As we embark on a year-long exploration
of the Dance of Lead+Follow,
it feels right to begin
where all dances begin:
with the moments just before.
Before you begin a dance,
you pause to pick up the tune,
even if only inwardly:
the music of your heartbeat.
How it begins
You call, someone responds. Or is it: the world is humming, and you join in?
The question of who started it…
I’d like to start with a disclaimer, borrowing the opening lines of a two-thousand-year-old book. Here’s how one translation of Tao Te Ching begins:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
To put my point another way, what can be set down in words about the Dance of Lead+Follow may succeed in conveying a glimpse of it. But the whole of a dance cannot be captured. For one thing, a dance is forever changing.
Is talking about a dance a futile endeavour, then? “Talking about love is like dancing about architecture,” says Angelina Jolie’s character over the opening credits of Playing By Heart. “But it ain't gonna stop me from trying.” And so for me.
It begins with contact — seeing, hearing. Eyes, nose, ears. Hairs on the back of your neck. No matter where: across a crowded bar, in a meeting room, on a video call, on a mountain top.
You receive something.
You make a move.
Your move makes waves.
The waves reach someone out there.
They respond.
What does this receiving-before-acting look like?
Taking the first step
I get asked sometimes, how can I meet new people? One way to begin is by allowing something about them to reach you. That way, you don’t have to start from a blank slate.
If this sounds unobvious, here’s a playful way in. For a week or so, look — properly look — at people as they pass you. (I realise this may feel like a stretch: we’re taught to avert our gaze out of politeness. But the price is that our eyes go hungry.)
For this game, you’re not just looking — you’re scanning for something evocative, something you like: some detail that speaks to you. Maybe it’s the book this person’s reading, their easy smile, or the pattern on their socks.
The invitation here — if you choose to accept it — is to practise naming what you see and like. Just to yourself, without saying anything out loud. Let your stroll through the day become a roll call of details you noticed and enjoyed. Become a curator of delicious details.
Let your stroll through the day become a roll call of details you noticed and enjoyed. Become a curator of delicious details.
I’ve offered this game to a few folk. What tends to happen is that people don’t stick to the rules — in a good way! They take the game, and they take it further. They tell me that by day four or five, they find themselves blurting out a compliment. It might be “I like the jazzy pattern on your socks!” to their neighbour on the train commute. Or “I read that book last year!” in the canteen at work.
There is a logic behind these outbursts that occur after days spent composing silent compliments. Your basket of compliments fills up — and eventually some start spilling out. By then, you no longer have to dig deep to find your words. You’ve grown familiar with the kind of thing you would say, and would want to say.
Their own spontaneity surprises people. And brings it home for them just how simple each Follow+Lead cycle can be: receive, respond.
I might as well admit it: this is what people generally do, instinctively, unprompted, when they feel relaxed and safe. The game just surfaces the moves and turns them into something you can do deliberately, at will.
Will the other person receive you, in their turn?
Some will, and some won’t. Making them respond is not the objective of this game. You can’t move someone else’s feet.
The Dance beyond the dancefloor
In the autumn of 2017, I enrolled on a 6-month course to study Leadership Coaching with Psychosynthesis psychology.
This move on my part came as a surprise. I already had two courses in counselling skills under my belt. So the psychology part made sense. As did the coaching part — I’d been around someone whose skills in coaching had impressed me. She had questions that opened up new vistas for me, in just one breath.
But what was I doing studying leadership? My own choice puzzled me. I had only very limited experience of management (or so I thought). My level of ambition for climbing up the managerial ladder was distinctly low. In retrospect, I was among those who feel that “leadership” is for other people.
In retrospect, I was among those who feel that “leadership” is for other people.
An unexpected source provided an answer. I was already running dance classes in Argentine Tango. The next class I taught showed me a connection between leadership and me: I was teaching people to lead and to follow – in a tangible, in-the-body sense.
My mentor at the time encouraged me to look for parallels. What lessons could Tango offer about how people lead and follow? Could any of these lessons walk off the dancefloor and step into the boardroom?
The more I looked, the more I found. When the course tutor said “leadership as a field is coming to acknowledge how much it has undervalued the skill of followership,” I knew exactly what he was talking about. My years on the dancefloor had taught me how challenging following could be, and how there is no way for a leader to create a dance all by themselves. “It takes two to tango” is not an empty phrase, it is a lived reality.
My years on the dancefloor had taught me how challenging following could be, and how there is no way for a leader to create a dance all by themselves.
As my coaching practice expanded, some of my clients weren’t looking to improve their leadership skills. They wanted to reduce stress, or to feel at home in themselves; to improve their relationships or to discover what they’d want next in their career.
