Close partnering is critical to winning ballroom competitions. A couple must be able to quickly and wordlessly execute midcourse corrections to avoid collisions when navigating a crowded dance floor filled with competitors.
As the woman in ballroom dancing, my job is to be alert and responsive in following the lead of my male partner. Although I’m not the leader in our dance partnership, I’m as responsible for our success as he is. As a female CEO used to leading in a business setting, it was difficult for me not to try to lead my partner on the dance floor. Allowing my partner to lead was critical, too, because ballroom judges will penalize a couple if there is a power struggle between leader and follower on the dance floor.
Since taking up ballroom dancing, I led my agency to win our biggest account by partnering with an outside marketing consultant. Moreover, I let him lead the account when we won it, which was something I had never done before with an outside consultant. One of my former partners astutely observed that had it not been for ballroom dancing, I could never have abdicated control in this way. He said the same thing when my partners and I decided to sell our New York-based PR and marketing agency, PT&Co., to a Richmond, Va., firm, Carter Ryley Thomas. In so doing, I stepped down as CEO and agreed to follow the able leadership of Mark Raper as the leader of our new combined entity.
Ballroom dancing taught me that being a strong and active collaborator and follower is not necessarily a bad thing. It could be a winning strategy! Our new agency, CRT/tanaka, is three times the size of my previous agency, offering clients enhanced capabilities and additional geographies in which we can support them.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
