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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 who wanted to resist destructive leadership as part of their personal integrity or their moral belief about a thing but as a social process.”
• “If you can find a group of folks who can help you sort out the true from the false and help you acknowledge that what you’re experiencing is real, then that community of coping is not just about coping, but about giving you the agency to do something about it.
• “You see over and over and over that performance outcomes and efficiency goals are being prioritized over employee well-being.”
• “Destructive leadership is a genetic mutation that’s a disease in an organization. It’s toxic. It spreads like a virus. You can’t let it do that.”

About Karen

Dr. Karen Perham-Lippman serves as Senior Manager of Global Inclusion and Belonging at Otis Worldwide Corporation. As a pracademic and mission-driven business strategist with nearly fifteen years of demonstrated strategic and process thinking results in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), ESG, and social impact, she has worked with nonprofits, state government, municipal clients, and businesses across diverse industries and sectors globally. She currently serves as Co-President of the League of Women Voters South Hampton Roads in Virginia and was appointed to the State League’s DEI Committee.

Karen is a Certified Diversity Professional and holds a certificate in designing equitable courses from the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). She earned her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Organizational Leadership and Business Management from Eastern University, where she received the College of Business and Leadership's 2025 Student Service Award presented to a graduating student who has exemplified the college and doctoral program's ideals of leadership and scholarship on and off campus through significant contributions to the field. Karen’s scholarship is published with Ethics International Press, Emerald Publishing, Forbes, Merits International Journal, and SAGE Publishing. Her forthcoming book, Bridging Generations: Transformative Intergenerational Leadership and Followership, will be available from Emerald Publishing in Spring 2026.

Episode References

ILA Global Conference in Prague

Connect with Karen

LinkedIn - for general connections

ResearchGate – for research updates or to collaborate

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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.

If you missed the first interview with Chris back in Season 2, I strongly encourage you to go back and listen to that one first, since it provides a lot of background and will make this new episode more intuitive and useful.

• “Most people just want a group to work, and that’s a group with a shared objective, working together to achieve a goal. When you have a group like that you don’t need someone to guide them.”
• “While we can try to manipulate people into obeying us, true followership is always in the hands of the followers.”
• “It’s the group that’s supposed to make things happen and they just use the leader as a tool to get there and I think we need more of that mindset because that’s really what a democracy is.”

Episode References:

Why We Follow: Natural Followership in a World Obsessed with Leadership, by Chris Monö
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Follow-Followership-Leadership/dp/9198847325

S2 E21 - Natural Followership - Christian Monö
https://leadfollow.buzzsprout.com/1735834/episodes/13838983-natural-followership-christian-mono

Global Followership Conference
http://www.followershipconference.com

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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 developed a focus on combining the individual development of each student with the requirements of a group. The individual person is at the center, and at the same time he encourages an active effort of everyone involved to create a social culture. He sees this as a reflection of the core, heart and potential of tango.

• “[Tango] is something that touches you emotionally and at the same time you don’t really know why.”
• “People see something [that] they don’t know exists, which is physically, spatially, and emotionally connecting to one another and being able to move in a way that is just magical.”
• “I don’t think it’s magical. I just think the body can do much more than the mind allows it.”
• “Being in a group setting where you open yourself and be present, your body takes over, and when you let your body take over, you can grow.”

Episode References

Nou Tango Studio
https://noutango.berlin/

Tango Connects Conference
https://tango.connects.berlin/

S4 E1 - Leading & Following in the Tango - Veronica Toumanova
https://leadfollow.buzzsprout.com/1735834/episodes/16416925-leading-following-in-the-tango-veronica-toumanova

"Efficacy of Tango Argentino for Cancer-Associated Fatigue and Quality of Life in Breast Cancer Survivors: A Randomized Controlled Trial"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37296883/

Connect with Thomas Rieser

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Thomas.Rieser

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-rieser/

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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: rethinking social justice leadership in education."

Ashton's research and teaching seek to disrupt educational practices that are harmful to individuals and communities, and to empower practitioners and scholars alike to imagine and work toward equitable and inclusive futures. Doing so, he infuses his coursework with lessons in leadership and followership to model reciprocal and community-oriented learning. As a researcher, he uses historical and narrative methods to understand and explore followership as it relates to disrupting systemic oppression and building diverse justice-oriented coalitions.

• "In the case of my study, it really positions White activists as followers of the civil rights movement."
• "In the study of leadership as a whole, not only do we become romanticized with leadership in general, we fall back to this idea of great men, and the notion of great men being that of those men who are forged in whiteness."
• "It is less about what we can do to lead the charge but instead turning to the people who are being affected and ask 'how can I be of service to you?'"
• "Learning how to put [yourself] in other people's shoes is really important to the act of followership."

