Leadership Unmasked: How to Inspire Change by Dancing Ugly
Leadership Unmasked: How to Inspire Change by Dancing Ugly
Heylo, my friend! I hope you are well, wherever you are. With this month’s newsletter, I’m excited to include an audio version of the article, narrated by me (with a nice raspy voice thanks to a cold), which you can enjoy on a walk, a drive, or while sipping your morning coffee. This first audio is a gift; in future editions, audio versions will be available when you upgrade to a paid subscription. As usual, the full-text version is free. Enjoy- and let me know your thoughts! Ana Lucia
Museums only choose artists through galleries and are afraid to take a chance. They make artists conform, whereas what we need is freedom.
Yayoi Kusama, contemporary artist
As a granddaughter of carpenters, an immigrant in Germany and the United States, and a woman in science and technology, I have felt lifelong pressure to prove myself. And like many leaders, I would do everything I could to look competent and confident. After all, people were counting on me. If I had doubts or fears about the change I was supposed to lead, I would keep them to myself so that others would not think of me as weak or uncommitted.
In the prevailing business culture, we tend to posture. There is a hypermasculinized definition of leadership, with an all-or-nothing view about struggle: show any signs of it and you lose credibility.
Here’s a composite example based on conversations I’ve had with different clients over the years: an executive is giving a presentation to the board. Business performance is down due to budget cuts and market pressures. The executive is upfront about the state of affairs, discusses the impact in the near term, and what their team is doing to get back on track. They have a reputation for being an enthusiastic leader who loves a good challenge, but today they are less so. Inside, they feel responsible for protecting their team, and unfairly treated by the board who cut their resources but still expected them to deliver the same performance. The board members are concerned by their behavior and give them feedback that they lack passion. The executive wonders: is their job on the line? Can they turn things around?
What strikes me about this story is that everyone felt unsafe. The board questioned whether their investment was in good hands. The executive worried about their and their team’s prospects. Had the real issue been openly discussed (everyone’s frustration and disappointment) they could have connected as human beings and addressed the problem as a team. But, as with many boards, this was not a place for the vulnerable.
When leaders wear a mask, everyone loses
Over time, leaders and organizations pay a price for this need to look good in the eyes of others.
For leaders, it can feel like we are leading a double life. We all make compromises to get the approval and the security we need. But when overpowering ourselves becomes the route to success, we risk forgetting who we really are.
For organizations, the cost is a culture of risk avoidance. Stories are one of the key ingredients of organizational culture. When leaders want change, they create a story about a better future. The stories where heroes are always triumphant fail to engage. The stories that truly captivate us are quests riddled with uncertainty, failure, and growth. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:
Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings. When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what my particular role is in the cosmic drama. This role makes me a part of something bigger than myself, and gives meaning to all my experiences and choices.
Ironically, we do our best to appear flawless, but it’s our flaws that move people. We cannot lead change without showing the ugly.
Dancing ugly as a leadership skill
I was born with curly hair. During my childhood, my parents decided to keep it short for manageability. Every day I yearned to have beautiful long hair like the other girls at school. And to make matters worse, I would often be mistaken for a boy. Ballet class became the only place where I felt beautiful.
Fast forward into adulthood, at a flamenco dance improvisation workshop, the teacher asked me to dance for the other students. This was my chance, so I showed off all my best moves. When the music ended, I knew I had nailed it. The teacher turns to me and says: “We get it, Ana Lucia, you’re a beautiful dancer. Now, dance ugly.”
I had no idea what to do. What did that even mean, isn’t the point of dancing to be beautiful?! Eventually, my pride won, so I jumped in and improvised: I made ugly faces, awkward postures, and imitated an old lady limping across the floor. To my surprise, I was enjoying myself. The other dancers were bent over, laughing with me.
By challenging me to dance ugly, my teacher helped me discover that I’m a flamenco comedian. I’ve allowed playfulness into my performances ever since. And I started noticing famous dancers who shared “ugly” traits with me, such as hunched shoulders, a skinny body, or clumsiness. These artists embraced their quirks and became stars as a result.
It’s harder to dance ugly than to dance beautiful. The research supports this. In a recent House of Beautiful Business newsletter, the author discusses a study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Behavior where…
…the researchers learned that, while people tend to feel weak and uncomfortable when they reveal their own vulnerabilities, they regard other people who show vulnerability as courageous and approachable. This double standard is called the Beautiful Mess Effect. In a nutshell, being vulnerable feels weak on the inside, but looks like strength and courage to everyone else.
There will come a time in your leadership journey when you need to make this choice: Are you going to dance ugly or are you going to keep looking good to impress other people?
For me, one of those moments came when I was offered a promotion to grow and expand my team’s scope. This meant more money, more status, and more career opportunities. I thought long and hard about it, and then I respectfully declined. I love building new things and getting them to work, but I don’t love sustaining them, and I especially don’t enjoy traditional management responsibilities such as performance reviews. I had been missing doing real work and being closer to customers. I decided to step down from my leadership role and become a member of the team instead. I mentored peers who later became leaders, and built our leadership coaching practice, helping hundreds of managers become transformational leaders. For less money and lower status- but more impact and freedom.
