How Tango Teaches Trust
As long as I can remember, I dreamed of being a dancer. Shelley Delayne; prima ballerina. But I was a really uncoordinated child. And my grade school gym teacher? She used to encourage me to sit on the bleachers and read a book instead of participating in gym class. Everyone in my world called me hopelessly clumsy, everyone. And I believed them. I gave up the dream of dancing without ever taking a dance class, and then didn’t really know what to grow up to be.
Now, I have my own business, a coworking space which I love, and I dance tango for fun.
How did that shift happen?
After moving to Los Angeles, I got cast in a reality TV show called “Ballroom Bootcamp “— like “Dancing with the Stars” but for people you’ve never heard of. We picked dances randomly — mine? Tango.
At that point in time, I knew absolutely nothing about tango other than the fact that a “hopeless klutz” couldn’t possibly do it.
I was terrified of the whole idea. I was also broke and it came with a paycheck… so I learned how to tango. Turning my fear into a passion led to a lot of personal growth, growth which eventually led me to start my own company.
At work it’s a constant growing process, often from conversations that happen during the course of each day. For example, one of our members came to me one day, to vent about how her boss (based in another city) was being a jerk. She is reliable and hardworking and responsible, and they were talking about whether to install a webcam over her desk, so he could see what she was doing at any given moment.
Which left me thinking about leadership.
You see: in business, in tango, in life in general, there’s a choice you make when you want to get someone to do something particular: you can force them, make them do it; or you can inspire them, get them to do it of their own accord.
Inspiring people is a little more complicated than force because it requires creating and nurturing a state of mutual trust.
Some people think trust is soft and fuzzy and optional, but in business, a culture of trust creates a major difference in outcome.
The “Great Place to Work Institute” showed that high trust companies perform better financially than low-trust companies; THREE TIMES BETTER than the average return on the S&P 500 index.
Trust matters.
And yet: only about 40% of employees trust their management, according to Harvard Business Review. And only about a third believe their managers trust THEM.
So what do we do?
How do we restore trust?
The good news is: Trust isn’t magic.
I learned trust through tango.
And so can you.
Why tango? Because tango — Social Argentine tango, to be specific — is completely improvised from one weight change to the next. No choreography, no prescribed routines or required sequences of steps. It’s a vocabulary for an ongoing non-verbal conversation. It takes mutual trust to engage in it at all: trust that you won’t step on each other’s toes, if nothing else.
Before taking a step, trust begins with connection.
Eye contact opens the door to connection.
In tango, people don’t verbally ask, “Do you want to dance?” In tango, there is the cabaceo: two people make eye contact from across the room. They smile, nod, and they meet on the dance floor..
At work, especially in an open office environment, there is actually an office cabaceo, and you’ve probably done it — you casually walk by someone’s desk, watching the other person’s face. If their eyes flicker up to meet yours, you can tell by how they look at you if they’re free. If not, you walk right on by and catch them later.
Once a connection is sparked, you solidify it.
In tango, after embracing, the partners will sometime listen to the music for a moment and take a breath together. the leader will sometimes slightly shift from one foot to the other — so both partners know which foot the other is on, and know which foot is free to move.
At work, you’re not as likely to hug someone to figure out how they are. You will, hopefully, look them in the eyes, and talk to them to understand how they’re doing and what they’re up to before making a request.
After connection, the next is communication.
In tango, the leader communicates by making a clear movement. In order to be clear, the leader has to know the next step in their mind before taking it with their body. If they’re unsure, they wobble through all the possibilities before moving; usually without really realizing it. And a wobbly leader often results in a confused or questioning follower.
Same thing applies in business: you have to know what you want before you make a request of someone. If you’re not sure, how can they be?
Then, there’s the third part to building trust: completion.
When dancing, no matter how solid the connection and how clear the communication, if you rush the follower and don’t let them complete the step, they inevitably stiffen with anxiety.
At work, when you throw more things at your team without allowing them to make progress on the projects you’ve already given them, it’s the same thing. And the same anxiety results.
Speaking of anxiety: anytime you are engaging in trust, mistakes are inevitable. Stepping on toes, literally or figuratively is always a pain and always causes a break in trust. What happens next is really important.
After a mis-step, if the leader believes they were right and it was the follower’s fault, their next step will often be extra forceful and aggressive and both partners are tense. However, if the leader believes their communication was unclear, or that it was an accident, they will be more gentle in next moment — with a breath and a reassuring squeeze of the hand and a conscious re-establishing of connection.
Why does this matter: to practice this way, to have all these non-verbal micro-moments of trust on the dance floor, when what you really want is better financial performance at WORK?
In tango, trust is unavoidable. With every step, you both choose to connect. Then the leader proposes a movement, and the follower responds and completes it. Then they connect again, communicate, and complete. Over and over again, a hundred repetitions in a single song
And, according to a study done by researcher Sandra Kerka: embodied learning (where you learn something through physical action, and not just through language) becomes deeply-rooted knowledge, more easily remembered under stress.
So when you dance tango, you experience trust-building in a way that embeds itself into the core of your physical being, in a way that you can’t forget any more than you can forget how to ride a bicycle. That translates into the way you show up, and the way you are able to navigate through creating trust at work and everywhere else.
We’ve seen what happens when trust is systematically stripped from our world: when companies have giant employee manuals, detailing every tiny action an employee can and can’t take, and installing webcams to watch over employees.
In the busyness of business and life, it can be a challenge to slow down to look a team member or loved one in the eyes and ask how things are going for them — to connect and be present, then to communicate with care, and allow space for completion—but it makes all the difference in the world and for the world.
The point of human life is to be in connection with others and to work together with others to create things more beautiful and grand and complex than we can alone. The foundation that makes all of it possible is mutual trust.
(To see the edited-for-stage-time version of this, with some beautiful, completely improvised tango dancing by Marika Alderink and Ricardo Coez, see it here on the TEDxBartonSpringsWomen channel on YouTube: https://youtu.be/v_z64BxI3Ek )
