These days, talk of leadership is everywhere. We can’t get enough of it. Leadership in business, leadership in teams, leadership in organizations, leadership at home. Everyone, it seems, wants to know how to be a leader.
It’s the ultimate goal for the career-oriented individual. To become a thought leader, it seems, is the surest way to the top in a world where career paths are dead. And to become an organizational leader may be the next best thing, in the places where hierarchy still exist.
But there’s a flipside to the concept of leadership that its very essence demands. Leadership demands followers. Some of the most important quotes about leadership frame it exclusively in the concept of followship. All of the best definitions do.
But guess what? There doesn’t seem to be much buzz about being a good follower. There are over 25 times as many books on leadership as there are on followship. A Google search reveals 43,300 hits for that term, while leadership gets a whopping 174,000,000. In fact, followship isn’t even a defined word.
In fact, most everything written on followship focuses on one niche – spirituality. This makes sense when you consider that most spiritual people consider being a follower of a person, an organization or system of beliefs to be a critical part of their lives.
That said, there are still profoundly more things written even in this niche about leadership than followship. And hardly any literature at all focuses on followship in the workplace, at home, in our personal lives, and in our careers.
This might be because in our independent society, we don’t really care about what it takes to be a good follower. In fact, most of the time, the idea of being a follower is framed negatively. How many times have you seen people be rewarded for excellent followship? A highly lauded episode in last season’s 30 Rock showed Tina Fey’s character ashamedly receiving a followship award. Liz Lemon lamented that the $10,000 prize didn’t highlight her leadership instead. And most of us would probably feel the same in a similar situation.
We seem to think, collectively, functionally, that followers are just blind sheep, and though we may not say it out loud, it’s in the tone of our voice and the look in our eye when we say the word. Say it out loud, in a sentence, and listen to how you sound. “She’s a follower.”
Let’s just be honest, most of us think that “followers” just aren’t thoughtful, creative, ambitious, capable or admirable.
And that’s a problem. Because that’s simply not true. In fact, being a good follower is just as challenging, admirable and important a capability as leadership.
We extol the virtue of leadership so much, we’ve even had to create terms like self-leadership in order to make followship more palatable. Don’t get me wrong, I think leadership is a valuable attribute, and I truly believe every person has areas of their life in which they are called to be leaders. And self-leadership is a great concept, too, especially if it’s helping people realize the value of knowing how to follow. Because no matter how much of a leader you are, every person can benefit from being a world-class follower.
The truth is, you can’t really be a good leader unless you can be a good follower first. That’s because great leaders put other people’s success ahead of their own goals. They add value to people. They reject the idea that they must take down everyone in their path. They build relationships that are mutually beneficial and based on respect and authenticity. And they don’t just know how to do these things, they practice them by practicing great followship.
Whether it’s following a system to help you work better, seeking out a mentor within your field or industry, following the advice of parents or experts, or putting yourself as a leader under the authority of other successful people, followship can make you a better business owner, employee, friend, advocate, mentor, student – and leader.
Reject the idea that only leadership is admirable. Find the power in the art of followship. It’s time.
Is leadership all it’s cracked up to be? Not sure what I mean by followship? Let’s talk. Want more? Read over 15 responses to this post syndicated on the Brazen Careerist network.
Great post.
In one popular business book (don’t remember which one) I read a story about a someone who would later be president of the USA. As a young boy, he looked for person’s he admired, and “sat at their feet”. Such learning is a sure way to greatness.
In retrospect, Jesus’ disciples haven’t done to bad either. At least for of them their own stories in the most popular book on earth.
@ Meryn – Great examples. There’s been an interesting conversation over at Brazen Careerist on this article, and something that jumped out at me is that it’s really difficult to isolate the concept of followship from that of leadership – obviously, you can’t be a leader without followers, but you can’t be a follower without a leader.
The questions become complicated even further when you look at the fact that no one is a leader in every aspect of their lives, so who decides when people are leaders and when they are followers? There are so many different types of leaders – functional leaders, vested leaders, natural leaders… on and on and on…
So in trying to define and understand followship, there are a lot of questions arising. What does being a good follower look like? What types of followers are there? These questions seem like a good place to start.
@ Meryn – Sorry about that, it’s off the front page today. Here’s the link. I’ll add that up in the post. Thanks!
http://www.brazencareerist.com/2008/07/09/im-not-a-great-leader-please-consider-praising-me-anyway/
Ah, now I get it… I followed the “Brazen Careerist” link from your blogroll, but that’s a blog from Penelope Trunk, different from the site your pointing to. Two sites with the same name is pretty confusing.
Maybe you could pass this on to her?
Another question for you: Do you think most of the discussion of your posts will be on Brazen Careerist? Then I might better subscribe to that site.
@ Meryn – Ah, I just need to change my blogroll link. Penelope actually owns the Brazen Careerist network, so that’s the reason for two sites, one name. It’s the title of her book. Good read, by the by.
You bring up a really interesting point in this comment about discussion – There is a lot of discussion on my posts at that site (where the content of this blog is syndicated), but typically, there is also a lot of discussion here.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the fragmenting of conversations online, and trying to decide how I feel about it. It’s happening in lots of ways – Twitter, syndicated content, rss site aggregators. Is it better or worse for the conversation to be being stolen from blogs? Whose interests does it serve – and does that matter, or is the conversation itself most important?
What are your thoughts?
The fragmentation of online conversations is a fact. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Centralized conversation – if there ever was such a thing – was merely an artifact of the short-comings of information technology.
Yet, while conversation fragments, it’s a service to all interested parties to enable people to see the whole picture by linking to it. For FriendFeed there’s even a wordpress plugin that can show all FriendFeed comments on your own page.
This brings me to the practice of cross-posing, which I have troubles with. Because of my background in technology, I can be considered an URL purist, which means that I think that a piece of content should have one URL, and one URL only. This can provide the binding glue for all conversations happening around the same piece of content.
In your case, I suggest that if you post on a “magazine” site like Brazen Careerist, you advertise it on your personal blog, but don’t copy the entire post. Just provide a small excerpt/teaser. This will make sure everyone reads the piece at the same place, and also helps with references (for social bookmarking sites for example).
If you really have to cross-post, I suggest you always mention from where it’s cross-posted upfront, at the top of the post. I will always try to read (and bookmark) it on its original location.
I hope this was helpful.
Spot on. To be a great leader, you’ve got to empower your staff and create opportunities for them to take the ball and run with it. And while they’re doing that, you’ve got to follow their lead. If you don’t, they could shut down.
To be a great follower, I think it’s important to understand what motivates your boss, what he or she is trying to accomplish, and how your role fits in with those two things.
@ Shawn – It’s such an important message that understanding the vision of your boss is critical to being a good follower. So many times we get bogged down into the day to day, the checklist of things to be done. How can we take the initiative to change, improve, grow, if we can’t see past that to the overall vision? But if we do buy into the vision, we are empowered to take our responsibility with that to the moon.
It’s really interesting that somehow, the discussion of followship seems so often to not understand that responsibility, proactivity, and self-motivation are all critical components. We think of those as leader-exclusive attributs. But it’s simply not the case, as your example illustrates.
A great team isn’t just cheering their leader on to run with the ball. They’re not passively standing on the sidelines. They’re engaged, aware of their role in the process, and running with that empowering vision in mind.
Still like an old infantry sergeant’s definition of leadership:
“Leadership is being the first to put your butt on the line to accomplish the mission, and the last to reel it in.”
Thanks for raising such issue, leadership
The issue you are speaking about in this post is really important. Everyone hopes to be the leader at list in any domain of his life, no matter whether it is work or home. But I think to be the leader is not an easy deal, to be such one should master the art of leadership.