This circling in and out of leadership roles became a regular practice in the team. Whereas in other places leaders who step down might be seen as weak or lacking ambition, in this team it was a part of life. It underscored that leadership is not a job. Leadership is about changing the consciousness of the world around you. Which you can only do when you dance ugly.
What it takes to dance ugly as a leader
There’s been a rise in the adoption of business models that replace hierarchies with autonomous teams, and encourage leaders to be vulnerable. I’ve often seen people quickly adopt expected behaviors without a genuine internal shift. Being vulnerable becomes a social trend, yet another mask we’re wearing.
If you truly want to dance ugly, you need a cocktail of lucidity, spontaneity and a healthy disregard for public humiliation.
Lucidity
According to philosopher Skye Cleary, lucidity is the ability to tell the difference between doing something you want versus doing something because you feel pressured to conform. For example, are you getting married because you genuinely want to, or because you’re being pressured into it by your family, friends, or society?
Paraphrasing from her interview with Sean Carroll for the Mindscape podcast,
It’s really hard to tell whether we’re acting authentically or not. We make many choices almost pre-reflectively. It’s not like we can stop every time we have to make a choice and say, “oh, is this authentic or inauthentic"?”. We can try to be as lucid as possible, and recognize we’re not always going to have full information about any situation. Often, we can only understand whether something was aligned with what we wanted to do after the fact. Being lucid means being reflective about who you are, who you've become and the choices you've made in the past.
On days when I’m feeling down, I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake giving up that promotion. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I’ve even felt jealous of my successors. Did I give up too quickly? Do I have some unconscious belief against owning my power? Maybe. I could go mad with this train of thought. But when I check in with my body and listen to the wisdom it holds, the calm I experience validates that this was the right decision for me, at the right time.
Spontaneity
I attended an all-hands meeting once where an executive was about to announce layoffs. The mood was somber. As an immigrant, I worried about losing my ability to stay in the country.
The executive making the announcement had a reputation for being an iron lady. However, as she delivered the news, her voice cracked and she teared up. It was the first time I had seen her show any distress. In that moment, she stopped being “the one responsible for my problems”, and became a human being who had worked hard to avoid what was happening and now had to deliver the bad news. It’s not that she was a weak leader, or couldn’t handle the job. She was simply overcome by grief, and couldn’t help but be vulnerable. I sensed the energy in the room shift, and a certain intimacy in the air. We were all feeling pain, together.
When you see someone being real, in an unrehearsed moment, you relax. You feel like you can be real and spontaneous, too. You feel less alone. Leaders who make others feel alone in their struggle cannot generate the collective resilience needed to sustain change.
Finally, a healthy disregard for public humiliation
You’ve probably come across the TED talk video of the lone nut in the park who starts dancing ugly, and eventually inspires everyone else to do it, too. As narrated in the video, what made this shift possible was the small number of people who joined him first. They did not care if they looked ridiculous. They just wanted to dance. And because there was a critical mass of those people, the definition of being cool changed from “stay seated and ignore those fools” to “join them and dance”.
We need a critical mass of ugly dancers to change the definition of leadership.
Practical ways to get started
We are all ugly dancers. We have just forgotten how to do it. This is about recovery of an innate quality, not about changing yourself. So here are 2 things to get you started on your journey of recovery:
1. Be a beginner, often.
Art is a great practice ground to get comfortable with ridicule. In the PBS documentary Art Happens Here, comedian and author John Lithgow returns to school to learn pottery, printmaking, dancing and singing. There’s a point where we see John singing Snowfall and… well, it doesn’t sound great. Wisely, John says, “What the heck, it’s my voice. I sing in my voice. I don’t think anyone will throw things at me”.
In my experience, John is right. I’ve screwed up many times dancing in live performances. I even fell on stage once, the ultimate humiliation. But instead of having things thrown at me, I got cheers and hugs from the audience. Contrary to what we’ve all been told, public humiliation does not lead to being kicked out of the tribe. Once you experience this, repeatedly, you are free. You realize that people don’t want perfect performers. They want to feel something. Only ugly dancers can do that.
2. When you’re in trouble, accept it.
Maria João Pires, one of the finest classical concert pianists out there, once realized while on stage that she had prepared the wrong piece for the concert. When the orchestra starts to play, you can see the terror in her face as she realizes her mistake.
In an interview, Maria João later dissected what was going through her mind, how she got over the terror and was able play the right piece anyway at a moment’s notice. Her secret: acceptance. In her words:
When you accept what’s happening, it’s like a miracle. The tension goes away… Acceptance is about your ego. You want to do well. When you fail, it’s like losing friends. But if you accept that nothing will happen if you fail, you can feel the love from the audience, you feel they’re there to listen to the music. You feel the energy of the people and they also feel yours. If you’re scared, the audience can’t construct the concert with you.
Like Maria João, one thing I learned in my artistic life- which I applied in my business life- is that the minute I step on stage, the probability of making mistakes is 100%. Instead of investing energy in avoiding mistakes, flamenco dancers invest in learning the skill of recovery. You learn to trust your body because you practice- a lot. The more you do, the more you can rely on your body to do exactly what is needed at that moment. This is the essence of dancing ugly.
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You do not know the whole truth about yourself. It takes intentional exploration to recover your ability to dance ugly. There are as many ways to do it as there are people on this Earth. I hope you find your unique way and that it opens up new frontiers for your leadership.