‘You can tell your follower where to go, but you can’t put them there’: Leadership as partnership

This workshop aims to explore the role of the follower in enabling leadership, the leader’s twofold obligation to the present and the future, issues around power and ‘powerful-ness’, as well as the relevance of this in a work context. We will use both the metaphor and the reality of ballroom dancing to explore and challenge our behaviour and assumptions in our roles as leaders and followers in a mix of practical dance exercises and reflection. Since this is ‘work in progress’, participants’ contributions are essential to the outcome. There is no need to bring a partner, but be prepared to partner up and dance! Some prior dance experience (of any style) may be helpful, but is not necessary

Dance, leadership and space

This paper aims to ‘unpick’ the spatial elements of leadership and followership in competitive ballroom dancing and to explore how they relate to organizational life. To explain and underpin this relational field, the authors use examples from their own learning journeys, both as amateur dancers and in their professional roles

Demanding followers, empowered leaders : dance as an “embodied metaphor” for leader-follower-ship

In this paper, we explore how leadership and followership are relational, mutually constructed and mutually enabled. Using dancesport as metaphor and medium, we focus on the embodied, corporeal aspects and dynamics of leading and following, relating them to lead/follow roles and tasks of people in organizations. In a mainly autoethnographic exploration of the lived experiences of people in leader-follower-relationships, we use the concept of embodied cognition as a basis and argue that dance can provide a vehicle for immediate, implicit “insights” and even “aha effects” through sensory, bodily experiences

Feeling your way forward : questions about autoethnography, embodiment and sensemaking

This paper tells the story of a journey of inquiry, which has turned into a journey of research, through the lens of collaborative autoethnographic work, connecting work lives, private lives, dance lives, a journey in time (nearly two decades) but also in spaces (dancefloors, universities, other organisations). It connects dance competitions with organisational life, dance performance with organisational performance, leader-follower-ship on the dancefloor with leader-follower-ship in organisations (Matzdorf 2005, Matzdorf & Sen 2005, Matzdorf & Sen 2014), but also reflection on dance with reflection on work and reflection on relationships in general (and how to make them work). The authors describe and reflect upon layers of mutual influence between work, life in organizations and dance

[Book Review of] 'Storytelling in organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies' by Yiannis Gabriel

Book review - no abstract

Planning for many futures: a method for building scenarios

A short workshop focused on generating scenarios can act to draw people together from across an organisation. The authors describe a process they have designed and implemented across several organisations and report on the key lessons they have learned

“You can tell your follower where to go, but you can’t put them there”: Leadership as partnership – a dancer’s perspective

This workshop aims to explore the role of the follower in enabling leadership, the leader’s twofold obligation to the present and the future, issues around power and ‘powerful-ness’, as well as the relevance of this in a work context. We will use both the metaphor and the reality of ballroom dancing to explore and challenge our behaviour and assumptions in our roles as leaders and followers in a mix of practical dance exercises and reflection. Since this is ‘work in progress’, participants’ contributions are essential to the outcome. There is no need to bring a partner, but be prepared to partner up and dance! Some prior dance experience (of any style) may be helpful, but is not necessary.</p

Embodied leader-follower-ship : a conversation in space

This experiential and highly participative workshop uses both the metaphor and the reality of ballroom dancing to explore and challenge behaviours and assumptions in our roles as leaders and followers in a mix of practical dance exercises and reflection. We will be looking at leadership and followership as a mutually enabled and enabling relationship. We explore, amongst other issues, the role of the follower, the leader’s twofold obligation to the present and the future, issues around power and ‘powerful-ness’, as well as the relevance of this to organisational context. Participants will be able to explore their own leadership, followership and teamworking behaviour and patterns, but this is also an opportunity to reflect on the use of experiential learning methods in management education and development. The workshop will be run by two experienced facilitators (and dancers). To overcome the challenges of a ‘journey into the unknown’ and encourage an atmosphere of acceptance, mutual support and enjoyment, we use a combination of ground rules, helpful insights and ways of managing the shared and private spaces of a partnership