CHAPTER 8

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).

Why Dancesport?

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):

• being together or “in tune” with the music and the partner;
• planning ahead;
• communicating the plan to the follower;
• navigating;
• modification of the choreography according to the follower’s feedback and changes in the physical environment.

The follower’s responsibilities are:

• to pick up the leader’s signals;
• to decide on appropriate action and
• to carry out the action;
• to make the space for the leader to move into;
• to react in real-time;
• ...and to make it look good!

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).

Rationale—Theory and Research

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.

Figure 8.1 The relational field within partner dancing (Matzdorf and Sen 2005, p. 2)

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

1. Participants should partner up with another person; the gender of the other person is not relevant.
2. Partners need to stand opposite each other at about arm’s length distance, their legs about a hip width apart (for a good solid balance), with their arms and hands raised, mirroring each other and touching each other’s hands palm to palm.
3. Start to experiment with leaning in slightly, giving weight to the partner, but maintaining balance; then to vary this pressure, without pushing the other person over.
4. Partners need to be careful not to overload the other person—this exercise is about negotiating a shared balance, not throwing their weight at their partner with blind trust, or even turning this into a “push and shove” exercise. It is about sensitivity to one’s own and other people’s needs.
5. Moving arms in a circular movement or “drawing” shapes in the air adds difficulty. This becomes easier as partners learn to “read” each other. Shifting the balance from one foot to the other can also be included here.
6. Change partners (possibly several times) and repeat the exercise.

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.

Figure 8.2 Trust building exercise demonstrated

Reflection and Discussion Questions

• To what extent did you trust your partner?
• How easy was it to balance the weight? Did you “agree” on an amount of weight to give each other? Was this a little or a lot?
• How easy/hard was it to follow the movement? Was it smooth, or jerky? Did this make a difference?
• How did you negotiate weight balance and movement? What did you “pick up” from your partner? Did one person lead the movements? Did you “swap” the lead/follow? How did you negotiate this?
• Did the exercise feel different with different partners? In what way?

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.

1. Participants, in pairs, should choose who will lead, and who will follow. It does not matter who leads first, as there will be a role swap later.
2. Partners should stand opposite each other at around half an arm’s length, with their feet about a hip width apart (this is important for “reading” the weight shift). The chosen leader should put their hands out, palms upward, at around hip height (see (Figure 8.3a also online video ...).
3. The follower should then place their hands, palms down, on the leader’s lower arms just below the elbow, allowing their own lower arms to be held by the leader, forming a connection between leader and follower (see (Figure 8.3b).
4. The follower and leader need to provide a little “resistance” or tone in their arms, so that the lead is transmitted through from leader to follower. It is important to mention that leading comes from the whole body, not the arms.
5. The leader now moves their weight fully from one foot to another, from side to side. It is important that the weight is fully moved across from one foot to the other—it should be possible for the leader to pick up the free foot without having to move weight (Figure 8.3c).
6. The follower should move to follow as they sense the weight change. This exercise should be done without verbal or visual communication—if the leader moves their weight fully over one foot or the other, then this should be clearly communicated to the follower through the shared interface.
7. There should be no need for the leader to push, pull, gesticulate, or communicate verbally. Equally, there should be no need for the follower to look at the leader or at their own feet. Simply changing the weight clearly and completely should be sufficient. If this is not working, there could be various reasons: there is no proper “hold,” so that the follower cannot feel enough; the leader moves too fast, too abruptly, or too little, so that the follower cannot follow quickly enough; the follower tries to anticipate or guess what is happening, instead of “listening with the body.” (One way to check whether this is working is for the follower to close their eyes and attempt to follow “blind” an added challenge.)
8. When participants have understood the mechanics of weight-shifting, they can then experiment with side steps, then with forward (Figure 8.3d) and backward walks. Introduce each added “difficulty” in a separate round, to give participants time to “feel” and learn. (NB. It is important to stick to forward, backward, and side steps—moving diagonally complicates things too much and is too difficult to achieve in this hold! Do not follow the online video in this respect.)
9. After the first performance of the exercise, encourage the participants to swap roles (leader become followers and vice versa) and experience the other role for themselves.
10. Change partners. Each participant thanks their partner, then moves on to a new partner. Repeat the exercise. Encourage people to experiment with longer and shorter steps, or several steps in one direction.

