Teaching is Leadership

Lately I have been struck by the synergy between what I am learning as a dancer, as dance is my avocation, and what I am learning as an employee and manager. I have an entire essay about this that I began to write during Management training, when thoughts began to flow fast & furious. Tonight, though I just have one comment.

A manager is really like a teacher. Both roles hold authority of others, but their primary goal is to help the other people grow. In the manager's case, it's a self-serving purpose too - better employees means more efficient management. And both people have to learn to teach to the level of the person.

I saw my dance teacher give a perfect example of Situational Leadership tonight. All of the students were tasked with tagteaming a full routine, meaning each student was assigned to dance solo in front of the rest of the class for a segment of it. With most of her long-term students, she simply watched and clapped along. She was Supporting, or you might even say Delegating. However, her newest student had never done this before. Our teacher saw that this woman was nervous and stood up and danced along for a bit, giving her ideas on what to do - just enough to get the student back on track. She judged that the student had low confidence, but had exhibited high motivation in the past to learn, and that the student had some skill but wasn't sure how to apply it in this new situation. This called for Directing Leadership. And it worked! Now, if she had interrupted me and started telling me what dance moves I should be doing, it would have thrown me off my game and perhaps even upset me. But then I'm pretty comfortable getting up and improvising to music I've never heard before.

I had wondered how a leader/manager could make the decisions to use one leadership style or another on the fly. I suppose it takes a lot of practice. But if that's all it takes, why don't more people adjust their management style to the employee and task at hand? I think it's something you need to keep in your mind, and that's why I'm applying the theory to other parts of my life - to really entrench it there.