How many times have you heard “we need better leadership!” as the catchcry to any and all organisational problems? To be honest, I’ve mostly I’ve heard it from my own mouth as I rail against the incompetence I perceive around me.

Organisations require leadership to work, but leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “Leadership sounds good, but arguably it calls for something that is less enthusiastically embraced: followership” (Alvession 2015). To be a “leader” is a social role in reference to another role – that of a follower. Leadership requires a relationship – without followers, we don’t have leaders, we can’t have leadership.

When I was studying leadership at university I remember my professor saying “we don’t need better leaders – we need better followers” and that has stuck with me – haunted me, if I’m honest. Isn’t it the job of leaders to help followers be better followers? Maybe, and even if that is true – why is the leadership literature all about how to be better leaders and very little about how to be a good follower?

Because, to be honest, there are very few leaders that aren’t also followers in some way, of someone else or even some higher goal or value system. For Christians I think we see this in Jesus – the first leader of the Christian movement – it seems to me his greatest value as a leaders was in fact modelling for his followers how to be good followers. Jesus followed God and modelled that followership for his disciples, who in turn modelled followership of Jesus as an essential part of their leadership in the early church.

If we looked at the ecosystem of an organisation and counted how many are leaders and how many are followers, counting many people twice because they’d be both, we’d quickly see that the number of followers far outweigh leaders. Maybe we would have better organisations if we had better followers?

Scholars have done some work on followership, Agho having interviewed leaders to  discuss what makes a “good” follower, that is, being dependable, loyal, cooperative and intelligent, as well as honest and competent which were also listed as the top-two traits for leaders (Agho 2009). I’m sure leaders would love to have followers with the traits as listed above – but how willing are they to relate in that same way to their leaders?

Clearly I’ve just scratched the surface as I delve into followership – and what that means for leadership and for organisations as a whole, but one thing I will take away for the moment is that when I’m complaining about my leaders, when I find myself expecting more from them, I’ll shine the light on myself and see what it is I need to do as a follower, because I might be lucky and see that’s where some answers lie.

References
Agho, A.O., 2009. Perspectives of senior-level executives on effective followership and leadership. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 16(2), pp.159-166.