Focus on leadership overshadows value of ‘followership’

MANAGEMENT may argue good leaders need good followers but our culture continues to privilege leadership.

IN her book on successful women, The Climb (Text Publishing) Geraldine Doogue suggests it might be time to change our ambitions and decide to be good followers rather than good leaders.

It’s not a bad idea, to move from the narrow funnel of leadership to a debate about “followership”. Logic says we can’t all be leaders. But don’t hold your breath.

The management industry and corporations may argue good leaders need good followers but our culture continues to privilege leadership.

Even scholars who take a broader view, such as Melbourne Business School’s professor Amanda Sinclair, acknowledge followership is unfashionable. “It feels like every effort to tilt the lens back on to the follower ends in a very insipid place,” Sinclair says.

There was a time after Hitler and Mussolini when we were cautious about all-powerful leaders but social change and the dominance of the market reinforced individual talent and the importance of being No 1. In the dotcom boom of the 1990s, we were urged to be our own brand and run our own careers and companies. It was a small step to believe we could all be leaders, if only we worked hard enough.

Today, leadership is taught and practised across all sectors and age groups. Even preschools try to turn toddlers into leaders, yet many management practitioners believe robust followers are an important antidote to the focus on almost superhuman leaders.

Canadian academic John S. McCallum writes in the October, 2013 Ivey Business Journal: “The flip side of leadership is followership. It stands to reason that if leadership is important to performance, followership must have something to do with it too.”

Yet MBA programs focus on leadership skills. Teaching anyone how to follow is not just unsexy, but somehow counter-intuitive.

“I think that along with the notion of follower come notions of compliance and biddability,” Sinclair says. “It is hard to put an ethical and moral framework against that, even though the best leadership writers have always talked about leadership being a relationship between leaders and followers. The general trend in our culture is to tell us a follower is not a good place to be. When you try to resuscitate the notion, the tide is against you.”

In theory, the relationship between leader and follower should not be compliant but active and contesting. Harvard academic Barbara Kellerman describes five kinds of followers: isolates (who don’t care); bystanders (who care but disengage); participants (who support or oppose leaders); activists (participants on steroids); and diehards (who either lay down their lives for leaders or knock them off).

In The End of Leadership, (Harper Collins) Kellerman argues the dynamic between leaders and followers has shifted in recent years because of reduced respect for authority, an “expanded sense of entitlement”, and the way the web helps circumvent traditional power lines.

Yet leaders still don’t grasp that “followers are becoming on the one hand disappointed and disillusioned; and on the other entitled, emboldened and empowered”. Kellerman says the canvas should hold “more than a single looming figure, the leader” because the “leader-centric” model no longer explains the way the world works.

Sinclair likes to focus on leadership as a negotiated, dynamic process. “One way to think about it is that some of us occupy a leadership role in one context and we are followers in another,” she says. “There are many situations where it is helpful to move between the two.”

Helen Trinca is managing editor at The Australian.