Followership is a practice, as leadership is a practice. Good followership is as necessary to a good outcome as is good leadership. Following last week’s article, we established that the process for learning to lead is overwhelmingly leader-centric. It ignores the necessary other, the follower. And it ignores the situation within which all the actors, leaders, and followers are necessarily situated.
Clearly, the leadership pedagogy is exclusive rather than inclusive. The focus is narrow rather than broad, and the presumption is that focusing laser-like on single individuals will suffice. These single individuals, these “leaders,” are rarely set in the larger world of other people, the single occasional exception being the people with whom they work. And they are seldomplaced in context, the single, rare exception being the organization within which they work. Instead, these single individuals, these leaders, or would-be leaders, are, in effect, free-floating agents fixated mainly if not entirely on themselves, on enhancing their experience and expertise, on developing their skill set, and on expanding their self-awareness, self-development, self-improvement, and the most obvious, their self-importance.
Of course, most leadership experts think that leadership matters a great deal; it justifies the importance of people who occupy leadership roles. However, some leadership experts are more skeptical as they argue that leadership matters only under certain circumstances. Based on this view, Hackman, a psychologist, coined the term “leader attribution error” to point out the propensity to attribute to leaders whatever it is that happens. Meaning, leaders get credit for good outcomes even when there is no evidence that they are directly responsible, and they get blamed for bad outcomes as well, whether they are responsible or not.
Therefore, the argument is that followership, like leadership, should be approached from two pedagogical directions. The first is learning about followership; the second is learning how to follow and be a good follower. The question then is what might it look like to study followership along with the study of leadership? And what might it look like to teach how to follow along with teaching how to lead?
Yet again, this is all about being inclusive, including in our conception of leadership followership. Instead of learning to lead is an exercise in narcissism, we openit up. So that we can see leadership from a wholesome perceptive and see it as a system. Kellerman, an outstanding professor in this field, has often argued thatteaching followership is integral to teaching leadership and that teaching followership is part and parcel of good leadership education. Simply because it makes it clear that leadership is an interactive process. Hence, teaching followership is part of good leadership training because it teaches a skill along with how to be a good leader and how to be a good follower.
Followership is a subject of study as leadership is a subject of study, and any leadership development exercise without the understanding of followership is an oxymoron. Most leadership learners, whether high school students, young adults in universities, or career professionals, are very unfamiliar with the idea of followership that it takes some getting used to. It takes time to understand that followership is as crucial as leadership. To follow does not mean merely submitting or even going along with anything the leader says or does. Being a good follower can mean not to follow or deliberately refusing to play ball.
The history of followership is, of course, simultaneously the history of leadership. The point is that followership, like leadership, changes overtime. Followers in the present are different from followers in the past. Typically, these differences, the changes that take place over time, are in consequence of changes in the external environment, such as the age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the communication revolution by information technology. We know that in times past, leaders were everything and followers nothing. People thought in terms of heroes, princes, and philosopher-kings, the divine right of kings, but then the world changed. Power devolved, and so did our conception of who had the right to do what to whom. More recently, in the last half-century, changes in culture and technology have further accelerated this trend. Again, leaders, certainly democratic leaders, are weaker than before, and followers, those without apparent sources of power, authority, and influence, are more robust, especially in liberal democracies. This is evident in how Twitter and Facebook followers are greatly influenced during an election year.
Another area of focus is on the values associated with being a leader or a follower. Values are associated not with being a good leader but with being a good follower. Again, most of us spend our time not leading but following. It then behoves on us then the assumption that we value a good outcome, good as ineffective and ethical to pay attention not only to what it takes to be a good leader but also to what it takes to be a good follower. We might assume that if the leader is in most ways good, being a good follower means being supportive.