Figure 8.3 Leading–following exercise demonstrated. Note here that the leader is on the right of each image

Figure 8.3 demonstrates this exercise. From left to right:

1. the leader places her hands out, inviting the follower;
2. the follower takes hold;
3. the leader moves onto her right leg, the follower responds by moving onto his left leg;
4. the leader takes a step forward, resulting in the follower taking a step back.

Reflection and Discussion Questions

• How did the connection feel? Safe/secure? Comfortable/uncomfortable? Different with different partners? What felt helpful, what less so?
• Was it easy to follow/lead? If yes, what made it easy? If not, what would have helped? Was there clarity of lead/follow? Did you feel pushed or pulled in either role?
• Did the follower respond as expected? If not, can you think of reasons why this might be the case, and what would make responding easier/more reliable? Was the communication clear? Did the leader/follower fully commit their weight to one foot, or were they unsure? How did the leader react to what the follower did or did not do? Did the leader take into account what the follower could/could not do?
• Did your movement feel harmonious, “as one,” or “bumpy”? Did you sense resistance from your partner?

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.

Figure 8.4 The ballroom hold (top-down diagrammatical view)

Instructions

1. In pairs, the participants should stand, facing each other, hips offset as shown by (i). This should result in feet being interleaved so that partners do not stand on each other’s toes, but can move forward without inflicting injury.
2. The nominated leader (L) should raise their left arm (ii) extending it slightly forward, and raise their right arm (iii) as well to form the “frame.”
3. The follower (F) should raise their right arm (iv) to take the left hand of the leader (v), and raise their left arm (vi) above the leader’s right arm (iii), placing their hand on the leader’s right upper arm.
4. The leader finally places their right hand on the follower’s left shoulder blade (vii) underneath the follower’s arm. This is shown in a photo in Figure 8.5. Note that each partner is “responsible” for carrying their own weight, that is, holding his/her own arms up—the follower should not lean on the leader, the leader should not have to “uphold” the follower.
5. Partners should stand right hip to right side, with a “shared” space (1) where the participants touch. This is a narrow section of contact, from right hip to right side of rib cage. This, together with the touch of the partners’ right legs, provides the “communications interface” where the follower can feel how and where the leader is moving and vice versa.
6. Partners should not look at each other, but instead look toward their respective “private space” (2) and (3). Within these “private spaces” each partner has their own tasks and responsibilities. The other partner should not “invade” this “private” space (i.e., not lean into it or push their head/shoulders into it), as this destroys the “communal balance” and makes it harder to move together.

Figure 8.5 The ballroom hold, demonstrated

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

• Did this feel strange? What is strange about it? Did it feel uncomfortable? If so, can you explain why? Was there anything that made it feel more comfortable?
• Did you feel more connected to your partner? How easy/difficult was it to feel your partner move? Was it easier or more difficult than the previous exercise?

Exercise 4: Moving Together

Instructions

1. In the hold described and tried in exercise 3, repeat exercise 2. This means that the leader shifts weight from side to side, making sure that the follower can pick up the signals and move their weight in the same direction. This will ensure that both the leader and follower have the opposite legs (same side of the partnership, i.e., leader’s right leg and follower’s left leg or vice versa) free to lift the respective foot and take a step.
2. Connection and balance should always be maintained. (This is not easy—it takes some practice to maintain two individuals’ balances plus a shared balance.)
3. The next step would be to move together, always keeping connection and balance… sideways, forward, backward.
4. The leader should decide in which direction they wish to move the partnership, and make a clear step in this direction, using the free leg. It is important that both partners already have their weight on opposite legs (the same side of the partnership), so that when moving, the opposite legs (leader’s right and follower’s left or vice versa) move together. The leader should think about how to communicate the intention clearly, and how they must wait for the follower to move, and then move with them.
5. Now the leaders should try lowering through their standing leg to move forward or backward. This helps the follower to feel the movements and to time their own movement.
6. When participants become more confident, they can start experimenting with side-close-side steps or turns/pivots.
7. Swap roles—the facilitator needs to make sure that participants get to experience both roles. This helps them to understand any issues that their partner may be facing in the other role.
8. Swap partners and repeat steps 1 through 7.

