The Tango of Life: Leadership, Followership, and Social Dynamics with Sharna Fabiano

Discover the unexpected wisdom of tango with Sharna Fabiano, an renowned tango artist and author, who speaks on the dance's profound reflection of life's social intricacies and leadership roles. Your episode host, Ketil Hviding, reflects on his journey through martial arts and tango and what the dance has taught him about the subtle art of leading and following, a dance of skills that extends far beyond the dance floor and into the very fabric of our daily lives. Sharna's words, drawn from her book, Lead and Follow, resonate as a testament to the essence of partnership, revealing how this art form is much more than steps and routines—it's a metaphor for community, connection, and the balance between giving and receiving in relationships. 

As the episode evolves, we wade into the nuanced waters of workplace dynamics—a mirror to the lead-and-follow of tango. Touching on pay equity and organizational hierarchy, we challenge the status quo, asking tough questions about the true value of each role within a team. Ponder the essence of 'followership,' a concept too often overshadowed by traditional leadership narratives, but one that's indispensable in achieving harmony both in business and in social settings. The insights from this episode might just inspire you to observe the dance of leadership and followership in your own life, recognizing the intricate steps and turns that make up the choreography of effective collaboration and trust.

Learn more about Sharna's work and listen to her podcast:

• https://www.sharnafabiano.com/
• https://www.sharnafabiano.com/book/:
  • Lead & Follow: The Dance of Inspired Teamwork
• https://open.spotify.com/show/6EhNZX3L6kvfqt8xSslG1A?si=292eb8b149b948a5 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Musketeers podcast, the podcast discussing wellness, fitness and, more broadly, the art of living. I'm your host, kettle Weeding, a retiree from the International Wonder Fund with 24 years of service. During my last two years at the fund, I served as a co-chair of its health, safety and environmental committee. I have been practicing and teaching various martial arts, such as Taekwondo, jiu Jitsu and Taichi. I have also been dancing tango for about five to six years. In today's episode, we will be discussing the lessons from the dance of tango for social interaction how we can become better dancers, fellow workers, leaders and followers. We discussed the costs of over emphasizing leadership at the expense of cooperation and the essential role of followership.

Speaker 1: 1:08

Our guest today is Shana Fabiano, who is an internationally recognized tango artist and the author of a recent book Lead and Follow the Dance of Inspired Teamwork. Over the course of her 20-year dance career, she thought thousands of people hoped both lead and follow with grace. Now she's taken her expertise off the dance floor and into the wilder world to help people create healthier relationships in life and work. Shana is a certified coach and completed her master's fine arts in dance at UCLA. Welcome Shana. As you know, we both share an experience as tango dancers. You have studied tango since 1997 and have learned both leader and follower roles. Personally, I've mostly been focusing on the leader role, but I've also recently become much more interested in understanding the follower role, not the least to become a better dancer. I also have in front of me your book Lead and Follow, and actually starts off with a very nice introduction. I wonder whether you can actually read that and tell the listener something about how we actually start the dancing tango.

Speaker 2: 2:27

I'd love to Kettle and thank you very much for inviting me on the podcast. Here's the introduction. There are approximately 10 feet between your chair and the edge of the dance floor. You are seated at a small cafe table and the tall stranger, the leader, is standing calmly in front of you. Eye Contact confirms your silent agreement to become partners for the next set of dances. This moment is sacred a tiny pocket of time in which you both acknowledge that, although you are individuals, you will now come together to play the roles of leader and follower a creative team, interdependent.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Thank you very much. That's very nice. Maybe you can say a little bit more about how you actually started dancing tango.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Sure. Well, the quick version is that I stumbled into tango by accident, like many of us, back in 1997, while experimenting with lots of other social dances ballroom, salsa, swing. I know I tried it all and my tango obsession story is probably similar to many others. I walked in and I saw people doing this incredibly intricate set of footwork and I thought, wow, this is more complex and poetic than anything I've seen before. And that comes, I learned later, from the fact that the tango has no basic steps, so it's very unique in that way.

Speaker 2: 3:52

It's not like a mirror image of your partner, as many other dances are. The leading and following roles are really distinct, so I was fascinated by that from an improvisational point of view. And as far as the two roles you mentioned, I have studied both. I was very lucky right at the beginning. At the end of my first tango class, the instructors, one man and one woman, performed an exchange of lead and follow and that just changed everything for me, changed all my expectations of what social dance could be, and I got really excited to learn both roles.

Speaker 1: 4:26

You also founded Tango Mercurio, a DC-based nonprofit with a mission to increase social creation through dance, of which I am currently a board member. Can you tell us what made you start this nonprofit Sure?

