ITAA Proceedings 2008 President's, Distinguished Lecturer, Prentice Hall Lecturer

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ITAA Proceedings, #65 – www.itaaonline.org
2008 Proceedings Shaumburg, Illinois
ITAA On The Edge: Lessons Learned from Cuban Salsa Dancing
Leslie Davis Burns, Oregon State University, USA
ITAA President 2007‐2008
Keywords: Leadership, multicultural
Good morning and welcome to the 2007 ITAA Annual Meeting! It is so wonderful to see all of you here!
It is a great honor for me to give my President’s address this morning. In the next 20 minutes, I hope to
provide a few insights (along with some laughter) as I use my experiences with salsa dancing as a
metaphor for leadership and ITAA.
For those of you who are not familiar with salsa dancing, here is a short video of the dance. So, what
does this have to do with ITAA? First a little background ‐‐ About a year and a half ago I started taking
Cuban Casino salsa dancing lessons. I had been involved with many forms of dance throughout my life
and at the age of 50 – I thought salsa dancing would be great exercise and a great way to meet new
people. Little did I know that Corvallis, Oregon is the home to one of the most vibrant Cuban Casino
salsa dancing communities in the world – a community that is fun, caring, and welcoming ‐‐ even
welcoming with open arms a 50‐year old woman who had never salsa danced before.
As I reflected on what I have learned from my experiences with Cuban Casino salsa dancing, I realized
that it could be used as an excellent metaphor for many topics and issues relevant to ITAA. And so I’d
like to use salsa as a metaphor for the following:
o Importance of both active leadership and followership
o Respecting and celebrating one’s heritage and mentors
o Embracing our multicultural past and future
o Stepping out of one’s comfort zone
Importance of Both Active Leadership and Followership
Cuban Casino salsa is a led dance – you have leads (the men) and follows (the women) – and as I was
told the first night – “Ladies, if you like to control things, with this dance, you’re going to need to let it
go”. Gee, let me think, do I like to control things? Well, I’m a virgo born in the year of the monkey and a
department chair – I think maybe I like to control things a bit! What I learned was the importance of
both active leadership and active followership. And that “letting go” did not mean turning over one’s
responsibility. In salsa, the lead directs the dance and determines the specific dance combinations; the
follow keeps the rhythm and must remain flexible but always mentally (if not always physically)
connected to the lead so that she can appropriately respond to the lead’s (sometimes) very subtle
direction. Both roles are necessary, nonverbal communication is imperative (a direction can be as subtle