It was colleagues at UK business school Ashridge who helped me see how powerful an experiential metaphor for leadership dance can be. Here’s why.
Interest in Lindy Hop is taking off around the world. 
So this a good time to revisit a topic that is a key issue for executives and at the core of the work I do: leadership.
Wait – you aren’t serious, you say. How is some silly dance going to help me with leading my business?
Well, actually, I am serious. Dance and leadership go hand in hand, pun intended.
If you have been to business school or read much on leadership, you will have heard that working experientially helps clients to embed learning in their body; and to access their body’s wisdom. In other words, it is one thing to think about, to be able to conceive something. It is quite another to physically do it. It is in the doing that we generally learn our greatest lessons, and gain experience we can tap at will.
The experiential work I offer draws on the Lindy Hop, a partner dance from the 1920s. It is an improvisational, creative dance – in business terms, innovative. It is based on having a physical connection with another person, typically hand to hand, via which you communicate with each other in order to create a shared experience in response to external input (music). It is typically done among other people (fellow dancers, or in business terms, colleagues). At times it is performed in front of an audience; in business terms, in front of customers, your marketplace, the media. But whether leading a dance or a business, you have to practice new skills, and you have to be willing to try, fail, and try again.
I have used the experience of dance as a metaphor for leadership many times over the last ten or fifteen years, with business leaders in places as far flung as Poland and China, to help them embody their leadership physically. Too often leadership is taught as a thought process, a mental construct, a concept. Yet how often do you think you know something, only to find when you try to actually do it that in fact something quite different is going on? Using a partner dance as a metaphor helps you ground your leadership style in action, which can reveal some surprises. (plus it’s fun! Remember fun?)
Here’s how I work with people with no dance experience. When you take a partner by the hand and try to move them from one part of the room to another, you might notice how forceful you are. Do you push, gently guide, yank? Do you get impatient when they don’t do what you had in mind for them to do? Do you tend to lead from behind, beside, in front? How is the way you lead someone by the hand (or not) reflected in the way you lead people in your office?
Then, what do you notice about following? Do your followers give you a lot of resistance, making it hard to move them? Do they simply collapse, expecting you to get them from A to B with no help from you? Or do they give just enough so that when you start to move in a given direction they automatically move with you, because there’s a clear connection between you that enhances rather than inhibits movement? In fact, leaders can perform best with strong followers, whether in business or on the dance floor. So how do you help your followers to become stronger and more effective?
For new leaders, learning to lead isn’t easy, whether you are trying to move a partner around a dance floor, or trying to move a team (or even yourself) toward a goal. You have to know where you want to go, and sod’s law, just as you decide to head in one direction something changes around you, meaning you need to rethink your goals and performance targets on the spot, or make changes within minutes of going on-stage. You may or may not have all the training and resources you need to make such decisions, but no matter how much training you have, there’s no substitute for experience. Because actually implementing the things you have learned outside the safe confines of a classroom or mentored relationship can be challenging, and causes many of us to freeze up with panic and overwhelm.
Which means that in order to learn to lead well, you have to make mistakes, fail – often publicly – then get back up and keep going. Anyone learning to lead has had to start somewhere, and if you didn’t start young with support for making mistakes, you need to learn how to make them as you get older. And to learn that what seems like a mistake often holds the seeds of new solutions, new innovation. In dance terms we call them new moves.
All this is quite obvious on a dance floor, where you and your partner either move with the music or you don’t. It is less obvious in a team or corporate environment, where particularly if you are good with words, you can bluff your way through even when you haven’t a clue what you are doing. Dance, a physical embodiment of the intellectual and emotional exercise that is leading, is a great way to get at what’s working and what’s not working for you as a leader, and for other leaders (and followers) around you.
For experienced leaders, there are additional issues at play. When you are starting out, it is ok, maybe even necessary to mimic other leaders’ or mentors’ moves.
However, if you want to stand out, take on a senior role, you have to understand and develop your own signature style, what I call your uniqueness, or your unassailable competitive advantage. As a mature leader, it’s no longer enough to copy someone else’s style and approach as the levels of pressure and responsibility mount. You need to find your own intuitive responses and solutions, become unconsciously competent, which is hard to do when you are trying to remember how somebody else did it.
There’s much more to play with in this metaphor:
- Learning when to say yes, and when to say no (and sometimes saying yes is harder than saying no).
- Understand what kind of community you are creating – whether it’s a healthy, growing, thriving community, or one that operates from command and control; fear and secrecy.
- How great musicians inspire great leading and following, and vice versa. If musicians are analogous to your marketplace, how can you choose (or create) the most vibrant marketplace with which to lead and follow? This is something Steve Jobs did well. He created products that appealed to a subset – one might say the best and brightest – initially, and that subsequently called forth ever greater numbers of people. He challenged his marketplace celebrate their differences, rather than try to hide them, and in the process stretched and grew us all a bit more.
But for now, if you want to join me for a wee experience of experiential leading (and following), contact me here or set up a time to chat with me here, and I’ll see you on the dance floor!