Sharna Fabiano is the author of Lead & Follow: The Dance of Inspired Teamwork, host of the Lead & Follow podcast, and creator of the Alchemists Clubhouse. She’s also a professional dancer: her long study of dance improvisation and partnering has made her a specialist in Argentine Tango, for which she is recognized internationally. Now a resident of Long Beach, Calif., Sharna is an author, coach, and member of a global network of scholars and practitioners exploring ethical, sustainable concepts of leadership and followership—the ability to be a skilled follower—in teams and organizations.
When Sharna and I decided to exchange posts for each other’s publications, I asked if she would explore the connection between the practices of dancing, leading, and following. Enjoy. —Steph
The connection between dance, leadership, and followership is a big but fabulous topic! I’ll do my best to answer with three lessons I’ve learned, starting with a quick tango story.
Years ago, I was traveling with a professional tango partner from Buenos Aires, and one day we were practicing a complex sequence for a workshop we’d be teaching the next day. One section of this sequence was not working well. My forward step was landing one beat after his side step, and of course I blamed myself and began to apologize. Javier quickly interrupted me, though, and said: “No, no. We just misunderstood each other. Let’s try again.”
We misunderstood each other.
Javier taught me an important lesson that day about valuing my followership role, and seeing myself as an equal partner. It made me realize that many conflicts can be avoided, both on the dance floor and off, by seeing miscommunications rather than errors, and by giving yourself and others the opportunity to try again. Years later, I even instituted a similar “do over” rule in my relationship with my husband. If one of us ever says something awkward, we get to immediately strike it from the record and say something else instead.
To fully appreciate the simple yet profound lesson of tango partnership, imagine my dance partner Javier and I in your mind. What will probably seem immediately obvious is that one of us needs to lead and the other one needs to follow; you can’t have two leaders. You can’t be a leader at all if you don’t have a follower. The partnership creates the two roles, and the two roles create the dance.
This is a very mundane, obvious fact for dancers, but I discovered by accident that it is a radical idea in the world of coaching, organizational development, and leadership development. It’s less obvious in those contexts because leadership is associated with power and success, and we all want to think of ourselves as leaders.
Here’s the thing though—it’s not possible in practice. Just like in dancing, you can’t lead without followers, and when you try to make everyone a leader, even in the best cases, you still get a certain degree of conflict and confusion. We’ve become so habituated to this that we just accept it like it’s part of every job. And yet, this layer of miscommunication or friction exists because we’re missing the followership skills, or because we’re over-emphasizing leadership. Work of any kind gets easier and more creative when we find the right balance between the two.
I stumbled into this perspective as a coach because of my social dance background, but I really love helping people look at professional development this way, and understand that leadership and followership exist simultaneously everywhere, like two blades on a pair of scissors. It’s just a question of whether you’re sharpening one blade or both.
As I studied, danced, and taught leadership and followership over the years, I discovered that people have widely varying expectations of what “partnership” means, and widely varying desires for what they wish to experience in a partnership, regardless of whether it’s going to last three minutes, three hours, or three lifetimes.
Some dance partners are looking for romance, others for a spiritual experience. Some want to enjoy the aesthetic quality of the music, others want to engage in playful non-verbal conversation. Some want to feel powerful, and others want to feel powerless. After a while, I learned to define more specifically what I personally wanted from a dance—and to accept that that would not always match well with what others wanted.
Eventually, I extended this perspective to friendships, romantic partners, and working relationships. In retrospect, I believe most of my early frustrations in love and in my career were a result of me thinking I knew what the other person wanted, or assuming that they wanted the same thing that I did. I was wrong most of the time! When I learned to express my desires more clearly, and ask other people to tell me what they wanted, things got a whole lot better.
—Sharna