Leadership is a topic that has been well examined by scholars, consultants, and the media. By contrast, the study of followership has been largely ignored. However, it has now been established that the leader-follower dynamic is far more complex than has been previously imagined. The term follower conjures up images of docility, conformity, weakness, and failure to excel. Often none of this is true.
At the turn of the century, there were slogans and taglines from adverts with the words like “we lead while others follow,” “why follow when you can lead,” and many others. Statements like this tap into a fear rooted in the psyche of the society. It reflected our aversion to being, or to be, one among many in a meek and mindless herd. Those words say plainly that there is no conceivable circumstance under which we should fall so low as to be a follower, and to be a follower rather than a leader is to be second best. This orientation is further entrenched by religious beliefs of being the head and not the tail.
While writing about professionalizing leadership, Kellerman stated that though medicine as a profession is about the doctor and it is equally about the patient. It is about the doctor serving the patient, though doctors generally expect to be paid for their services. Law as a profession is about the lawyer, and it is equally about the client. It is about the lawyer serving the client, though lawyers generally expect to be paid for their services. Then, how is it that most of those who teach leaders ignore followers; they ignore whoever it is who must be carried along if leadership is to be exercised.
In his analysis of leadership dynamics, Hollander stated that leadership was all about an influence process between leaders and followers, each of whom was equally important. Each of them was likely to shift from being in one role as the leader to be in the other role as a follower. He explained that leadership is an ongoing transaction between a leader and followers. The key to effective leadership is this relationship. Though most attention is given to the leader, leadership depends upon more than a single person to achieve group goals. Therefore, the followers and the leader are vital to understanding leadership as a process. Haslam and Reicher, two distinguished psychologists in their article titled “rethinking the psychology of leadership,” argued that leadership involves leaders and followers motivating and influencing each other. Sadly, followers remain widely ignored or even neglected entirely.
Ironically, one of the reasons for the neglect is the problem of semantics. The presumption of weakness weighs down the word “follower.”The word itself, followership, remains suspect. Followers are erroneously thought of as being passive. Additionally, there is the leader attribution error. We typically assume that leaders are of overweening importance and followers of little or no importance, even when this assumption is demonstrably false. So, if leadership were a profession, followership would be part of and parcel of the relevant education and training.
Interestingly, the concept of followership deliberately departs from the leader-centric approach that dominates our thinking about how power, authority, and influence are exercised. It claims that to obsess about superiors at the expense of subordinates is to distort the dynamics between them. So long as we fixate on leaders at the expense of followers, we will perpetuate the myth that followers don’t matter much. Here is the challenge. When we omit from lessons on leadership conceptions of followership, the focus is solely on educating, training, and developing the leader, not the follower, the superior, not the subordinate. This is unfortunate, for there are good reasons for teaching followership to those ostensibly learning leadership. Among them is the fact that most leaders are followers most of the time. Another point is that leadership can never be “all about me,””it must be all about us.”
Therefore, we must ditch our fixation on prescription and incorporate a description. Followers must become part of the picture of the leadership context. The way the world works now, followers are much more important than they used to be, and leaders, much less. Traditional leadership approaches of top-down management and limited follower participation are being replaced by more inclusive and participatory models, especially with the advent of social media. Now, social networking and communications tools such as Facebook and Twitter are dictating the behavioral expectations of those in leadership. Communication technology and social media are significantly changing the way leaders in business and government make decisions. Followers are users of online networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, and they have had a significant impact on elections and protests around the world, including the Arab Spring demonstrations that led to the toppling of leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya.
The sooner we move beyond these negative images of a follower and get comfortable with the idea of powerful followers supporting powerful leaders, the sooner we can fully develop and test models for dynamic, self-responsible, synergistic relationships in our organizations and society.
Do look out for part two of this article.
