Followership links to Leadership

How do you define a ‘follower’?
Followers can be defined by their rank – for example, subordinates who have less power, authority and influence; or they can be defined by their behaviour – people who go along with what someone else wants and intends. In general , rank and behaviour coincide, but sometimes, those ranked as superiors follow and those ranked as subordinates lead. President George W. Bush was portrayed repeatedly, especially with regard to the war in Iraq, as Vice President Dick Cheney’s puppet; Cheney’s lower rank nothwithstanding, he was seen as pulling the strings.

For the purposes of my book, I define followers by rank: those who have less power, authority and influence than do their superiors and who therefore usually, but not always, fall into line. Voters can be followers, employees can be followers; they are often called subordinates or constituents or stakeholders. To me, the word follower is simply the plain-English opposite of the word leader. You cannot by definition be a leader without having at least one follower, and followers are without any particular power, authority or special influence.

The rewards of leading are obvious; but what are the attractions of following?
I actually take issue with the first part of your statement. I think the rewards of leading were a lot more obvious at one time than they are today, and this relates to the latter part of your question. Leadership was once a very comfortable perch on which to sit, but today’s leaders are much less comfortable than they used to be. Sure, leadership is still associated with high visibility, money, status and power, but followers have become considerably more aggressive in recent years. Because of what I call ‘the rise of the follower’, being a leader is not much fun anymore. Leaders are easily brought down nowadays, whether it be for mismanagement or a sexual indiscretion; and even if they aren’t, they remain vulnerable to public humiliation and embarrassment. So while the rewards of leadership are still in some ways ‘obvious’, they are much more precarious than they once were, due in large part to the increasing clout held by followers.

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Followers are -- for reasons both cultural and technological -- assuming more power than ever before, which in-and-of-itself is a reward of followership. Another is the reward of complete passivity – of knowing that someone else will take care of things. If you simply want to go in and do the minimum amount of work, you can do that and go home at night assuming that the organization will continue to function, because someone else is taking care of things. Other rewards of following vary, depending on the kind of leader in place and on the kind of follower you are, as well as on the nature of the situation.

Many people aren’t comfortable being labeled as followers. What is your response to this frame of mind?
What I am attempting to do is no less than change the state of leadership studies. When I use the word leadership, it is without any value judgement. There are rotten and evil and incompetent leaders, so for me the word has no particular glory associated with it. It simply means ‘somebody who is able to get somebody else to do what he or she wants them to do’, by whatever means. The term does not necessarily imply anything to aspire to. Likewise, I attach no value judgement to the term ‘follower’ either. A follower is not necessarily a sheep; quite the contrary, a follower can be an activist -- somebody who actively supports a leader and gets involved in what’s going on. In contrast, a follower can be somebody who willfully decides not to follow -- a subordinate who chooses not to go along but rather, to protest and do everything he or she can to undermine the person in leadership.

You have defined five different types of followers. Please describe them.
The reason I did this is that I want people to start to think about followers with the same level of sophistication that they apply to leaders. We would never assume that all leaders are the same, and we shouldn’t assume that all followers are the same. To drive this point home, I have divided followers into categories, according to their level of engagement.

The first type of follower is the Isolate. This is somebody who is able to pay attention to what is going on around them, but for whatever reasons, chooses not to and barely knows what’s going on. In the workplace, this would be the employee who goes to work because he needs the paycheque, but doesn’t connect with his leader or peers. He simply disregards all issues of power, authority and influence, does his work and goes home.

The next category is the Bystander. This is someone who is keenly aware of what is going on around him, but chooses not to participate in any way. The example I often use is the famous case of bystanders during Hitler’s time in Nazi Germany. Hitler the man does not explain in-and-of-himself what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945. What occurred involved many different kinds of followers, some of them active supporters of this ‘leader’, but many others -- in fact the overwhelming number of Germans – who simply stood by and did nothing as things began to badly deteriorate.

The next category is the Participant, and as the word implies, this is somebody who does pay attention, who is engaged, who knows what’s going on and becomes involved. In the workplace, she knows her manager, decides to support that manager with some measure of enthusiasm, and is to some degree involved in what’s happening in the workplace.

The Activist ratchets all of this up. As the name implies, she is very actively engaged, either in the community or in the workplace. She willfully and deliberately assumes a fair measure of responsibility, sometimes in favour of what is happening, but not always. Say you are a registered Democrat living in the United States: you might be very active in the Democratic Party; you care a lot and are empassioned about what you’re doing, etc. In contrast, you may also be an activist who wants to challenge the system and do everything you can to overturn those who have come into in power.

Last but not least is the Diehard, who is literally prepared to risk life and limb for the cause in which he or she fervently believes (or does not believe.) An example is somebody who volunteers to join an army because he believes so strongly in a cause. Conversely, one might become a revolutionary because one is so dedicated to overturning the existing system.

In your view, which type of follower is most prevalent in today’s organizations?
Any good leader -- or any boss at any level for that matter -- should take a look at the various subordinates that report to him and ask, what kinds of people do I have reporting to me? Are they engaged, or not? If they are engaged, do they do what they can to support our organization’s mission, or are they engaged in ways that subvert my aims as leader? Generally speaking, a lot of people are bystanders: they vaguely know what’s going on, but they only do their job because they want to collect their paycheque and get out of the workplace as quickly as possible. So it’s up to the employer or the manager to first, assess the different kinds of followers and second, figure out how to reach them in order to further the organization’s mission.

Having written a book called Bad Leadership, how do you define a bad leader?
My latest book [Followership] grew out of my 2004 book Bad Leadership. Both go against the conventional grain in the field, whereby authors tend to look at good leadership and try to figure out how to develop good leaders. Bad leadership is by and large ignored in these books, and no attention is given to followership. My book is called Bad Leadership rather than Bad Leaders, because you cannot ‘do’ bad leadership without having bad followership. Just as there are good leaders and bad leaders, there good and bad followers.

In the book I describe seven different types of bad leadership: incompetent leadership, rigid leadership, intemperate leadership, callus leadership, corrupt leadership, insular leadership and finally, evil leadership. Each type involves followers every bit as much as leaders. It is wrong to point the finger of blame at the leader alone; doing so represents a misunderstanding of what actually happens in the real world. An emphasis on followership is absolutely critical to an understanding of what we call the leadership dynamic.

What is your advice for people who want to become better followers?
Just as one needs to think about how to be a good leader, so one needs to think about being a better follower. Again, it depends on the nature of the leader and on the nature of the situation, but by and large, followers who do little or nothing are less good and less effective than those who do something. So in general, I would argue for getting engaged. We see this happening around the world as we speak. For reasons of technology and culture, people are feeling empowered, learning to speak up for themselves and participating in the activities of the group or organization to which they belong. This is a far superior way to follow than doing absolutely nothing and being completely disengaged.

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders (Harvard Business Press, 2008), co-editor of Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change (J-B Warren Bennis Series, Jossey-Bass, 2007) and author of Bad Leadership: What it is, How it Happens, Why it Matters (Harvard Business Press, 2004).

[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]