What Is Followership?

How to be a better follower

In the typologies explored here, positive/pro-active followership is about having energy and assertiveness, providing support but being willing to question, and seeing yourself as a partner rather than a subordinate.

Professor Jean Hartley offers her thoughts on how to be a good follower here – including the value of understanding your leader's personality and preferences.

 

 

Benefits for the follower

The typologies covered in the previous section labelled good followers as 'effective', 'proactive' or 'partners'. As leaders increasingly value the partnerships they develop with their followers, followers should also be aware of the potential benefits to them.

Upward influencing

If a follower forms a positive relationship with their leader, they can potentially influence situations where they perceive the leader to be making a mistake or offer additional support if needed. They may also be able to improve circumstances for themselves and colleagues. This is sometimes known as 'managing up'.

Kipnis and Schmidt identify four strategies of organisational influence that are commonly used when influencing superiors:

1. Reason – using data and information to support your requests
2. Coalition – mobilising others to support you
3. Ingratiation – creating goodwill
4. Bargaining – negotiating and exchanging benefits or favours.

It should be noted that these approaches are also used by leaders wishing to influence their followers, i.e. the same skills and attributes, but they are just deployed in a different way.

Developing leadership skills

As a follower, you have the opportunity to develop yourself as a leader of the future. This might be through observing the strengths and weaknesses of your leader, or through the support, advice and development opportunities that they give you. Many of the skills and attributes you develop as an effective follower are mirrored in an effective leader, for example:

• courage
• judgement
• communication
• independent thinking
• initiative
• self-awareness and self-management
• commitment
• diplomacy
• collaboration
• influencing.

Agho collected the perceptions of over 300 senior-level executives on the distinguishing characteristics of effective leaders and followers. Although his findings don't show identical characteristics, he states that 'a significant number of the respondents agreed that followership skills should be viewed as prerequisites for effective leadership'.

More effective leadership

A leader with a team that is disengaged and lacking motivation, can find it difficult to complete projects, to innovate, to introduce change etc. Engaged and enthusiastic followers can make a huge difference to achieving goals and moving forward.

A leader must think strategically about the types of followers their organisation needs. For example, you might not always need your followers to be 'effective' or 'proactive'. As Chaleff explains, an 'implementer' might seem to be the perfect follower, but if a leader starts to make mistakes, the 'implementer' is unlikely to challenge them. You might also be working within a context that benefits from passive followers who are happy to abide by the rules, for example, a manufacturing production line.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement is an increasingly popular management concept, focusing on the mutual benefits of a strong relationship between employer and employee.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) lists the benefits of employee engagement as follows:

• Happier, healthier and more fulfilled employees
• Better staff retention
• Improved business performance e.g. increased customer satisfaction levels; productivity; innovation; efficiency
• Increased profit
• Stronger brand and reputation.

You'll consider how to build good followership and an engaged workforce later this week.

In this section, you've seen that the benefits of good followership are numerous – impacting on the follower, the leader and the organisation. However, some organisations are starting to question whether the traditional leader–follower relationship is the most effective approach. You'll explore this idea in more detail in Section 5.

Shared leadership

Shared leadership is defined by Pearce and Conger as 'a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both'.

This means that leadership behaviours are exhibited by a set of individuals rather than following the more traditional model of a single person. Leadership is no longer seen as a role, but as a shared function or activity.

It can be a useful approach in a complex, technical environment where the expertise of different members of a multidisciplinary team becomes relevant at different stages of a project.

Shared leadership can create a strong sense of shared responsibility and facilitate effective collaboration, but relies on excellent communication and without this, can impede the decision-making process.

You can find varied examples of shared leadership across the business world, for example:

• ICT solutions provider Huawei has three CEOs who each take charge for six-month periods in rotation.
• The Anglo European School in Essex has two Co-Headteachers working alongside each other full time, sharing executive authority.
• Shared leadership is the model that underpins the NHS's Medical Leadership Competency Framework – allowing multidisciplinary teams to pass leadership from individual to individual at relevant times along a patient's pathway of care.

Another, more radical approach, known as 'Holacracy', attempts to distribute leadership between all employees, removing the traditional leader–follower relationship altogether. You'll find out more about this in Week 7.

Even within these different approaches, each individual will have needs and responsibilities that require nurturing and support. In the next section, you'll explore these needs in more detail.

Figure 5 A Keep Calm poster

Engaging and developing your followers is a crucial part of a leader's role. A team of people who are motivated and feel valued will perform more effectively that one where the members feel underappreciated and ignored. Professor Jean Hartley explains.

  

Engagement

As previously discussed, there are many benefits to a strong relationship between employer and employee, and there is significant commentary about how to build and boost those relationships.

In their research, MacLeod and Clarke set out four enablers of employee engagement:

1. Leadership
   • Leaders provide a strong strategic narrative which has widespread ownership and commitment from managers and employees at all levels.
   • The narrative is a clearly expressed story about what the purpose of an organisation is, why it has the broad vision it has, and how an individual contributes to that purpose.
   • Employees have a clear line of sight between their job and the narrative, and understand where their work fits in.
2. Engaging managers
   • Managers are at the heart of this organisational culture – they facilitate and empower rather than control or restrict their staff.
   • Managers treat their staff with appreciation and respect, and show commitment to developing, increasing and rewarding the capabilities of those they manage.
3. Employee voice
   • Employees' views are sought out; they are listened to and see that their opinions count and make a difference.
   • Employees speak out and challenge when appropriate.
   • A strong sense of listening and of responsiveness permeates the organisation, enabled by effective communication.
4. Integrity
   • Behaviour throughout the organisation is consistent with stated values, leading to trust and a sense of integrity.

These themes are reflected throughout this course. For example, in Week 4, you explored common mistakes, and possible solutions that focused on a clear vision, good communication, developing your team and leading by example. In Week 6 you'll look at some common challenges for every leader that also reflect the value of motivating and developing your team.

Development

Looking from the followers' perspective, Kelley suggests that while leadership training and development is undertaken by most organisations, few focus on training their followers. He outlines topics for a potential training programme as follows:

• Improving independent, critical thinking
• Self-management
• Disagreeing agreeably
• Building credibility
• Aligning personal and organisational goals and commitments
• Acting responsibly towards the organisation, the leader, co-workers and oneself
• Similarities and differences between leadership and followership roles
• Moving between the two roles with ease.

As well as providing suitable training and development opportunities, there are several other ways in which you can support and encourage your followers:

• Allow them to take responsibility and lead on different elements of the work.
• Give them praise and encouragement, acknowledging their work and taking a step back yourself.
• Give them the confidence to be innovative by allowing them to implement changes without fear of repercussions.
• Use your knowledge and experience to coach your followers. If you don't have time for all of them, select some key individuals who can cascade your knowledge to other team members.

Professor Jean Hartley adds her thoughts in the following video.

 

Looking at this from the opposite perspective, followers may be reluctant to be developed if they feel you are asking too much of them. For example, they may argue that they aren't paid enough to take on more responsibility or resent you delegating tasks that they aren't interested in. Development planning should include discussion with your followers, giving them a voice and allowing you to explain the business needs that must be addressed.