Followership
You probably know what leadership is. Followership is trending, but do you know what it is, what it means? Dictionary.com defines followership as the practice of doing what other people suggest, rather than taking the lead. There have always been leaders and followers. Why is this trending now? https://www.dictionary.com/browse/followship
Is it Better to be a Leader or a Follower?
The difficulty with this question is that it implies one is better than the other. And that is not true. Both are equally as important.
Organizations, businesses, groups, teams and families cannot be successful without both good leaders and good followers. A team will fail:
- If it has good followers, but poor leadership
- If it has poor followers, but good leadership
For success, leaders and followers need to be working together. You may have heard the phrase, “An organization is only as good as its leaders”. That is true, but it is only one half of a success story. An organization can only be as good as its followers as well.
How well followers follow is equally as important to a team’s success as how well leaders lead. Followership will always be in the shadow of leadership. But there are no good leaders without good followers.
Characteristics of Good Leadership
Many MBA programs boast of helping their students become great leaders. But having good leadership skills can also be intuitive. Some people are just critical thinkers and can easily see something from multiple perspectives.
The following are eight examples of characteristics people who have good leadership skills possess:
- Visionary: able to see the big picture
- Risk takers: willing to take risk for reward
- Goal driven: can set goals, tasks and achieve goals
- Decision makers: they know the buck stops here
- Motivator: can encourage and inspire the team
- Good listeners: are able to hear feedback from people doing the work
- Critical thinkers: don’t get stuck in one way of thinking
- Problem solvers: view every situation as an opportunity for growth
Characteristics of Good Followership
People who are successful followers tend to be focused on the process of doing a task rather than the accolades that may come with the completion of a project. The following are eight examples of characteristics people who have good followership skills possess:
- Good judgement: know how to disagree with a directive that is wrong
- A good work ethic: diligent and pay attention to detail
- Competent: in the effort to learn their job
- Honest: can give a leader an honest and forthright assessment
- Courage: can confront a leader about concerns
- Discretion: don’t share confidential material with others
- Loyal: prioritize achievement of the team’s goals
- Ego management: success is based on team achievement, not personal recognition
The Contradiction
Can you be both a good leader and a good follower? You should be.
For many, being a good follower is not a reputation you want if your plan is to climb the corporate ladder. Sadly, there can actually be a stigma to being a good follower! The paradox is that you cannot progressively reach more responsible leadership positions without demonstrating an ability to follow and function effectively in a group!
Ultimately, everybody on a team is both a leader and a follower.
The Underbelly
As with most situations in life, there can be an offensive underbelly. What this means is that something meant to be helpful and positive, for example, followership, will end up being distorted. And the ugly underbelly gets reinforced and encouraged. This is absolutely true for leadership and followership.
Uneducated, incompetent, ultra-sensitive leaders with no confidence and/or low self-esteem will always minimize and devalue the contributions, or the people, who work for them. The followers. When followers are demeaned and disrespected, it makes them feel less valued, violated and much less willing to be productive. The diminished ego strength of poor leadership has created this mess.
Relationships Relearned: Learn. Unlearn. Relearn
To be in a healthy and successful relationship, what you learned in childhood about relationships may need to be unlearned and relearned in a different way as an adult.
It isn’t just in business that the concepts of leadership and followership exist. Relationships can also have leadership and followership. One role is not better or worse than the other. They must co-exist for a healthy and successful relationship to exist.
Example of leadership and followership in a relationship:
An engineer and an artist are in a committed relationship. They frequently look at things from a very different perspective. The engineer reads the directions on the Ikea furniture, the artist is more inclined to wing it when putting together the furniture!
Because the engineer and the artist respect each other, before starting a project together, one of them will ask the other, “Is this my project or yours?” Whoever is in charge of the project will be the leader, and the other will be a follower.
Again, because they have mutual respect, who is the leader and who is the follower changes with the project. Both feel respected and valued.
In childhood you may have learned that one parent or caregiver was the one who always made decisions (the leader) and the other one was always the one who did what they were told (the follower). This is especially true in homes in which there was domestic abuse, a substance use disorder, or another form of addiction. An example might be one parent or caregiver always drove the car, even if they were intoxicated.
As you aged and had more exposure to healthy egalitarian dynamics in relationships, you may have decided to unlearn some of these behaviors you believed in childhood.
Relearning in adulthood means being open to alternate ways of doing things. It also means you see the importance and value of both leadership and followership in relationships.
Take Away Point
Taking a leadership role requires a strong sense of self-awareness, that you are not the supreme being who has all of the answers. In spite of the term followership being relatively unknown, it is equally important for a team, business or relationship to understand the vital role of the person or people in followership roles.
With warmest regards,
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