Speaker 2: 4:42

And first of all thank you for being a board member. Very important work. I'm very happy to know that Tango Mercurio still exists. I'll go back to my early experience of Tango, actually because it was very much a DIY type of experience. In the late 90s there were very few Tango schools and very few local teachers in North America, and so if you wanted to learn, either you had to do a lot of traveling or you had to pitch in with your local Tango group and organize a workshop or organize a practice, organize like a video night. So learning and dancing Tango were wrapped together with helping out with all these logistical tasks, and so those two just have always been linked together in my mind.

Speaker 2: 5:29

And although eventually I did earn money from Tango and I was again very lucky to be one of those people who could earn a living teaching Tango for a short period of time, relatively speaking, it was always really clear to me that Tango writ large, like the whole Tango community globally, it only occurs.

Speaker 2: 5:48

It only happens because lots and lots of people give their time for free. I was one of those few teachers who could make a living, but that's only possible because at the same time there's thousands of people running events, putting out flyers, helping out at the door, doing things like that. So it already is a nonprofit enterprise right, like the whole Tango community, and when it became my business I thought that should be the model right. It should be a nonprofit model because that's what it is really the whole community and it was also a way to recognize all that work that people do. That I once did and now I had tons of volunteers helping me run my classes and my events, and it was a way to invite public funds. I really do believe that social dance is a public good, social good, and that civic entities should support it.

Speaker 1: 6:40

You read the passage from the book and it's clear to many who will be watching Tango that it's an intriguing dance. It definitely can attract people and it's difficult to do. But there's also the connection aspect. You have to deal with another human being, you have to connect. It's really important for even to be able to dance the simple step. So the Tango Mercurio as a submission to talk about. You talked about social cohesion. Can you explain a little bit how actually Tango is dance, or any dance that can help with social cohesion?

Speaker 2: 7:20

Sure, I think it helps in lots of ways. One, it gets people interacting with each other without their phones, without the sort of digital interference, and I think we've forgotten how important that is and how healthy it is to just be with each other physically and interact, doing anything really. But dancing is creative, so it builds relationships very quickly. I can tell you that most of the important people in my life I met through dance. So that's a short answer. There's more. There's a physical benefits. You learn about emotional intelligence, relational intelligence. There are a lot of things embedded in Tango, almost like a mind-body practice. I've heard people compare it often to yoga or even meditation, in the way that you learn to be with yourself, be with the other person. There's lots of good benefits there as well.

Speaker 1: 8:24

So in dance, can you tell us a little bit more about how a leader needs to be attentive to the followers, and vice versa for that matter?

Speaker 2: 8:33

Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you listeners who don't know anything about Tango, one really interesting part of it I alluded to earlier is that the roles are not symmetrical, so they're the leader and follower not doing the same thing. So the easiest way to understand that, I think, is to talk about what the focus is in each role. So the leader in the dancing couple has their attention out almost all the time. They are directing the couple, they're protecting the partner from crashes, they are managing the floor, the dance floor space, right, navigating around in a circle with all the other couples, while the follower, on the other hand, their attention is mostly in it's on their own experience of the dance, the sensation of moving, the quality of movement, the expression of every individual step. So it's like a macro, big picture, small picture type of distribution of labor. The leader is like assembling the dance, like start to finish, like a project manager almost, and the follower is breathing life into the dance in every moment, right, attending to all the details.

Speaker 1: 9:44

That's very nice. Most listeners may not be Tango dancers, but you also have quite a lot to say about management and life in journal inspired by your Tango experience. Could you tell us a bit more about how you started to think that there are wider lessons for how we work together?

Speaker 2: 10:03

Honestly, I don't think this idea comes from me. When I was teaching full time, I was spending most of my time in dance studios, so it wasn't me who was like going to the office and seeing these parallels, it was my students. So I have lots of really fascinating conversations with my Tango students who they themselves were going to offices and going to workplaces and they would come into their class and say, oh, I totally get it, I'm doing too much here with my partner, I'm trying to control things. I need to back off a little and let them move a little more freely. And then they would say, oh, I totally do that.

Speaker 2: 10:37

At work, I try to micromanage my team because I get anxious, but I just need to trust them a little more and then our workflow will be better. So they started making these analogies for me and it got me really curious, right? So when I eventually then changed careers, become a coach, I thought there's something here, right. I want to explore that and that's what led to the book right, lead and follow, where I sought to translate all of these amazing insights and wisdom from Tango partnership into language, into written language, so that other people, even if they never try to dance class could benefit right from those insights, from that wisdom.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Apart from our joint low of Tango, the other reason that they invited you to talk about, the tour listeners that were struck by your emphasis on the importance of followership. I've actually personally been a bit uncomfortable with the management's emphasis on leadership. Maybe that's because I come from a very egalitarian culture of actually Norway, where standing out is frowned upon, not only a good thing, but it definitely is a cultural aspect, creating more egalitarian society. But how is followership important in organizations more broadly?

