Un-Leadership Lessons from a Lip-sync Street Performance

An artistic, collaborative experience in 7 songs

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A few weeks ago, I volunteered to join a collaborative experiment, at the invitation of the Théâtre de la Croix-Rousse, located near my home and whose programming I enjoy. The timing was bad, with a full weekend of rehearsals just after I got back from my US book tour, which had already taken me away from my family for two weeks in a row.

But I couldn't resist the invitation:

Do you dream of being a pop star? Do you like to sing in the shower?
In this participative and collective performance, the artists of Groupenfonction invite 25 people of all ages to swap their shower head for a microphone for two outdoor lip-sync concerts at the Croix-Rousse. By interpreting pop music hits (Shirley Bassey, MGMT, Jamie T or Björk...), these one-day stars illustrate the uniqueness and plurality of individuals within a group. The gestures and the mimics studied to the detail transform lip-synching into a real art. Here is a generous, funny and playful show that allows us to celebrate the pleasure of being together.

My teens were mortified that their mother applied for a lip-sync performance(!) out on the street(!!) close to our home(!!!), but it was too tempting. This invitation resonates so much with my work on collective engagement, participation, co-creation in the workplace – which I've outlined in my book Dare to Un-Lead: the Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World (Figure 1 Publishing). Raised by artist parents, myself inviting organizations to more "corporate artistry", I am always curious about how artists see the world. I stand for the growth of "agency", I encourage people to move from being spectators to being actors, so it was quite natural for me to volunteer.

After several days of work with the creator and choreographer, Arnaud Pirault, we performed the piece twice. An absolute joy!

Here is a short video summary of it:

This joyful and generous performance will remain in my memory for a long time. From the work that preceded it, I retain the following points – and relate them to my practice of corporate (un)leadership.

The time for heroes is over - no more heroic leadership

Were we, actors of this performance, apprentice heroes, as its title indicates? Not really. At the origin of the show in 2008, the title was crossed out, to mark the author's defiance of the notion of hero. Every era has celebrated its heroes, only to later deny some of them: Stakhanov, Zidane, or even the slave traders whose statues have been taken down in recent years. In fact, the status of "hero" only reflects the ideology of the moment. The line that crossed the title was only removed at the request of the program designers, because it might have evoked the cancellation of the show. And so the title stayed: We Can Be Heroes.

But it should be taken with a healthy distance, a critical spirit. In my book, I quote director Olivier Assayas who believes that "superhero films are based on the passivity of the spectators". It is the same thing when we put our professional destiny, or the smooth running of an organization, in the hands of a supposedly exceptional "leader". We acknowledge our passivity, or that of the employees, and thereby limit the collective capacity.

Instead of heroic leadership, I suggest we develop "un-leadership", or relational and collective leadership.

Creating together, to be together – It is common action that makes a collective emerge

The start of our first day together felt a little awkward. No sitting in a circle, no ice-breaker, no "let's get to know each other", none of those rituals that have become common in the corporate world. No big statement from the creator about his work' purpose either – what I know about it, I went to ask him during a coffee break. Instead, a few words about the day's content, then everyone got to lie down for a first long exercise on the floor.

In fact, the collective gradually grew around what we were building together, a playful but demanding performance. At no time were our abilities questioned. On the other hand, the choreographer made us see that the show didn't work when we weren't really attentive to each other, when we weren't generous enough.

At the same time, who we are – our beliefs, our identity, our trajectory – was neither scrutinized nor questioned. We were given the liberty to share or not. Our freedom to be who we want to be was respected, without having to make the effort to fit into a cultural mold, without having to pretend. This is true inclusion, the kind I find in working with corporate volunteers.

We sometimes think that we must first build a team in order to do good work: we invest in fine recruitment, in analysis of each person's character, in teambuilding activities... when we should instead encourage emergence of the common through collective action. Pirault has a passion for an " implicative culture " made by all in the public space. In my opinion, we should cultivate a similar passion in the world of work.

Convening emotions - Humanity is a driving force for collective performance

Part of the preparation work consisted in "summoning" our emotions - not just "embracing" them, as we often hear. To a fairly long piece of music, for the duration of several songs, we were invited to move in space, expressing with our bodies the emotions that were running through us. Another exercise consisted, on another music, to look at our fellow participants for a long time, and to let ourselves be looked at by them; without speaking.

This intentionality, this connection to the emotional domain, powerfully resonates with what I talk about in Dare to Un-Lead regarding collective leadership.

One of its essential dimensions is indeed "emotional fluency" or the ability to connect emotionally with people sometimes very different from ourselves. I illustrate this point by evoking rowing, a collective sport if ever there was one, in which one must learn to feel the collective without talking to each other, without even seeing it directly, by opening up all senses and mobilizing one’s "somatic intelligence". A radical change compared to the pre-eminence of the "logical" and "rational" in the world of work.

It is not enough to convince or explain, to bring a group towards a certain objective. It is not enough to coat the work with injunctions to empathy or bits of positive psychology. Matthieu Androdias, rowing champion at the Tokyo Olympic Games with Hugo Boucheron, said that he had tried for a long time to suppress his emotions in order to row faster and harder. But rowing like a machine only got him so far, and no further. It was with a mental coach that he understood that his emotions were precisely what would allow him to win. On the condition that he welcomes them – that he summons them.

Tomorrow's workplace will be different from that of the past because it will grow on the humanness of its people, instead of repressing it.

This is already possible today, if we really want it.

My gratitude to Arnaud Pirault, Christel Zubillaga, the Théâtre de la Croix-Rousse, and my co-heroes & sheroes for this unforgettable experience; to Get Well Soon, Jamie T., Björk, Eminem, Shirley Bassey, and Arcade Fire for their great songs, which I can now sing in the shower because I know their lyrics.

Though Eminem, that's still going a little too fast for me 😊

Find the Heroes' playlist here: