The Meaning of Followership
What is the connection between leaders and followers?
Followership used to mean unquestioning obedience. Now it is becoming more like partnership and some followers can show leadership to their bosses.
How can a better understanding of followership clarify the meaning of leadership? Followers used to be sheep-like subordinates who did their master’s bidding without question. But, today, they have a far more active and powerful role, with some writers even claiming that leadership can’t be defined without reference to followers.
What Is Followership?
The meaning of followership is clearly evolving. Gone are the days when people worshipped authority figures without question. It wasn’t too many hundreds of years ago in Europe when kings claimed to rule by divine right. Challenging their authority meant certain death. Today, people are still in awe of some CEOs such as Jack Welch, but they no longer command unswerving obedience. A follower was once a pretty lowly cog in the wheel. Today, especially in modern democracies, the pyramid has been turned on its head: leaders are answerable to their followers. The popular idea known as servant leadership seeks to extend this theme to leadership generally. In politics, leaders depend on their followers to get elected. But in many small businesses and heavy industry, the boss still rules with an iron fist.
Followership in Knowledge-driven Businesses
Leaders of simple groups like street gangs and corner grocery stores can make all the key decisions because their world is not as complex as businesses that compete through rapid innovation like Apple Computers or Google. Wherever leaders depend on the knowledge of technical specialists to make decisions, followers have a lot more power and are more partners than pawns.
Redefining Leadership
Recognizing that senior executives have limited knowledge, some writers have redefined leadership as a facilitative activity whereby their role is to draw ideas for new directions out of their followers. This means that the CEO is more of a catalyst, coach and facilitator and less a provider of direction except in the sense of a strategic vision. This move raises the question of who is leading whom. If followers convince their boss to introduce a new product, surely this is leadership shown upwards. It is only in the desire to hang onto the idea that the person in charge must be the leader that people are prepared to move the goal posts, to redefine leadership as a facilitative activity. The option is to retain the idea that leaders provide direction but allow that so-called followers can also show leadership to their bosses.
Followership Today
Complexity reigns for followership and leadership today, just as it does in all walks of life. The bottom line is that there are still conventional, obedient followers in some industries and simple groups, while followers have more of a partnership role in other organizations and, in some contexts, followers actually show more leadership than their bosses. Leadership is no longer a position at all but an occasional activity. No one can dominate a complex, knowledge-driven group simply because no one has a monopoly on good ideas. Someone who is a follower one minute, therefore, could take the lead the next minute.
