Followership Development for Every Leader

Everyone wants to be a great leader, but who cares about being a great follower? Leaders are winners and followers are… dare I say, losers? Growing up in the 90’s, all the kids wore No Fear shirts. I remember one of them read “second place is the first loser.” I think that’s how we look at followership. If we can get past the followers are losers mentality, then we may be tempted to look at followership as a stepping stone to leadership. A good pursuit, but what I’m really after is leadership. After all, this is a blog about leadership, so why are we talking about followership? The truth is that leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. We need to study, understand, and master both of them to maximize our influence. Especially when Servant Leadership is our ideal leadership style, followership is a critical component to master ourselves then cultivate in others.

Most managers I know occasionally talk about “managing up.” The context of that is usually based in some tactical response to better handle the communications and decisions of a given situation. It’s very good and necessary, but this blog post isn’t about managing up. Where managing up is the other side of the coin of managing, followership is the other side of leadership.

First a few observations about followership(1):

1. Leaders are over emphasized and followers are under emphasized. It becomes a competitive sports analogy where the leader is the winner and all followers are losers. Something is inherently wrong with followers because they aren’t good enough to be leaders. They are inferior.
2. Follower development is almost non-existent. There are leadership development courses all over the place, but no one is cultivating and developing exemplary followers from a training standpoint.
3. Followers are undervalued in their contribution to the leader’s success. It is often the courageous follower that provides the leader with the vital information he or she needs to be successful.
4. Leadership and followership really aren’t that different. They are heavily interdependent and need to work closely together to collaborate effectively. Leaders need to step down and become more like followers, and followers need to step up and become more like leaders.
5. Followership is an undeveloped science. There is little written and few models to go on. Therefore, it is difficult for leaders to identify the characteristics in followers that are desirable and know how to cultivate them.

Now, let’s discuss what makes a great follower:

1. Be Competent. This one feels self-explanatory. Leaders need followers that know what they are doing and they need to count on their followers to do excellent work. This baseline expectation needs to be fully met before any of the other characteristics can make a difference.
2. Publicly Support the Leader. Trust and respect are necessary and extremely valuable commodities in successful organization. Power without trust and respect is just coercion, and will only produce mediocre results. Even worse, if a middle manager complains about his or her boss’ decision to his or her subordinates, then the middle manager’s subordinates will do the same thing with their peers when the middle manager isn’t around, thus creating a cycle of distrust and disrespect. It is crucial for followers to publicly support the decisions of their leader. There is a time and a place to challenge and confront a leader, but never in front of peers or subordinates. It is important to try to see things from the leader’s perspective, and act as his or her agent, explaining the decision in the best possible light.2
3. Champion the Vision. This is similar to “Publicly support the leader,” but at a higher plane. Leaders cast vision and set direction. They need followers to carry the torch and make it real. Great followers chose to be early adopters of vision and evangelists for spreading it across the culture.
4. Privately Challenge the Leader. In converse to the previous item, don’t be a “yes-person.” It is equally expected that a great follower will challenge his or her leader when it is appropriate, most importantly in a private setting. Followers are closer to the action, and can see first-hand if a leader’s strategy is working or not. Leaders can become disconnected, so it is important that their followers courageously and respectfully ground them in reality.
5. Accept Responsibility. The courage to accept responsibility is by far the most valuable follower attribute to a leader. Leaders are busy and they need followers that can step up to the plate and share the burden. Followers hate to be micromanaged, and most managers are reluctant to do so, but feel that they need to if their followers lack the initiative to assume responsibility on their own. Therefore, the best and first antidote to micromanagement is lot of responsibility accepting on the part of the followers. Any time a follower accepts responsibility for something new, there is the risk of failure. This takes courage and drive on the part of the follower. It takes patience and faith on the part of the leader to let the follower try, succeed or fail, and learn. When this new cycle is practiced and demonstrated as safe, meaning no punishment or reverting to micromanagement by the leader, then it encourages other followers to follow suit. With enough incentive and encouragement, the leader may find him or herself surrounded by bold followers who are eager to share in the responsibilities and workload of the leader, freeing him or her up to focus on more strategic activities.(2,3)
6. No Surprises. Leaders have an insatiable need for up-to-date information in easy to consume, well crafted “executive summaries.” Formal or informal, the current events need to flow upward. Leaders need to know about bad situations from their followers before they find out from their peers, leaders, or customers. Leaders hate being the last to know. They may look bad and incompetent when they don’t know what’s going on in their organization. Well informed leaders, who are armed with the facts can present even negative situations in a controlled and more positive manner than if they were caught off guard. Similarly, leaders need to be adequately armed with quick facts about all of the good things that are going on in the organization. When armed with the good accomplishments, leaders can share the successes with their peers, leaders, and customers. Some followers may feel uncomfortable with “tooting their own horn” to the boss, but as long as the focus is on the team effort of the organization, and the shared purpose that the accomplishment supports, then there is no need for the follower to feel uncomfortable.(3)
7. Be a Good Peer. This one might be the hardest. Peers are the competition. If we look at being a good follower as a means to an end to become the next leader, then we may be tempted to neglect our peer relationships. Few of us will outright sabotage our peers, but are we willing to take the initiative to praise our peers’ successes to our leader and make them look good even when we don’t get any credit? Good followership requires being a good team player, because you are working for your leader and your team, not for yourself.(4)

So, do you have what it takes to be a great follower? Have you ever even thought about your own followership development? Pretty much everyone who is a leader is also a follower, so this is definitely part of the deal. Also, any good leader needs to cultivate and develop good followership, so every leader better learn what it looks like. This blog post assumes a relatively healthy leadership-follower relationship. There are situations when a good follower is following a bad leader. That’s a subject for a future blog post. Thanks for reading! Please share your followership learnings in the comments below.

References:

1Grayson, Don and Ryan Speckhart. (2006). The Leader-Follower Relationship: Practitioner Observations. School of Leadership Studies, Regent University. 

2Chaleff, Ira. (2009). The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders. 3 ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

3Meilinger, Col Philip S. (2001). The Ten Rules of Good Followership. Concepts for Air Force Leadership.

4Kelley, Robert. (1992). The Power of Followership. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday Publishers.

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