Why Followership Matters

Demonstrating How to be a Good Follower is Essential for Virtuous Leaders

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion of writing and teaching on the topic of leadership. It’s been a welcome revolution, and the best of these books, articles and programs are helping to build caring and effective leaders. But lost in all this discussion about leadership is an equal focus on followership. This is unfortunate because even the best leaders will fail to achieve their full potential without the support of their team, and the support of that team is rarely possible if the leader doesn’t understand and hasn’t modeled good followership.

Because modeling good followership is so important, and because there are few times when a leader isn’t also a follower, teaching followership should be an integral part of every course on leadership. Leaders have a self-interest in understanding and demonstrating good followership because their example will have a significant influence on how they themselves are followed. Like leadership, good followership isn’t innate. Even if a leader accepts its importance, she won’t be able to either teach or demonstrate good followership if she doesn’t first understand its core tenets.

‍Followership Tenets

Good followership requires five things:

‍1. Respect for duly constituted authority. This means a deep and willing acceptance that someone else is responsible for making certain decisions and that one’s own beliefs on a topic must sometimes be subordinated to the judgment of the person empowered to decide.

‍2. The willingness to offer candid advice. This means providing an honest opinion and avoiding the temptation to tell leaders only what they want to hear.

‍3. Advocating for someone else’s decision as if it were your own. Good followers advocate their preferred course of action to their superiors, but once a decision has been made, they present that decision to others as if it were their own. This is true when they agree with the decision, and just as true when they disagree. Leaders acting as good followers would never say “I don’t agree with the boss’s decision and I’m only telling you to do this because I have to.” They would say instead “I talked about it with the boss, and this is what we’ve decided.”

‍4. Humility. Good followership is impossible without the humility to know that others sometimes have better answers. Humility enables followers to acknowledge the experiences and perspectives of more senior members within their organizations, allowing them to accept that others, including their bosses, may have valuable ideas. Humility shields followers from the contempt that grows and corrodes an organization when followers habitually believe they know better than the people for whom they work.

‍5. Self-control. Good followership requires controlled responses to decisions with which they disagree. An emotional response is easier but good followers don’t allow their feelings to drive careless comments or outward signs of discord. This is true because even if a follower complies with the directives of a leader, undisciplined comments, gestures, or facial expressions can imply disagreement and undermine the unified effort a team needs to succeed. The ability to recognize the moment of decision, and the discipline to shift from advocacy to enthusiastic compliance, are essential traits of good followers.

‍Putting Followership Tenets into Practice

Discussing followership may be jarring in a culture fine-tuned to the idea that everyone is a leader but that doesn’t make an understanding of followership any less essential. No organization can function effectively if its members can’t recognize when followership is required and don’t understand the tenants of good followership. That understanding is only possible if leaders are demonstrating good followership and feel comfortable explaining its tenets in both casual conversations and as a part of formal training. Leaders who expect good followership from their subordinates but don’t model good followership themselves are failing their organizations.

Leaders who unite their teams by disparaging the decisions of their bosses are sowing the seeds of their own organization’s decline, even if they also rally support and create a degree of cohesion in the short run. Leaders who exhibit this behavior give the members of their team license to act as poor followers. They do this unknowingly, falling into a trap of believing it’s possible for them to disparage their bosses without also being disparaged themselves. Leaders create cultures and set the parameters of acceptable behavior, and any example of poor followership will elicit a similar response from the people they lead.

Embracing the decisions of others is foundational to good followership but so is aggressive and informed advocacy by followers to their leaders. Followers owe this type of advocacy because it’s simply not possible for leaders to make the best decisions without the chance to consider alternate and dissenting opinions. In other words, being a good follower never means agreeing with every position a leader takes. If followers fail to offer leaders their respectful and candid opinions, they simply aren’t being good followers. To encourage this essential trait of followership, leaders need to create cultures that welcome candid conversation, one of many illustrations of how leadership and followership are so closely intertwined. Creating this culture requires leaders to listen closely to the suggestions of followers before the point of decision, and to model good followership by publicly offering advice to their own leaders. A leader who models bad followership by always nodding in agreement when his boss speaks is encouraging his team to adopt the same counterproductive behavior.

‍It’s Time to Acknowledge Both Leaders and Followers

American culture has always and rightly placed a premium on the value of individuals. This focus on self isn’t always productive, however, and its worst consequences have been exacerbated by the advent of social media, which encourages people to think of themselves as the center of a very personal universe. The heavy focus on leadership education, and the now widely held belief that everyone is a leader, has offered our society and our organizations several important benefits, but without an equal focus on followership it risks perpetuating a self-centered worldview. The focus on leadership may have made it more difficult for people to accept their roles as followers. Ultimately, organizations require individuals to be both good leaders and good followers, often at different times on a single day. It’s right for modern America to celebrate and seek to develop good leaders, but our society and our organizations would benefit if we invested a similar effort in understanding and encouraging good followership.

‍

‍

‍

Colin Pascal is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He lives in Annapolis with his wife Caroline, daughter Claire and son Casey.

‍

‍

‍