Speaker 2: 12:00

We could be here all day talking about that, but I'll try to give you a concise answer. And first I want to say I think you're absolutely right to point that out that there is a really strong leader bias right here in US culture anyway, and I think we can tell people that, like, point it out, because it's a little strange really that we say, oh, these people are more important. But I also want to acknowledge, on the other side, followership for listeners might be a totally new term. I get that. It's not in the mainstream discourse and it may even feel a little cringy, a little icky, right, followership is no, we don't want to be following, right, so that's there. And that's because we've all been taught for decades and decades that leadership is good and followership is bad, right. So it's a very kind of black and white type of construct we've all inherited. And so if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I am cool with leadership, leadership is great, I do that, but not following, I'm not a follower, I'm not a loser, so you're not alone in thinking that's the cultural bias, right, you're noticing.

Speaker 2: 13:10

So, having said that, the problem with this good, bad binary is one that it's false, right, they all know that bad leaders exist and unfortunately, we've probably all worked for some of them. So being a leader or having a title doesn't just make you a good leader, right? Automatically, like you have to work at that, just like a dancer would. And two, it creates this tendency for us to label all the good things that we see in a work environment as leadership, right, which can be pretty confusing. You're a good listener, you're showing great leadership, you land a contract great leadership. You speak up about a problem great leadership, right, it's all a great leadership. And what do these things have to do with each other? Not a lot, right, but we're just used to being like okay, leading good. So that's the second problem. It just makes it really confusing what we really value. So it turns out that leadership and followership really only makes sense together if you look at them as a pair, like we do in dance.

Speaker 2: 14:15

So I'm gonna give you two ways to think about that relationship. Number one is positionally. So your positional roles. You are rank or title in an organization, so it's what it sounds like Someone's above you, someone's below you, right? So if you're a team leader, then you lead your direct reports, but you also follow your own supervisor, right. So you have these two lead follow conversations happening all the time.

Speaker 2: 14:42

The second way to think about leading and following is situational roles. So situational roles are, for me, more interesting because they are fluid. They change throughout the day, sometimes they change even hour to hour. For example, you can actually lead your boss in a conversation if you happen to be the subject matter expert or if you have a list of questions you need to get answered. You're leading that conversation, right, you're steering it, but you can also follow your direct report. Say they're happening to facilitate a meeting right On a certain project. You attend the meeting, but you don't steer it. They're steering it and you're maybe asking some questions along the way. So that's situational.

Speaker 2: 15:27

And if you listeners out there reflect a little on your own experience, I'm willing to bet that you can spot these right. Especially the positional is easy. Right, you know what your title is, but you can spot the situational leadership too if you just think through your day or your week and all your appointments, and it's natural to us as humans to do that right. It's like a conversation, like go back and forth. That's how things happen. Leadership alone does not make things happen. I know we've been taught that leadership is influence, leadership is choosing, but the reality is everybody is influencing everyone else all the time, just in different ways. So it's leadership and followership interacting right you with your boss, you with your direct report that's what makes things happen, and when you start to see that dynamic in your everyday experience, a lot of things make more sense.

Speaker 1: 16:22

So I have actually some experience, as you put a positional managerial leadership in my career and I was pretty much in my organization, international Monetary Fund. I was thrown into this role pretty much unprepared, so the first thing you start thinking about is I'm a leader, I need to give good instructions. Okay, to some extent, it's true, you cannot give confusing instructions. That's also true in dance. But then it really dawns on you after a while the importance of not only listening but establishing a co-creational relationship with your team, and that's where you really get it. But it's hard and many will have to do journey on their own. Many don't even so. That's why what you're saying is I'm really understanding it from a personal experience I have some more big questions. I think there is also a gender dimension of this. So it's true in dance, in tango, that most leaders are typically men. It's true in organization that most leaders are men, at least the positional one. Is it a reflection of a patriarchal society or is it something else going on there?

Speaker 2: 17:57

I think we know we need to bring in an army of historians and sociologists maybe to answer that question, but my MFA dance experience opinion is that, yes, it's an artifact of patriarchal society. Just remember all of these structures, like both social dance itself and the structure of a company. These were both invented under a patriarchal social order. It just is what it is. We just have to call it what it is. The society was set up with that set of values and the dances were created in that society.

Speaker 2: 18:34

So we now have the sort of lingering relic of that which is on social dance floors. We have the expectation that men lead and women follow. In companies there's a generational pattern of men leading. Now that women are working, which is fairly recent, they started in that lower following role, so it is a little bit like this inheritance of that old structure that is, of course, changing. In terms of dance itself, I would say there's nothing wrong with men leading and women following. People love that. Let them do it. I also love it. I just also love dancing with women in both roles. I also love leading men who follow. I love it all, and that's just what gives me pleasure, but everyone gets to choose what they want, right.

