Lead & Follow

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Visual focus.  In most Western contexts, eye contact signals to the other person that you are paying attention to them. A lack of eye contact can signal the opposite: disconnection, dismissal, or disinterest. Just think about the last time you tried to share information or ask a question of someone who was looking at their scree...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Take turns.  One summer I attended a large afternoon bbq, and a person I’d just met walked over and asked me about my work. Perfectly normal, right? But then he interrupted me before I could finish, and asked me another question. So, I started answering the new question, and then he interrupted again. Another question. Finally,...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Actor/Director Dan Istrate shares his thoughts on presence, connection, and social leading and following.  Dan grew up in Romania and has lived for the past 25 years in the United States. He’s had thousands of both painful and hilarious experiences of language and culture translation and mis-translation, working on both stage and screen in a wide variety of creative collabor...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Yulia Tolstikov-Mast, Ph. D.  shares the concept of a global follower and especially of global followership as a force of power that can and does influence the far-reaching decisions of global leaders. Yulia is a global leadership and followership expert, an award-winning international leadership scholar, and an educator. Her scholarship and training focus on the internaliza...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Kyle Payne, a strategic talent development leader based in Chicago, describes his recent study exploring how professional engineers navigate ethical dilemmas.  Kyle has fifteen years of experience driving process improvement and behavior change through training, coaching, and consulting. In his research, he focuses on unethical behavior at work and examines the behaviors...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Hi Everyone, this is Sharna. I’ve spent the beginning of the year in a resting phase with the podcast, letting the new season slowly take shape in my mind. New episodes are coming soon, in early March, and I’m hoping this little preview will give you a sense of how I’m thinking about season 3 as a collection of conversations. * Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden The E...

Send Fan Mail by Text! In this short, end-of year episode, host Sharna Fabiano reflects on season 2 and shares three  compelling lead and follow ideas to try out in your own life and work in 2024. Please send feedback on Season 2 along with suggestions for Season 3 directly to Sharna at sharna@sharnafabiano.com . Special thanks to Glover Gill for providing our music. Lead & Follow , by Sharna...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Wendy M. Edmonds is Interim Chair of the Management, Marketing, and Public Administration Department in the College of Business at a Historically Black University, and Co-Chair of the Global Followership Conference 2024.  Her research focus is on toxic followership (people following bad people).  She is an author, and internationally recognized toxic followership expert...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Langley Sharp is the former head of the Centre for Army Leadership, responsible for championing leadership excellence across the British Army.  After graduating from Sandhurst two decades ago, his career in the Parachute Regiment, which included operational command at every rank, saw him deployed to Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Among his many varied rol...

Send Fan Mail by Text! David Elser, author of Doing the Chores , shares his concept of smart followership through personal stories of growing up on a small family farm in northwest Ohio.  David is a learning and development professional based in Coldwater Lake, Michigan who has over 30 years of experience in the transportation industry. He works with employees at all levels, from essential front-l...

Send Fan Mail by Text! David Scott is a PhD Researcher at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. He is exploring Followership Salience as a factor of Leadership in Organisations, and is also a Visiting Lecturer in Business at Leeds Trinity University.  In this episode, he shares his concept of followership as informal leadership, and his view on how the universal practice of followers...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Christian Monö is a Speaker, Author and Sweden’s first and only followership expert.  In this episode, he shares what he has discovered in more than 15 years exploring what he calls “natural followership." We discuss how our human ancestors self-organized in egalitarian band societies, and also how the leadership industry is affecting people, businesses and societies to...

Send Fan Mail by Text! This episode is a conversation about integrated leadership-followership education, featuring both Fatema Haque, Academic Program Manager & LEO Adjunct Lecturer at the Barger Leadership Institute at the University of Michigan, and also Dorine Lawrence-Hughes, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Michigan. They are both involved in the introductio...

Send Fan Mail by Text! I speak with Erica Dawson, Professor of Practice and Nancy and Bob Selander Executive Director of the Engineering Leadership Programs at Cornell University . Erica’s Montana upbringing instilled in her a deep sense of connection to the mountains and outdoors. But her thirst for adventure was too big even for the Big Sky State, so eventually she made the leap to New York to p...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. David Leitner has spent the last 15 years as a followership, leadership, and strategy educator.  In this episode, he shares his passion and perspective on followership and leadership not only interpersonally but also as a way of analyzing relationships between states, communities, or companies. Dr. D not only teaches these topics academically, he runs workshops, seminars...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Nixon Jallo is Husband, Father, Chief Executive of FOLDEVIN Consults Ltd., Bishop of Supernatural Love Ministries, Rector of Agape Bible College, Writer and Researcher based in Jalingo, Taraba State, Northeast Nigeria. He speaks about teaching followership in both faith communities and business communities, how followership differs at each level of an organization, and why r...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Choose an inner orientation.   This technique is also called choosing a mindset or an intention. I’m calling it an inner orientation because I want you to use it as a deliberate and methodical way to orient to people and situations you are in. Most of the time, our inner state is reactive, and we’re not really choosing it. You l...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Julie Newman, a Certified Human Resources Leader in Ontario, Canada, shares her experience coordinating a recent implementation of leadership and followership training for a nonprofit client. Julie is a well-rounded HR professional with 15 years of experience in all areas of HR, from building organizational culture, performance management, recruitment, employee relations, an...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Deepen your breath.  Many of us are in the habit of shallow breathing, sometimes called chest breathing, where the collarbones and sometimes shoulders move up and down with each inhale and exhale. Because of tension in the muscles, or sometimes just because of the general speed of working life, our bodies can get used to a shall...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Together with her partner in all things, Marc Hurwitz, my guest Samantha Hurwitz is co-author of the game-changing book Leadership is Half the Story and co-founder of the innovative training and development company FliP University, based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Samantha and Marc are also co-founders of the Global Followership Conference, which is where she and I first...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Dr. Chris Fuzie, owner of CMF Leadership Consulting, talks through the development and delivery of his Effective Followership training program and how it works in combination with leadership training. We also discuss how most employees in large complex organizations are actually leading and following at the same time, whether they realize it or not! And how focusing more on...

Send Fan Mail by Text! My guest Erin Barry is currently working on her PhD in Health Professions Education focusing on leadership and followership within healthcare teams. She shares her observations of how meaningful and flexible followership impacts the quality of care delivered to patients, as well as the necessity of regular peer feedback and personal reflection. Erin Barry is Assistant Profes...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is Tune in.  You’ve probably heard many times that active listening is an important skill for just about anything, including leadership and followership. Tuning in does include listening with your ears, but it’s much more than that. It’s more like listening with your whole body, directing your attention with all of your senses open...

Send Fan Mail by Text! This week on the podcast, I speak with Maddie Gray, a Leadership & Organizational Studies major at the University of Southern Maine and a member of this year’s USM Collegiate Leadership Competition team.  She has been involved with 4-H for fifteen years, competing in public speaking competitions and building her leadership and followership skills.  Maddie speaks eloquent...

Send Fan Mail by Text! Your lead and follow coaching tip for today is make meeting agendas and make them great.   One reason we tend to complain about meetings is that they feel like a waste of time. I know that when I don’t have any meaningful way to participate, or the topic isn’t relevant to me, I can’t get out of the room fast enough, and if I’m required to be in the meeting, I start feeling r...