Dance and Leadership

Since my last post touched on dance, at least tangentially, I'll continue along those same lines again. Ballroom and other forms of partner dancing involve leading and following. A great deal about leading in the office can be gleaned from leading on the dance floor.

First a little background on lead and follow in dance. To dance with lead and follow, we must have connection. Our connection comes in various forms. There are visual connections - you see me do something. But more often it comes from a physical connection: hands, arms, shoulders, back, hips and thighs. Connections can’t be one-way. They are equal and opposite. If I pull, you have to pull back against my pull equally. If I push, you have to push back - again equally. If our connection is mushy, the language of our dance will be equally mushy. With a solid connection to transmit my intentions and suggestions to you, we can do anything.

So what happens when I lead? For example, if I want to lead a simple under-arm turn - how does that evolve from a thought in my mind to your action? It’s all in the connection. First, I push you away slightly - and you see “hey - something is happening here” - you push back and there is a nice firm pressure between our hands. Then I move back towards you, shifting the connection to a slight pulling and as you respond and start to pull back, I raise my hand up and to the side. You don’t even need to know what I’m doing. You will turn. Your balance and motion will dictate that. The only thing that is required: you maintain the connection.

So how does this related to management and leadership at work?

Let's start with the connection. If there's no connection, there's no leading and there's no following. It's pretty likely I'll fail miserably trying to get a room full of strangers to do something for me. So a connection must be cultivated over time and exercised. It's on ongoing process to be built.

Next, there's the message to communicate. You'd be amazed what can happen over a good connection. When dancing, if I have an instant of indecision, my partner will feel it. "Go left..NO! GO RIGHT!" She'll start going right and then get totally thrown off. Or you can give one signal which is open to multiple meanings. If I raise my hand and sort of move it to the side but sort of don't, my partner will be confused. "Does he mean for me to turn? Does he mean for me to move towards him?" I recall an instance when I failed to do this at work. I was proposing that we take on a certain task. I presented the pros and cons and in my effort to be balanced and explain things well, I left my audience unsure what I was advocating! You must me unmistakable. If you leave two options but only want one, you can just bet someone will take the wrong one.

But by the same token, in dancing, nobody wants to dance with someone muscles them around the floor. When leading on the dance floor, it's not my job to do my follower's job. I lead; I recommend; I suggest..and it's up to her to follow. If I strong-arm her into what I want, I will throw her off-balance, possibly injuring her or myself in the process. And if it's clear that's how I lead, I'd expect she'd find reasons not to dance with me in the future. Likewise at work, you can't just bark orders and expect people to comply. Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower said it best, "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."

If you've selected good partners to begin with, good leadership looks effortless and efficient; a team (or a couple) moves as one.

Embracing Boredom in Operations

So, when I'm not working, there's a pretty decent chance that I'm dancing.  You will note that IT folks/geeks and dancers are somewhat different demographics.

The other night I had a dance lessons with one of my professional instructors - Olga.  Now, Olga is an amazing dancer, a fantastic teacher, a fabulous dress designer and a world-class hair doer-uper.  But when it comes to technology?  Ooof.  Not so much her thing.  In fact, it was when she was having trouble getting my next lesson set up in the on-line appointment calendar that this conversation began...

"Olga, I'm not sure if you're allergic to technology or it's allergic to you - but this always seems to be harder than it needs to be.  I guess watching you deal with technology is a lot like you watching my dancing."

[I will not attempt to phonetically convey Olga's adorable Russian accent]

She noted that she was lucky that she had a job which didn't really require a lot of high-tech skills and then she asked what I actually do, work-wise.

"I oversee operations for the financial and acquisition systems for a huge civilian agency.  When FDA or CDC or other parts of HHS buy things or spend money - many many billions of dollars - our systems track that."

"Oh!  That sounds exciting," she said with eyes wide.

"It is sometimes.  But it shouldn't be.  The goal is to make it boring."

Now, sometimes we have a little language barrier between us, so she wasn't sure if she understood me, "You want boring? Why would you want your job to be boring??"

So I did what I do: I gave her an analogy.

"When you fly, do you want the pilot to walk off the plane thinking, 'Wow - that was boring?' or 'Wow - that was the most exciting flight ever!'

At this point Olga informed me that she hates flying no matter what.  So I tried again, more on her terms.

"Imagine you've been asked to design a dress that a woman is going to wear in a competition in several months.  So you find out what she wants - is it for ballroom or latin?  Does she have a color in mind?  All that stuff.  Then you take measurements and come up with a design.  You find the exact fabric you want, you sew it, put stones on, do fittings - all that stuff in whatever order it's meant to happen.  And maybe it fits just right - maybe there are problems.  Finally, the competition comes - she wears the dress and it looks good.  Let's call that boring.  Exciting is when you find out you don't have quite enough fabric or she changes her mind about the color just after you've ordered the fabric or you do a fitting and you realize some measurement is now WAY off and you'll need to do a lot of tailoring or she puts the dress on the day of the competition and the seam rips or maybe the worst case, she's dancing in the competition and the dress pretty much falls off.  Now THAT is excitement.  But not in a good way."

At this point, the the light bulb was lit brightly over her head.  But then she paused, "Isn't that almost all just good planning?"

Why yes, Olga, it is.  It really really is.