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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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Order the book: Lead & Follow
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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 undergraduate minor in leadership and social change. He also has a partial appointment at Virginia Cooperative Extension, and that role has focused his attention on best practices for working with community members to guide educational programming. Eric is a past president of the Association of Leadership Educators, and he is the current chair of the International Leadership Association’s followership member community. Eric has also held significant volunteer roles with his local church and draws upon those experiences to inform his research.

• “Leadership is the process of inspiring vision and hope. Followership is the process of aligning behavior with a particular vision or purpose.”
• “People will put up with bad leadership in a business setting when they won’t in a community setting.”
• “In some community associations, we have a lot of people who care that it’s successful but they don’t want to be in the leader role.”
• “Sometimes there’s a default to lead through statements, to tell people, ‘this is where we’re going,’ but leading through questions opens space for conversations and it can surface some answers we may not otherwise come up with.”

Episode References

Kaufman, E. K., Kennedy, R. E., & Cletzer, D. A. (2019). Understanding the Nature of Eco‐Leadership: A Mixed Methods Study of Leadership in Community Organizations. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 167(1), 33-49.

Graduate Certificate: Collaborative Community Leadership, Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education, Virginia Tech
https://www.alce.vt.edu/student-info/graduate/commleader.html

Connect with Eric Kaufman

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickkaufman/

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Connect with your host Sharna Fabiano
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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 broken new ground in the field of health and wellbeing, through her long-term collaborations with mental health occupational therapy staff in the UK National Health Service. She has worked with children in hospitals; in mental health care settings; in prisons, and with people with dementia. In this episode, she shares what she has discovered over the years about the power of fluid leading and following in improvised music.

• “The drum is a tool to deepen group relationship and understanding.
• “If you can just be aware enough to follow somebody and to find that meeting point that becomes a key that unlocks this door to going somewhere new and probably unexpected.”
• “Our educational process is to become a better follower: to become more aware of larger and larger chunks of our environment so that we can then formulate a response to it and co-construct things together.”
• “Its never one-way and it’s very important that that role switches over – that’s what makes the relationship.”

Jane’s TEDx Talk
https://www.youtube.com/embed/MQo-1qlKUBE

Connect with Jane Bentley

https://artbeatmusic.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-bentley-a2550631/

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Connect with your host Sharna Fabiano
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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 business world) for his social media channels. Having amassed more than half-a-million social media followers in just two years, he educates in a unique brand of visual storytelling that vibes like someone rebooted Schoolhouse Rock for the next generation. He is also a USA Today and Amazon best-selling author, and has numerous published Forbes articles, one of them on followership (see below).

• “Everything comes down to help, and we all need it.”
• “There are two fundamental roles of help: leading and following.”
• “I view leadership simply as an offer of help to produce a better future together than we could alone. Followers are people who say I want that future too and I like your interpretation of how we get there.”
• “If we recognize that what we’re trying to do is increase the capacity of others and ourselves, then it creates a really great positive sum.”

Episode References

• S2 E21 – Natural Followership with Chris Monö
• https://leadfollow.buzzsprout.com/1735834/13838983-natural-followership-christian-mono
• Leadership is Only Half the Equation, Forbes
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/08/14/leadership-is-only-half-the-equation/
• Four Tiers of Help, Forbes
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/07/19/four-tiers-of-help-for-unlocking-career-and-team-success/
• Eric McDermott, Team Amplifiers: 8 Ways Teams Thrive in Rapid Change
• https://www.amazon.com/Team-Amplifiers-Teams-Thrive-Change-ebook/dp/B0BWXGD1P9
• Eric McDermott, Career Amplifiers: A Field Guide for Getting Ahead
• https://www.amazon.com/Career-Amplifiers-Field-Guide-Getting-ebook/dp/B0CLGLJK1M

Connect with Eric McDermott

Nextpectations
https://access.nextpectations.com/

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