Here is the full transcript of Rashmi Sharma’s talk titled “Great Leaders Know How To Turn On This Simple SWITCH” at TEDxHanoi conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Leadership vs. Follower
If given a choice between being a leader or a follower, which one would you choose? How many of you would say leader? How many of you would say follower? Great to see, so when I ask that question, a lot of people do say leader, and there are a few who say follower.
However, if you look globally, the word leadership is searched far more number of times. Every time someone searches how to be a good follower, there are a thousand more people searching how to be a good leader. And I found it very strange, because aren’t they two sides of the same coin?
Well, I think the reason is conditioning. So when we are in school, we have positions like class monitors, who are supposed to be like special people. And then we grow up, and in college, we’re supposed to have like a nice little section on our CV called leadership roles held, right? And which is supposed to make us more suitable for working. So predictably, when we get to work, we aspire for the bigger team or to lead a team, or even if we don’t want to do it, we should want to lead a bigger team.
And the fact remains that in our culture, being a leader is considered far more aspirational, valuable, and rewarding compared to a follower. But something about swing dancing made me unlearn that. It challenged my belief that leadership is about leading. And today, I would like to challenge yours too.
The Swing Dance Revelation
The objective for my talk today is to share with you how being a follower can make you a better leader. It’s May 2016, I just landed into Saigon and going through a typical struggle some of you may be able to relate to: the struggle of building a home in a new country, in a new city, with a new job. But the fun explorer side of me is also looking for something, you know, new, adventurous to connect better to the city.
And that’s how I discovered swing dance. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it has two people, a lead and a follow. The role of the lead is to direct the course of the dance. The role of the follow is to build on that, and together they create a performance.
Now, there’s a beautiful interplay which happens because in the beginning, the follower does not know what’s going to happen. The lead initiates the movement, the follow observes, interprets it, and based on his or her interpretation, builds on that. Then based on what follow does, the lead then decides the next act, and so on and so forth as the dance progresses. So sometimes followers are far more skilled than the lead. And in some sense, they are leading through their follower role.
So when I started learning, I took up the role of the follow because I thought that it’s going to be easier for me as a beginner. Well, I thought wrong. When I started dancing, I quickly realized that it was hard. See, I’m a kind of person who likes to know where I’m going, and I like to be as prepared as possible for that. And I’m sure a lot of you might be able to relate to that.
But what was happening when I was dancing is that I kept trying to control the movement or play Sherlock Holmes in the middle of the dancing, “Hmm, what will my partner do next?” Or just overprepare myself for the next step. And it was miserable. At best, it was a mediocre viewing experience for anybody who cared to watch. And at worst, it was a clumsy experience for me, my partner, and quite opposite of what I wanted.
So after struggling to improve for a while, one day, my instructor taught me this phrase, which really changed the game for me. And that phrase was, “It’s great to be late.” And what that meant for a follower was that don’t get stressed out trying to do it that very second. But you’re allowed to be a split second late and then respond. So it sounds like a small thing, but it completely changed the game for me. I was moving better, I was dancing better, I was more confident, I was being asked to dance with much more, and overall, I was just, just enjoying the dance much more.
And then when I thought about it, I realized that the game changer was not about being late, because that’s hardly perceptible to somebody watching. The game changer was the mindset, which allowed me to wait, a mindset, which allowed me to listen, and a mindset, which gave me the permission to respond, rather than initiate. A mindset, which I like to call a follower’s mindset. The ability for me to switch to the mindset to trust, listen, and respond, changed the game for me.
A London Experience
So that reminds me of a recent incident which validated this. So I was in London for work. And as usual, I thought in the evening, I’ll go and check out, you know, there’s a swing night happening. And so here I am, London downtown, walking into a room full of strangers, mostly Britishers, but who are connected to me by a shared love for swing dance.
So I’m there, and then a short while after, a British elderly guy, let’s call him Mark, he walks in and he says, “Can I have a dance with you?” I say, “Yeah, sure.” And we start dancing. And within a minute, I understand that Mark is an advanced dancer. So I’m like, “Okay.” And then after a while, he asks me, “Do you lead?” And in my head, I’m like, “Oh no, I’m doing it again.
I just can’t follow.”
Clearly, my body language is telling him that I’m, you know, I usually lead, and he’s asking me if he should switch to be a follower for this dance. Anyway, I said, “No, I can’t lead. Does it look like I’m trying to? Because I’m nervous, you see.” He says, “No, not at all. In fact, you’re an excellent follower, which is precisely the reason I asked you if you could lead.”
Of course, I didn’t hear anything after “you are an excellent follower,” because in my head, I was dancing with joy. And I was like, “This is the first time somebody’s complimented me like this.” So that was my state of mind there. And anyway, I composed myself. And you know, and really, if two years back, somebody had told me, “Rashmi, someday the words, ‘you are an excellent follower’ is going to be music to my ears,” or give me a reaction like this, I wouldn’t have believed them. But it was, because that meant the work which I had put in to swing to the follower’s mindset was really working.