Yet with each of them, the moment came when we had to talk about daring to take an unfamiliar step, to take the lead. I began to see the lead-and-follow texture in all sorts of human situations. It became my recipe for how to create and keep connection — with yourself, with another, and with the world. Connections matter: at home, at work, in love, in groups, and in life.
How can a dance change us?
Remember how I started out as someone who felt leading was something others did? Well, that didn’t disappear in a hurry. Even as a qualified leadership coach, I questioned who the conversation about leading and following was for. I still thought of it as a niche topic.
What’s more, I still didn’t see myself as a leader. Yes, even though I was leading Tango classes. Yes, after delivering a TEDx talk. Yes, even after I set out to build my own business.
It came home to me only slowly that you can lead and still not recognise yourself as a leader. I got to feel for myself what that’s like.
But it was finally a tiny moment that showed me what was really at stake. Why the conversation about Lead+Follow goes much deeper, and belongs in many rooms and corners.
It happened during a talk I gave about Leadership for Careers. The talk concluded with a demonstration of a format based on Tango, which shows leading and following in an embodied, visible way. At the end, I asked the group what they found most valuable. One girl said “Watching the demo, I realised I had always thought that leading is about force. My father is quite forceful. I thought that’s what leadership was. Now I know it can be gentle. Leading now feels like something I could do.”
I found her comment deeply moving and inspiring. How many others out there are holding back because what leading seems to be is unattractive to them? How many fall silent for fear of making a mistake, or making things worse? And on the flip side, how many adopt the leadership-as-force approach because that’s all they’ve seen?
How many others out there are holding back because what leading seems to be is unattractive to them?
If we muddle leading and forcing, we’re left with fewer options.
In relationships, if we mistake pushing for leading, it makes us feel like we’re at the end of a line when we don’t want to push, or have no way of pushing.
In organisations, mistaking pushing for leading brings exhaustion. Those who are supposed to lead get tired of pushing; those who are supposed to be led get tired of being pushed. Both sides feel baffled why it feels so hard.
In society, when we divide people into “leaders” and “followers”, we diminish both by believing this division. If a leader’s voice is only ever permitted to use the pitch of command, they have to stifle half of their voice – the half that knows how to ask a question. If a follower’s voice is compelled to submit, they too must stifle half of their voice – the half that knows how to make a suggestion. Each speaks with half their voice, and we end up a society deprived of full-voices.
The steps ahead
I would love to just sit and talk with you. That would be hugely satisfying for me. But as we’re meeting through writing, it seems fitting to share a sense of what I envisage for the coming letters.
I intend to follow a series of concentric circles, starting with the innermost. It will begin with how you receive-and-respond inwardly. How you connect and re-connect with yourself: what might be called self-leadership. Your me-with-me dance. This is the foundation. The first person you have to trust is you, as my next letter will explore.
The next circle outward represents a dyad, a pairing: you with one other. This is the intricate exchange between friends, in personal relationships, with colleagues you see often. We’ve already touched on this when we talked about meeting people. Your social world is built one connection at a time. Each such connection asks you to both lead and follow. A lot of nuance here!
If we widen the scope again, we arrive in the circle of groups and organisations. After all, what happens “between two people” is not sealed off from the world around them. In Tango, each pair moves along a lane they share with the other couples (a bit like walking with a friend along city streets). How do one-on-one connections weave together into larger fields? What helps – or gets in the way – when you’re leading (or following) surrounded by many?
Ultimately, we reach the outermost circle: the Universe, cosmos, Nature, the Tao – feel free to replace these with the words that feel best to you. Here too, there seems to be a subtle interaction with a lead-and-follow texture. Some call it fate, some call it manifesting. I call it “you dancing with the universe, and the universe dancing with you.” In Tango, they say that the music should lead all the couples on the dancefloor. It is an “invisible third partner” in the dance.
I’ll be the first to admit that speaking of the ineffable is well-nigh impossible… But, like Angelina’s character in Playing By Heart, that ain’t gonna stop me from trying.
Following the reader
Writing can seem like a one-way act —
words sent out to be read
at a different time,
in a different place.
And yet, when tenderness moves you to write a letter,
you’re not alone.
Before writing, I pause.
I listen inwardly,
wondering how you arrived here,
what caught your eye,
what made you pause.
Leading and following seem like simple, everyday words.
And yet, they carry a lot —
the hum of past experience,
the tug of future hopes.
I have no way of knowing
what echoes those two words stir in you.
My best hope in writing this is that,
as you read,
these reflections arrive as prompts to hear yourself —
perhaps a little more tenderly than before.
And if you’re ever unsure how to read what follows, keep this close:
when I speak, what I’m really hoping
is that you hear your own heart.
Let this be where we begin.
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