfunctional organizational cultures does not invalidate the concept of organizations altogether! Similarly, while there are, undeniably, controversial gender issues that need looking at, modern Ballroom dancing has moved on and away from stereotypes such as “the lady’s role is just to look decorative” to a concept that takes a partnership approach and sees the contribution of the two roles to the success of a performance as near equal—modern coaches emphasize that the contributions to the whole performance are 51 percent (Leader), and 49 percent (Follower).