Last Summer, I received a compliment I have cherished ever since. It was offered me by a guy I had met only recently.

He had texted that he might have to re-schedule our catch-up which had been in the diary for weeks. His text reached me already on the train, en route to the place where we were due to meet.

The way I engaged in the ensuing negotiation impressed him so much that this experienced businessman greeted me with the words 'I have the distinct feeling that you took a lead in that exchange but I just can't tell how' as we settled in at the hotel lobby.

I acknowledged his compliment with a smile.

I knew how. Argentine Tango had shown me that there is a way to lead to subtle and elegant that it's even hard to tell who is leading. It seems more like 'somehow we went that way'.

If you don't already dance Argentine Tango - and my guess is most readers of this blog post won't have - you may consider it a 'difficult' dance.

It can certainly look complex and impenetrable.

It was in the face of such expectations from my students of Argentine Tango that I set out to devise easier - and faster - ways to grasp and experience the essence of this exquisite dance form.

I decided to strip out all the technique that tends to keep beginners pre-occupied, and set up a format for experiencing directly the lead-and-follow dynamics in play.

I borrowed a practice from martial arts that I had heard described as 'Butterfly lead'. The fingertips of one person rest lightly on the back of the hand of the other, as a butterfly might settle on a plant stem. In martial arts, this practice is used to develop sensitivity, and it did very well for teaching students the skills for joint improvisation - the core format of social Tango.

While training as a Leadership Coach, I asked myself repeatedly what, if anything, I really knew about leadership.

I had books about it, among them a large heavy tome which reported on the many views on leadership that our culture has held over the last century. Apparently, a hundred years ago, leadership meant the ability to control others and make them do as one wanted. Among the current approaches to leadership this book listed 'legacy leadership', 'servant leadership', and a host of other 'types' of leadership. Ironically, this authoritative summary of up-to-date research started out with acknowledging that 'we can't really define what leadership is'. So that did not provide much firm footing.

It dawned on me however, after a while, that I knew something very reliable and valuable about leadership: I taught people to lead and follow, in a TANGIBLE if subtle way.

Since coaching is less about the abstract and more about helping in practice, the workshop points participants to consider what situations they are involved in that they would like to see improve.

Once you have enough lead-and-follow savvy to get by, we use the format to represent real-life situations, so that you can also practice exploring how what the movement format reveals can translate into action in the world.