Episode References

• Ashton R. Cooper (2024) Antiracist followership: rethinking social justice leadership in education, Whiteness and Education, DOI: 10.1080/23793406.2024.2433952
• Helena Liu, Redeeming Leadership: An Anti-Racist Feminist Intervention. Bristol University Press, 2021
  https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/redeeming-leadership
• Robert M. McManus and Gama Perruci, Understanding Leadership: An Arts and Humanities Perspective, Routledge, 2015
  https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Leadership-arts-humanities-perspective/dp/0415728738
• Say Burgin, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit, NYU Press, 2024
  https://nyupress.org/9781479814145/organizing-your-own/

Connect with Ashton Cooper

Email: ashton.cooper@uc.edu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashton-cooper-phd-13595816/

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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 started dancing tango while living in The Netherlands. She has worked with different partners, performing and teaching in France, Sweden, Norway, UK, Italy, The Netherlands, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Switzerland, Canada and USA. Veronica is an elegant dancer with a strong personality and a refined sense of music. She has extensive knowledge of both the follower and the leader’s role and is especially known for her in-depth technique classes. She is also a popular tango blogger, her essays on tango are translated in eighteen languages and she has recently published the second volume of her “Why Tango” essay collection.

• “Tango puts you into a context where you have to revise this understanding [of lead and follow] and realize that it is not about command and obey but it is more about having a conversation.”
• “In tango, you learn that true leadership is way more about listening and understanding the other person… and following is way more about taking a deliberate decision to collaborate with your leader.”
• “The real question is ‘how can we remove the violent component of what we now understand as leadership?’”
• “I think we as a humanity have misunderstood following, because following for me is flowing. I flow intuitively with whatever the situation is creating in me as a response.”

Episode References

Tango Connects Conference
(Organising Team: Thomas Rieser, Veronica Toumanova, Juliana Thutlwa, Almut Knauß, and Stefan Knauß)
http://tango.connects.berlin/

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Connect with Veronica

Website - https://verotango.com
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@verotango
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/veronica.toumanova

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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 artists sharing their wisdom on embodied leading and following.

In the meantime, I thought I would read for you the Preface from my book, Lead & Follow, which tells a condensed version of my tango origin story. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy, this will give you a sense of where my perspective on leading and following comes from.

Lead & Follow: The Dance of Inspired Teamwork is available anywhere you buy books. If you’re ordering from outside the US, I recommend betterworldbooks.com – they ship to nearly every country.

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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 followership community has been and where it is going, as well as his own current work to expand the research on followership and its relationship to leadership. Learn about his current work and collaborations including the anatomy of followership, implicit peer theory, storytelling methodologies, and more.

• “When we put the term leader on something in our western culture, we sort of raise it up and kind of put it on a pedestal, and that leads to the follower being downgraded, and we need to change that.”
• “The traditional way is to say well the leader does something… and the followers perform, and we’re saying it doesn’t really work like that… it’s a collaboration.”
• “By focusing on follower identity and the role of followers, people don’t default to ‘the leader knows best.’”
• “If I’m looking at my co-follower, and saying, this is my ideal co-follower, there may be some clues in their for what ideal follower behavior looks like.”

Episode References

Claremont McKenna College
https://www.cmc.edu

Art of Followership, by Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, & Jean Lipman-Blumen (Eds.)
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Followership-Followers-Leaders-Organizations/dp/0787996653

Global Followership Conference
http://www.followershipconference.com

Liu, Z., Riggio, R.E., Reichard, R.J., & Walker, D.O. (2022). Everyday leadership: The construct, its validation, and developmental antecedents. International Leadership Journal, 14(1), 3-35.

Beenen, G., Todorova, G., Pichler, S. & Riggio, R.E. (2022). Reconceptualizing multilevel leader-follower shared outcomes. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 29(2), 289-305. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518221094481

Riggio, R.E., Lowe, K.B., & Levy, L. (2023). Why are followers neglected in leadership research.Organization Development Review, 55(3), 44-48.

Riggio, R.E. (2014). Followership research: Looking back and looking forward. Journal of Leadership Education, 13, DOI: 10.12806/V13/I4/C4

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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 groundbreaking PhD research on how courageous followership actions can interrupt and prevent the worst outcomes of destructive leadership actions – that episode is called Courageous Followers can Stop Destructive leadership. If you haven’t already, I suggest listening to that one first, before this one. It’s a detailed discussion of Alain’s theoretical work that will make this episode's real-time case study make more sense.

GSB is among 1% of business schools worldwide to have triple accreditation for excellence from the world's leading accrediting bodies. At GSB Alain teaches leadership (and followership) nationally in the Executive MBA, MBA, and Public Service Management programs along with other executive education programs.

• “That’s the biggest challenge - you don’t get a big flashing neon sign: ‘Hey, destructive leadership here! Warning, turn back!’ It’s more akin to that old analogy of the frog in boiling water.”
• “When we look at the ultimate outcomes, if we can collectively say they’re not good, we’ve got to think differently, behave differently, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.”
• “If we can’t agree on basic facts, we will never change the way we believe and therefore the way we behave.”
• “One of the ways to increase trust in government is to increase transparency.”
• “We need to have an award system that publicly recognizes whistleblowers and encourages people to do that.”

Episode References

S1 E8 – Courageous Followers can Stop Destructive Leadership - Alain de Sales

Queensland University of Technology’s Graduate School of Business

Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, Robert B. Kaiser, “The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments,” The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2007

Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, The Heritage Foundation
https://www.project2025.org/

Join or Die - documentary film
https://www.joinordiefilm.com/

Ira Chaleff, To Stop A Tyrant
https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Tyrant-Political-Followers-Leader/dp/1637560567/

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