A meeting has a formal chair, but the room keeps turning toward someone else before committing. Leadership is written in the organisation chart. Influence is happening in front of us.
The group participates in creating the leader
Leadership is often discussed as a quality held by one person. In a room, it is also a relationship. People watch, follow, resist, amplify and redirect. Those responses help determine whose movement becomes the group’s movement.
I see this in workshops when one participant begins an exercise with calm certainty and others immediately match their pace. I also see it in corporate meetings when a person with no formal authority asks the question that reorganises the whole discussion.
Recognising this does not make titles irrelevant. It shows that leadership can move according to the situation, and that followers have more influence on the pattern than they may realise.
Influence is not only what a leader sends. It is also what the group chooses to follow.
The exercise and its source
Who Is the Leader appears in Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton on print pages 189 and 190. A group stands in a circle and silently chooses one leader. The leader begins simple movements, everybody copies them and a person in the centre tries to identify who is leading.
The book uses the exercise to explore leadership and observation as a changing dynamic. The central participant must look beyond the largest movement and notice where change begins.
Practiced Spontaneity: Resources, Theory and Supplemental Information by Izzy Gesell offers a related idea on page 6. Gesell describes leadership through the emotional impact that action has on other people. The exercise lets a group observe that impact in real time.
What makes influence visible
The leader may try to hide by making small changes. The followers may reveal the leader by turning toward them before every movement. Sometimes one confident follower becomes more visible than the chosen leader because the group copies that person more clearly.
This creates useful questions. Do people follow clarity, confidence, status or familiarity? Can a person support leadership without constantly checking for approval? What happens when the formal leader is no longer the most useful source of direction?
I keep the debrief grounded in behaviour. The exercise is not a personality test and it does not reveal a natural leader. It shows what this group did in a brief, artificial situation.
Use leadership as a moving resource
In a transformation, the most useful leadership may move from architecture to finance, from delivery to operations and from programme leadership to the colleague closest to the customer impact.
The formal owner still protects the objective and the decision process. Their leadership can include recognising when another person should shape the next movement.
A practical meeting question is: whose information should the room be following now? That question can move influence toward relevance instead of leaving it attached to rank or habit.
Sources used
- Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton. Who Is the Leader, indexed at print pages 189 and 190, and its focus on leadership and observation.
- Practiced Spontaneity: Resources, Theory and Supplemental Information by Izzy Gesell. Page 6, on leadership as action that changes the emotional climate for others.
Max Grillo is an applied improvisation facilitator. He manages and hosts Rice Cookie Improv, is cofounder of Monday Flow Improv and is a member of the Applied Improvisation Network. He combines workshop practice with more than 25 years of experience in technology and transformation.
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