Speaker 1: 19:33

I think it's actually quite interesting when you're actually following a little of what's going on in Argentina, although that is a very traditional society in many ways, but it's also, in many ways, a society that has many norms, actually trying new things, and inside that tango, I would say many of the things that comes out from the younger generation in Argentina has a lot to do with changing roles, thinking more carefully about the followers role, etc. So I think that's really encouraging from the tango scene side. I have to ask this question as well. You mentioned that in companies, the leaders are valued more, and this is also true. There was a paid more and, in many cases, a much more. What do we do with this?

Speaker 2: 20:27

I commend you for asking the question. I actually think this is a really important question to ask right now, especially. Right, we're facing multiple crises, right, climate, economic, social, like. Something has to change and, yes, you're absolutely right to call this out. We definitely overvalue. I would call it supervision, right, I don't even want to call it leadership because in my view, in a company, everyone is doing leading and following if it's working well, but we definitely overvalue those supervisory positions compared to what everyone else is doing. Yeah, and I'm not at all convinced that is the most optimal way to do good work together, to incentivize good work together. So I want to be clear it's okay, it's totally fine for some people to earn more than others, based on good reasons maybe more responsibility, more education, more expertise. There are lots of reasons to adjust the rates of pay. But here's what I wonder, kettle, maybe we'll leave this for listeners to ponder too, If a company were a democratic entity, would we choose this same org chart, right?

Speaker 2: 21:42

This same stratification of salaries, or would we make up something else Right? If we were choosing, how would we pay ourselves for the work we do together? I think that's a really intriguing thing to consider, and I think if we start thinking about that together, we might come up with some pretty creative systems of reward and incentive that would then make career more interesting and varied. So right now, there's just one way to move your career, like up the supervisory chain, but maybe there's other ways to develop your career that could be equally rewarding.

Speaker 1: 22:14

I had to ask that question. I'm an economist, so I kind of stopped myself.

Speaker 2: 22:19

I would love to hear your thoughts on that, Kettle. It's a really important question.

Speaker 1: 22:25

I actually don't have an answer, unfortunately, but I do think that it brings up and I know it's not very popular to talk about communism in this country, but the ideal that you're being paid for you're being paid how much you actually need and that's it, and they get a terrarium. Society is better in many ways. It still is true. Question is actually how to bring it about and still having a free people. So I do think it's a very fundamental thing I do. One of the thing we also should not forget is that how much people are being paid is not how much they're worth, and I think even starting there it can help us to understand a little bit of where we're gonna go forward. But, of course, how do you organize companies? In a way, I don't think we can. Putting two strict structures on. That can be hard. There are, of course, been many attempts of having much more democratic companies and some work and some don't work.

Speaker 2: 23:33

It's not straightforward I think it's a great. It's a great question, is a great thing to think about and I wanted to just throw out a fantastic resource for listeners on this subject. Not specifically leading and falling, but Wonderful book by rose hackman called emotional labor, just out in the end of march and incredibly well researched, very accessible, high recommend. She explores this question in depth the question of value, the question of what we consider work, what we consider paid work, unpaid work or underpaid or overpaid work. It's incredible so I highly recommend it. Rose hackman, emotional labor.

Speaker 1: 24:14

Thank you very much for the recommendation. Thanks a lot for this insight. It is clear that we opened up a large number of questions, and I did a lot of the organizer society, the role of leadership, the pay structure, gender roles and also the value of human beings, but I don't think we really have time in this short podcast that well too much into this last area. Suffice it to say the importance of a christian fellowship carries the seed of a more productive and egalitarian society in itself.

Speaker 2: 24:52

Any last remarks I just well said. I really believe that too, because when we start to see a followership happening right and recognize its value, what it does is it creates a more inclusive environment right in any group, because we suddenly see, oh, everyone's doing something all the time. We need to value all that work. So I would leave listeners with a maybe a tiny little assignment, which is just to go through the rest of your week and every time you interact with a co worker, colleague or even Co volunteer if you're in a community organization, just start to notice when you are in a leadership role meaning like when are you steering the situation and when are you actually in a followership role where you are participating in a situation that somebody else is steering and just notice that's it. Just start noticing that flow back and forth.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Thank you for joining us for this episode. You have provided great insights and food for thought. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in for this episode of wellness musketeers. If you found this podcast interesting, please check out charna's book lead and follow the dance of inspired teamwork. She also has her own podcast lead and follow, available wherever you listen to podcasts. All of this information and more, such as few videos and the description of her coaching service, can be found on her website, www. Shana Fabianocom. You can check the podcast notes for the link. Please share this podcast with your friends and family and subscribe for upcoming episodes, as we'll give you tools to improve your health, work performance and just live a more balanced life. Thank you.