In Praise of Followership

While everyone is focused on leaders and leadership, we’re overlooking the critical role of followers in the leadership equation. Without followers, there is certainly no leadership, but scholars and leadership experts have simply not paid enough attention to studying and understanding followers and followership.

I just returned from the second Global Followership Conference hosted by the Followership Member Community of the International Leadership Association and Christopher Newport University. It was a wonderful experience—perhaps the best organized and most efficient conference that I have ever attended (and the facilities and campus were beautiful). What stands out, however, was the deep, focused learning on followership, and the good fellowship among the attendees.

Lessons Learned

1. Leadership and followership are intertwined. Leaders and followers co-create leadership in a specific context. Although leaders are often the focal point when we see a collective accomplish great things, or fail, it is only through the efforts of followers that things get done.
2. The lens needs to be reversed. While we know a lot about leader competencies, we know relatively little about what makes a good follower. My friend Robert Kelley (from whom I stole the title of his ground-breaking HBR article [Kelley, 1988]) argues that good followers need to engage their brains, be motivated self-starters, and take risks, but we still know relatively little about what makes a truly effective follower.
3. Followers can enable or disable the leader. As Ira Chaleff (1995, who was a key part of the conference) and Jean Lipman-Blumen (2006) demonstrate, it is up to the followers to decide to enact the agenda set by the leader. If the mission is one that the followers agree with, they will work to get the job done. But that can be problematic if the goal is a destructive one. As I heard several times at the conference, “Hitler didn’t kill anyone, but his followers certainly did.” As Chaleff asserts, good followers need to have the courage to stand up to their leaders if the leader’s agenda is the wrong one.
4. Leaders set the tone; followers create the climate. While a leader may articulate a vision for how the team or organization should be, it is up to the followers to make it happen. As the saying goes, “The people make the place.” If a workplace, or a community, is going to be a positive, inviting place to thrive, or if it is going to be a negative drudgery (or worse), is up to the followers and the followership they create.

So, for those of us who study or enact leadership, it’s time for us to focus more on the importance of followership.