As a learning and development professional, it also intrigued me. So you know, if you talk to a lot of dancers, they don’t talk about the dance itself. Instead, they talk about what they found with dancing. And what I found with dancing is to follow and lead better, is to listen more than talk, is to reserve judgment, then jump to conclusions. And most importantly, to creatively express myself when somebody else is setting the direction.
Now, I had understood that this is so important and critical, right, but I had never heard of it. So I was like, “How come I’ve never heard of this? This is so important to be in a team. And how come I’d never heard of it?” You know, given my background, my experience. So I started researching.
The Power of Followership
And sure enough, Barbara Kellerman, who’s a Harvard professor, and a Forbes top 50 business thinker, talks about it. And she talks about the how, in the new world, the dynamics have changed, and because of technology and a lot of other trends, which have given followers far more power, and that in fact, the key to leadership is followership. And then I realized the disconnection in our worldview.
We glorify stereotypical leaders, you know, who have one-sided authority, who set the vision, you know, who have a rigid or unique style of doing things. And we often — we often don’t realize that it’s a stereotype. And aren’t stereotypes dangerous? In fact, my favorite author, Adichie, says that “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
There is another side to leadership, and that’s followership, which gets missed out. Now what do I mean by followership? In a dance, the lead initiates and the follower responds. So good followership is about having good responding skills. And I feel that in our world today, we need it more than ever. The world is not just becoming more complicated, it’s also becoming more complex. Let me show you an example.
This is complicated, it’s a maze, finding a solution takes time, it’s hard, not everybody can do that, but it’s static, so it’s repeatable. The world we live in now is more like this traffic junction right here in Hanoi. Because you can see that there are all kinds of players: there’s a pedestrian, there’s a car, there’s a biker, probably a bus coming from all kinds of directions, trying to get somewhere. There are very loose rules. It’s a community, which is self-adjusting, slowly, you know, figuring out where the blockages are and trying to help each other get where they need to be without crashing the system.
This is more representative of the world we live in today. But still, I do meet people who think of leadership like this. A lot of leaders I meet confuse leadership with authority and power and a one-way street to being in control, something like this orchestra performance, where there is one person directing a group in a stable, predictable environment. There’s been enough time to rewrite the music, to rehearse it.
And often, these are the kind of people who put so much pressure on themselves to know it all, to have all the answers all of the time, when by definition, they cannot, they cannot have all the answers because the world is changing. Vertical hierarchies are not going to be very effective in a community-led world. In a community-led world, everybody is equal, everybody gets a different point. And there’s no one person who has all the answers. Community is indeed the new team.
Jazz Band Leadership
So what do we need in this kind of world? What we need is a jazz band performance. In a jazz band, there is no one leader. It’s a group of musicians coming up with diverse skill sets, they come together, and they switch between roles, they play, they listen, they collaborate, they build on each other’s input to create a performance. There are no rigid rules. And there are no rigid roles, just a very clear idea of where they want to get to.
And in this environment, they need to listen, they need not just to follow, but they need to be proud followers to be able to create music in a jazz band. Even companies like Nokia, Kodak, who were at the top of their game at one point in time, admit that they failed to listen to what their consumers were saying. They failed to follow where the market was moving, and which could have contributed or at least prevented their downfall.
Leadership today is far too important a concept to be vested in one person only. It is a team sport. And the best team leaders are those who swing between listening and talking, between initiating and responding, between leading and following. And aren’t these the same skills which make us a better parent, a better teacher, or even a better spouse?
So coming back to Mark, who, the guy who kind of said I was an excellent follower, he decided to convince me that I could lead because I had said I can’t. And then without telling me, he goes ahead, switches hands, and after a while points it out to me, saying, “You’re leading now.” And I realized that I was indeed leading without ever having done it before.
And I share this story because I strongly feel that I could do it, that switch was so smooth for me because I had worked hard on building a follower’s mindset. So Mark knew then what I realized much later, that to be a great leader, you first need to be a great follower. So next time, if you are anxious, or you are in an uncertain situation, or you feel under the pressure to know it all, take a pause, step back, and reconsider your mindset.
Think back to the performance you just saw at the end. I’ll explain what happened. There were two leads who came together and started dancing with each other. One of them switched to follow role, then the other switched to follow role and they kept interchanging and both were leading and both were following and as an audience, you couldn’t figure out who was leading and who was following after a while.
And that’s what we need today, to know when to step in and direct, but to also know when we need to swing to a follower’s mindset to step back, pause, listen, and follow. These skills are underrated, but I believe that the real magic begins when we start swinging from leading to follow, whether on the dance floor, or in our teams, or in our communities.
So in conclusion, I asked you the question in the beginning, do you want to be a leader or a follower? And whatever answer you chose, I request you to think again. Yes, you all want to be great leaders, but can you swing to be a great follower? Thank you.