The untold business benefits of learning to samba
Learning to dance has offered both peace and excitement to EY’s deputy CEO in Australia, Jenelle McMaster, who thinks business leaders can take note of her experience of switching off and having fun.
Jenelle McMaster will never forget going to Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro two decades ago, when she was working as a management consultant for IBM.
The Rio festival, held every year before Lent, is considered the biggest celebration of Carnival in the world.
“I was really taken with the vibrancy and the sassiness of it all. There’s a real cheekiness and an irreverence to the Brazilian way. Once you go to Carnival and experience that, it stays with you. It is pretty intoxicating,” she says.
McMaster vowed to return to Rio, but in the meantime she has found a great substitute.
Four years ago, she decided to bring a special element of Brazilian culture into her everyday life when she took up dancing samba, known for its simple forward and backward steps and rocking body movements.
She went to a summer dance school near her home in Sydney’s inner west and has been there almost every week since.
“There is something about it. You can be serious, you can be cheeky and there is something about that whole vibe that is very much me,” she says.
“I do samba classes and then I also do a class that’s called “roots”, which is all the African underpinnings. So you understand the genesis of samba and then you build on that with your actual technical classes and routines.”
To McMaster, dancing is more than a lighthearted pastime. As accounting giant EY’s head of people and culture and its deputy CEO in Australia, she believes dancing genuinely improves her mental health and focus, fuelling her passion for changing company cultures and helping people think bigger about what they can achieve.
With more than 20 years’ experience in the areas of transformational change, management, and HR, she has previously led the markets section, and the change and HR services for EY member firms across Asia-Pacific.
“Dance class is one of the few times and places that I am entirely present, where I think about nothing else. I don’t even wear my watch. There are no notifications, no pings, I’m not multi-tasking. So it is such a contrast to every other moment in my life where there are always multiple things going on competing for attention,” she says.
“I love the fact that it brings me joy. I don’t think joy is a word that we use too often in life, but it is the only word that comes to mind when I think about dance. It is joyful. I also love that nobody knows or cares who I am or what I do. I’ve been there for four years. Nobody has ever asked me, ‘What do you do for a living?’ Nor have I asked anybody else. So then you are unshackled from any responsibilities, accountabilities, hierarchy, status or expectation. We are just all there to learn a routine, laugh at our missteps and have fun and there is a wonderful relief and release in that.”
McMaster also does pilates classes three days a week and has employed her 17-year-old son, Liam, as her personal trainer at the gym.
“It is a win-win in the sense that he wanted to make some money, I needed to get a trainer, and we needed time together (or at least I did!),” she says.
“I would directly connect my mental health and my fitness and my physical outlet to how I lead and succeed in the workplace. I think it is not just the impact on, and for, me. There is the positive ripple effect of it on others.”
She is now also determined to take four blocks of leave each year, after previously “not being a leave-taker”.
McMaster holds a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of Sydney, with an honours degree in psychology.
“Dance class is one of the few times and places that I am entirely present, where I think about nothing else.”
From 1997 to 2004 she was in the Australian Army Reserve where she did psychological assessments for recruitment and selection, as well as critical incident stress management.
Those skills are now on public display in a regular EY podcast series called Change Happens, where she reveals how to apply the lessons learned by leaders who harness the power of change.
“The direct relationship between mental health and wellbeing and impact as a leader has all been directly observable to me and shared by many of my colleagues and other leaders, particularly through Covid,” she says.
“We have more language now than we ever had before around boundaries, mental health and psychological safety. These weren’t words that existed in the business lexicon a number of years ago.”
She says many business leaders are grappling with these issues, especially the expectation of their people around empathy.
“They know that they have got more language, but also feel a bit ill-equipped,” she says. “There has been a steadily increasing shift in the expectations of leaders. Even just the cognitive load of managing a remote or hybrid workforce and knowing how to engage, inspire, coach and performance-manage in those vastly different conditions. Or the load of knowing how to have a conversation about what does flexibility like now. What can I reasonably ask of you?”
Those dilemmas now extend to the employment of artificial intelligence in the workplace, and the practical and ethical dilemmas that come with it.
“Leaders are starting to ask themselves, ‘What does it look like if I now have AI agents on my team with staff? How do I talk to staff about the future of work for them? Is there an opportunity, perversely, for AI to help me be more human. If AI can take on my administrative load, could I actually have more time to spend with our people and lean into the humanity part of things? Or can I use AI to help me have difficult conversations in a way that I might not have before?” she says.
McMaster took over the people and culture role at EY in July 2024.
“I thought that most of my attention would be on our staff, lifting the culture and the capability for our staff. Whilst that has certainly been important, what has become incredibly apparent to me is I need to spend more time and focus with our leaders,” she says.
“I can see our leaders are asking themselves, ‘How do I show up in this vastly different landscape? What worked before doesn’t seem to serve me now’. So all of my focus is now lifting this awareness and capability.”
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