Why followership matters

I went to Amazon and searched ’leadership’, 50,000 results popped up. When I searched ’followership’ there were 111 results.

Billions of words have been written about leadership. But hardly any have been written about followership. I’m writing this in a Word document and every time I write followership, it has that red squiggly line under it – Microsoft doesn’t recognise the term.

Effective leadership and effective followership are equally important for high performance teams. They have a symbiotic relationship: they strengthen each other and depend on each other. Yet one side of the equation gets all the attention. For teams to hit that sweet spot where everyone in a team – the team members and the leaders – feel empowered, trusted, and supported to do their best work individually and collectively, leadership and followership should be of equal standing.

My favourite definition of leadership is ’the awesome responsibility to see those around you rise’.

I define followership as ’the awesome responsibility to see your leaders see those around you rise’.

[As a side note, I hate the term ’follower’. It is passive, agency-less, uninspiring and inaccurate. I will call people who do not hold a senior leadership position or who do not directly manage people, team members.]

Followership is not blindly following your leader no matter what, it is not agreeing with or supporting everything they say and do, it is about empowering leaders to do the best job they can. It is a different way of looking at how team members can help organisations succeed.

Effective leadership and effective followership require a similar set of skills, just channeled in opposite directions. For example, effective leaders are generally empathetic, curious, consistent, honest, transparent, accountable, constructive, they take responsibility, they are decisive when the time comes, and thoughtful when consideration is needed.

Effective followership involves all those skills, but in the opposite direction.

Team members who practice followership are empathetic towards their leaders (they understand leadership is really hard), they are curious and seek greater understanding before jumping to conclusions about their leaders uselessness or heroism, they are consistent, honest, thoughtful, transparent and accountable, they take responsibility for their shortfalls, they offer constructive feedback, they are decisive in communicating to their leader when the leader has failed to take responsibility or live up to the values and standards expected of them.

By only focusing on leadership, we place huge pressure and expectation on leaders to solve every problem independently of the quality of their teams or the real constraints they operate in. To an extent, this is part of the role of leadership, but the best organisations encourage team members to take on some of this pressure too.

For seasoned senior leaders, high pressure and high expectations are normal, expected and accepted. But for new leaders, it can be really tough. Especially because most leaders receive very little leadership training until they are holding a position of leadership. It is one of the few positions where you are expected to have that intuitive ability to just do it. And some do, and for them it’s fine. But many do not and without training and support, they never find their inner leader. It is a loss for them, and a loss for us.

When teams place more focus on the role of followership, it gives team members skin in the game: they take on responsibility for helping their leader live up to the awesome responsibility of seeing those around them rise. That makes followership an awesome responsibility too, not something that falls second place to leadership, and not something that only benefits leaders, it benefits everyone.

Not holding a leadership position in an organisation and being an effective team member by exercising followership does not mean you cannot also be an effective leader. Followership does not prevent team members from being leaders. Rather, it is a call for team members to consider how they can empower their leaders. If team members have the energy and passion to be leader and take on the awesome responsibility of seeing everyone around them rise too, that’s amazing and should be encouraged.

But leadership is not for everyone, and we should be careful about putting leadership expectations on everyone in an organisation. It has become trendy to say ’everyone is a leader in our organisation, we all take responsibility for empowering everyone around us’. That is quite an intense expectation, and I’m not convinced it creates the most inclusive culture given not everyone wants to be a leader, and that is fine.

What we can do is set higher followership expectations. That is to expect people who do not hold a leadership position in an organisation to help their leaders succeed by actively practicing followership. While followership and leadership have much in common, the practice of followership is a more manageable expectation to have of team members because the responsibility is dispersed (among the team) and focused in one direction (the leader), in contrast to leadership where responsibility is concentrated (on the leader) and focused in multiple directions (multiple team members/teams), as shown in the graphic below.

One of the key roles leaders have is creating an environment where team members feel they can exercise followership. If leaders do not take constructive feedback well, or if they do not empower their team members to take responsibility, it is difficult for team members to be good at followership. It is a two way relationship.

Leadership enables followership which strengthens leadership which improves things for everyone. They are as important as each other and should be equally valued and invested in.

A positive side-effect of embracing followership is that it helps to train team members in leadership skills, because they both involve similar skills. This helps to overcome the leadership training problem which is a precondition for making leadership positions accessible to more than just the born leaders or the overconfident or particularly charismatic folk.

When an organisation has effective leadership and effective followership, you get teamship which is that sweet spot I mentioned earlier, where everyone in a team – the followers and the leaders – feel empowered, trusted, and supported to do their best work individually, and for the team.

How can organisations create a culture of followership?

If leadership is as important as has generally come to be accepted (I think it is hugely important), then we must normalise conversations in our organisations about how we can help leaders succeed. Team members can start these conversations (given the way we think about leadership, it would look like shirking responsibility for a leader to start these conversations). Academics and ’leadership experts’ can do more research into the area to help correct the Amazon imbalance, and organisations could bring followership skills into the recruitment process in the same way that leadership skills are a core part of the any recruitment process for any leadership position.

The 21st century is and is going to continue to be a tough century to be a leader. The level of complexity that leaders have to deal with, the number of simultaneous interlinked crises and the speed of change make it an almost impossibly difficult position. Yet we depend on leaders. So, let’s make it a slightly easier job by becoming better at followership.