Reflection and Discussion Questions

• How well did it work? Could the leader lead? Could the follower follow? Or did the follower take over the lead, or did the leader relinquish the lead?
• Follower: How easy was it to follow the lead? Did you understand which direction the leader was moving? Did you try to second-guess what the leader was trying to do? Did you take over the lead, temporarily or permanently?
• Leader: If there were problems, think about how you reacted—did you hold on more tightly? Did you try harder? Did you push/pull your follower in the right direction? Did you give up? Did you let the follower do the leading?
• Did you feel able to do your job, whether leading or following? If yes, how did that feel? If not, what prevented you? Did you “fight” each other?
• Did you find your leading or following to be different to what you expected? Did you experiment with different ways of doing it? What was successful, what not so much? What did you do when things “went wrong” how did you regain your connection, frame, and balance?
• How did it feel doing this exercise with different partners? What did you learn/discover in different partnerships?

Exercise 5: Moving with Music

Instructions

1. Repeat exercise 4, this time with the music playing. This introduces an extra factor that participants need to pay attention to.
2. A “one-way” system should also be introduced—pairs should now dance anticlockwise around the room, which will now bring up new issues: getting round the corners, avoiding obstacles (tables, chairs, other participants) and collisions. It is the role of the leader to avoid collisions and navigate around the floor, and the follower to understand the direction they are trying to go in, and to make it easy for the leader to move in that direction.

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

• What was different about adding music? Did it make it easier, or more difficult? Did navigation add extra stress?
• Were there issues around the external environment? What about other pairs getting in the way?
• Can you see parallels with organizational life? What are they?
• Which role did you feel most comfortable in? Does this surprise you?
• Did you trust your partner? Did followers trust their leader to navigate and avoid collision? Or were they worried/­anxious/suspicious and hesitant to follow? Did leaders trust their ­follower to “come along” and go in the right direction?
• Did the leader “lose” the rhythm at times? What happened then—did the follower follow the leader or the rhythm? How did he/she make that decision?
• What happened when there were problems/obstacles? What happened when leader, follower, or both made a mistake? Did the leader resort to “command and control”/pushing/pulling? Did the follower take the lead and push/pull? What did you do in terms of “crisis management”? What did you do to get back into the “task”?
• How did you feel about your responsibility for yourself/your partner/the team? Did it feel like good teamwork, or was it a struggle? What difficulties did you encounter? If there were difficulties, how did you resolve them?

Relating this to the workplace:

• Who is/are the leader/s in the organization? Who is influential, and how do they exert influence? Remember that leadership is not the same as management—not all managers are leaders, and not all leaders are managers. Leaders: how do they get people to follow them? What are their methods and “tools” for influencing? How do they communicate their goals? Do they rule by trust or by control? Do they take ­people “with them?” How do people feel in their presence? Valued, pushed, pulled, coerced, coaxed, relaxed, encouraged…? What makes for a “good” lead?
• How do followers behave in the organization? Are they engaged, switched off, cynical, optimistic, empowered, keen…? Who do they consider to be “their” leader/s? How do they feel about their leader/s? How do they communicate those feelings? How do they build relationships with others? Do they support each other or criticize and hurt others?
• As a leader, what do you need from a follower to achieve your work goals? As a follower, what do you need from a leader to do a good job? What helps, what hinders?

References

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