Lead & Follow
Lead & Follow offers a candid discussion of teamwork, collaboration, and professional development. Host Sharna Fabiano talks with scholars, educators, and artists to explore the relational dance between leadership and followership, and how to become excellent in both roles.
Episodes
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, within this concept, that speak...
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 organizations and beyond.
- “[Follo...
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 not just as individual followers ...
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 a World Obsessed with Leadership.
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 teaching and organizing, Thomas has develop...
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 "Antiracist followership: rethink...
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 2007. She has Russian origins, but sta...
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 bring you more interviews with tango art...
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, Ron shares his thoughts on where the...
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 Alain on his then and still groundbre...
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 and supports an undergradu...
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. Jane’s work as a facilitator has broke...
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 Stevies (the Oscars of the busine...
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 the United States military and is cu...
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.
This is probably the most extreme exam...
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 political spaces and in US policy and electi...
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 screen, at their phone, or out the window....
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, I had to not answer at all and instea...
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 collaborations.
Socially, his way of being se...
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 internalization of leadership and followership e...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!