Lead & Follow

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Basil Read shares his work creating a comprehensive leadership curriculum for the FDIC which included followership, plus his research on the influential followership role played by executive assistants, and about his current work exploring responsible global followership and global citizenship. Basil is a retired US Navy Captain, Consultant and a Professor of Practice in...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Robert Kelley shares his current thinking on citizen-level followership in an environment of authoritarian politics, as well as a few observations of how both business teams and community groups are moving beyond leader-follower structures to get things done. Robert Kelley is a Distinguished Service Professor of Management at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mel...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Kinsey Hansen shares her research on the co-construction of psychological safety among leaders and followers in organizations, and gives real world tips on  how she’s been integrating followership into her leadership courses.  Kinsey is an Associate Professor at Angelo State University, where she serves as Program Coordinator for the Master of Arts in Administrative Lead...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Otto Henfling brings a distinctive lead–follow lens to the board–CEO relationship, helping boards govern well and CEOs both lead decisively and follow faithfully in service of mission. He is a consultant and governance advisor in Australia with more than 20 years’ experience in the for-purpose sector, including 15 years as a CEO. He also has over 20 years of board experience...

Send Fan Mail by Text! This is a bonus episode of The Tango Waits For You , a 3-part audio documentary series that tells the story of the first year of building a brand-new tango community in Long Beach, California. It’s both my story, of losing a dream and finding it again, and it’s also a story of dozens of people coming together by chance in a way that feels like it was truly meant to be. It’s...

Send Fan Mail by Text! This is a reverse interview with my coaching colleague and former teacher Amy Lombardo, originally recorded for Amy’s podcast, Human Not Hacked .   Through the lens of dance, art, and embodied practice, this conversation challenges one of our culture’s most persistent illusions: that power means control, and that growth requires constant self-improvement. In this soulful con...

Send Fan Mail by Text! The Tango Waits For You is a 3-part documentary series that tells the story of the first year of building a brand-new tango community in Long Beach, California. It’s both my story, of losing a dream and finding it again, and it’s also a story of dozens of people coming together by chance in a way that feels like it was truly meant to be. It’s a story full of friendship, conn...

Send Fan Mail by Text! The Tango Waits For You is a 3-part documentary series that tells the story of the first year of building a brand-new tango community in Long Beach, California. It’s both my story, of losing a dream and finding it again, and it’s also a story of dozens of people coming together by chance in a way that feels like it was truly meant to be. It’s a story full of friendship, conn...

Send Fan Mail by Text! The Tango Waits For You is a 3-part documentary series that tells the story of the first year of building a brand-new tango community in Long Beach, California. It’s both my story, of losing a dream and finding it again, and it’s also a story of dozens of people coming together by chance in a way that feels like it was truly meant to be. It’s a story full of friendship, conn...

Send Fan Mail by Text! In this episode, Sharna shares her own history and experience with tango as a social dance form. It’s a reverse interview with Actor and Director Dan Istrate, who has been a guest on the show twice before. They talk together about Sharna's discovery and rediscovery of tango, and about what makes tango so compelling for so many people. “There’s a weight within this dance...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Maike Kugler shares her research on followership as voluntariness, a specific way of understanding followership behavior. She also speaks on the need to both expand and deepen followership research to account for a wide range of cultural contexts, variations of language and meaning, and relational dynamics, in order to fully understand the phenomenon of followership in o...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Karen Perham-Lippman shares her research on destructive leadership patterns in the tech industry, and the response of various types of positional followers in those companies. Her findings include the behaviors of Challenger followers and their communities of coping that give rise to positive acts of self-restoration and collective resistance. “Challengers were revealed...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Chris Monö is an author and consultant based in Sweden known for his innovative concepts of "natural followership" and "collaborationship." He has spent nearly two decades exploring leadership and followership from a follower’s perspective, and in this episode we discuss several of the powerful ideas in his new book, Why We Follow: Natural Followership in...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Thomas Rieser is the owner of Nou Tango, a tango studio in Berlin, Germany that just celebrated its 20-year anniversary. In this episode, he shares his perspective on how simple yet powerful tango exercises, can be shared outside the world of social dance in supportive group settings to bring healing and joy in surprising and delightful ways. Over the past 20 years of teachi...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Ashton R. Cooper is an assistant professor of higher education in the School of Education at the University of Cincinnati. In this episode, he shares his research on the participation of White activists in the South in the Black-led Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as insights into the lead and follow role switching of White activists from a recent paper titled &q...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Tango artist Veronica Toumanova shares her insights from 20+ years of learning, dancing, and teaching tango in both roles, how tango social dance communities are evolving in Paris, Europe, and beyond, and what tango has to teach about leading and following possibilities in life and work.  Veronica has been dancing tango since 2000 and actively teaching and performing since 2...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the need to get away from digital life and back to in person life, and as beautiful as it is to connect online with folks everywhere, it’s also really important to be in both the same time and the same place with others in a full body way.  So in 2025 I’m planning to teach more in person tango classes. And for the podcast, I plan to bri...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Ron Riggio has a uniquely broad and deep perspective on the evolution of followership research over the past two decades. He is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and former Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College, where the very first followership conference took place back in 2006. In this episode,...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Alain de Sales currently teaches at the Queensland University of Technology’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) in Brisbane, Australia. In this episode, he describes a recent educational project he coordinated for a group of MBA alumni, analyzing patterns of destructive leadership in the 2024 US presidential election cycle. Back in Season 1 of the podcast, I interviewed...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Leadership Educator and Scholar Eric Kaufman shares his observations of leading and following dynamics in a variety of community and volunteer settings, from civic organizations like Kiwanis Clubs to parent-teacher organizations to church governance bodies. Eric is a professor at Virginia Tech, where he coordinates a graduate certificate in collaborative community leadership...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Jane Bentley is a percussionist and drum circle facilitator based in Glasgow, Scotland, specializing in rhythm, improvisation, group dynamics and communication skills. She completed a Ph. D on drum circle improvisation and facilitation, highlighting the effects of group music making on human wellbeing, and revealing its fascinating leadership and followership dynamics. J...

Send Fan Mail by Text!  Eric McDermott shares a framework he developed through his decades of professional experience called the 4 Tiers of Followership (or the 4 Tiers of Help).   By day, Eric is an equity partner at a financial services firm with more than 60,000 clients. But behind the suit, in his other company, Eric was named "Best Business Influencer of the Year" winning two Stevie...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Paul McGachey shares his theoretical research on Ira Chaleff's Courageous Follower model plus lots of terrific examples from his own professional work demonstrating what it takes to follow courageously at the higher levels of an organization, whether that's  in the US military or in the business sector. Paul is a scholar-practitioner with 18 years of experience in...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Focus your email. I recently received an auto-responder email message from a colleague that read, and I’m not kidding about this, QUOTE “I’m out of the office this week, and your message will be deleted. If you’d like a response, please re-send your message after next Monday when I return.” UNQUOTE Your message will be deleted. ...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Lindsay Burr shares the tools of Polarity ThinkingTM as a way to understand, identify, and refine leadership and followership dynamics in any group or organization. Lindsay is CEO of the Yarbrough Group and based in Washington, DC. Her career has focused on helping people clearly see and then navigate the systems that they're in. She has worked in international politica...