Introduction

In many organizations, there has been a movement away from the extremes of all-powerful leaders and powerless, submissive followers. We hear about “shared leadership,” a helpful concept in softening the rigid demarcation lines often found between leaders and followers. But there is a limit to the usefulness of this concept. Despite the fact that many people experience visceral discomfort with the term “follower,” it is not realistic to erase all distinctions between leaders and followers.

Instead, we need a dynamic model of followership that balances and supports dynamic leadership. We need a model that helps us embrace rather than reject the identity of follower because the model speaks to our courage, power, integrity, responsibility, and sense of service. This book proposes a proactive view of the follower’s role, which brings it into parity with the leader’s role. Parity is approached when we recognize that leaders rarely use their power wisely or effectively over long periods unless they are supported by followers who have the stature to help them do so. Regrettably, recent history is strewn with examples that support this observation.

In many situations, no matter how much partnership or empowerment exists, the leader has ultimate authority and responsibility. The CEO of a business, the commander of a fleet, the head of a government agency, the director of a nonprofit organization, the bishop of a diocese, all have certain powers they retain for themselves and accountability that is not transferrable.

It is difficult to appreciate the external pressures on leaders until you have walked in their shoes, until you have had to make payroll, bring a squadron through safely, or respond to the outraged constituents who elected you. The internal pressures on leaders are often equally potent. “Ego-strength,” one of the qualities that propels an individual to leadership, is reinforced in ways that can deform it into “ego-driven.” If these pressures aren’t managed well, with adroit help from followers, they can distort the leader’s decision-making processes and interpersonal dynamics. Usually, the distortion will be in the direction of more authoritarian behavior and away from the partnering we desire.

How does a follower effectively support a leader and relieve these pressures? How does a follower become a “shaper” rather than simply an “implementer”? How does a follower contribute to leadership development rather than become a critic of leadership failings?

As in all human endeavor, many of us do some of these things quite naturally. But most of us can readily identify times we felt frustrated in our “second fiddle” situation as we watched our leaders make a mess of things, whether from the best of intentions or the worst. The increasingly egalitarian age we live in does not allow us to comfortably shirk responsibility and say, “Well, she’s the boss!” We’ve grown beyond authoritarian models that strip followers of accountability. But we haven’t necessarily grown fully comfortable with a new way of operating.

Most of us are leaders in some situations and followers in others. On one level we understand and fully accept this. You can’t, by definition, have a world just of leaders! To think of leaders without followers is like thinking of teachers without students. Both are impossible. They are two sides of one process, two parts of a whole. Teachers and students form a learning circle around a body of knowledge or skills; leaders and followers form an action circle around a common purpose.

But on another level there seems to exist the deepest discomfort with the term “follower.” It conjures up images of docility, conformity, weakness, and failure to excel. Often, none of this is the least bit true. The sooner we move beyond these images and get comfortable with the idea of powerful followers supporting powerful leaders, the sooner we can fully develop and test models for dynamic, self-responsible, synergistic relationships in our organizations.

If we are to attain the empowerment we crave, we must accept responsibility for both our own roles and the roles of our leaders. Only by accepting this dual responsibility do we ultimately accept responsibility for our organizations and the people they serve. There are three things we need to understand to fully assume this responsibility:

First, we must understand our own power and how to use it. As followers we have far more power than we usually acknowledge. We must understand the sources of our power, whom we serve, and what tools we have to carry forward the group’s mission from our unique vantage point.

Second, we must appreciate the value of leaders and cherish the critical contributions they make to our endeavors. We must understand the forces that chisel away at their creativity, good humor, and resolve. We must learn how to minimize these forces and create a climate in which a leader’s strengths are magnified, so a leader can better serve the common purpose.

Third, we must understand the seductiveness and pitfalls of the power of leadership. We are all familiar with Lord Acton’s quote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We are all witnesses to the many examples that support its assertion. Yet we are like the person who has never taken hard drugs: though we can intellectually understand that they are addictive, we cannot appreciate their force. We must learn how to counteract this dark tendency of power.

The changes occurring in the world make it an opportune time to develop new models of followership. In the past, centralized organizations used relatively crude instruments and blunt force to coordinate resources in pursuit of their objectives. If you were building a pyramid, this method of organization worked terrifically. If you were laying a railroad, it also worked well. It even worked for awhile if you were building cars on an assembly line. Dominant leaders and compliant followers were able to get the job done. In information-age organizations, however, hundreds of decentralized units process and rapidly act on highly varied information within the design and purpose of the organization. This requires an entirely different relationship between leaders and followers.

Additionally, in both the West and the East, a new social contract is being formulated. In the largest organizations, we are no longer guaranteed employment. Our health benefits and retirement plans are being made portable. Leaders and organizations will no longer take care of us. Paternalism is gone. We need to take care of ourselves and each other.

In a deep way this is liberating. A central problem in the leader-_follower relationship is its tendency to become a parent-child relationship, a relationship in which the follower is dependent and unable to relate to the leader on an equal footing.

A new model of followership can help us reorient ourselves and our relationships with leaders. I am choosing the image of the “courageous follower” to build a model of followership because courage is so antithetical to the prevailing image of followers and so crucial to balancing the relationship with leaders.

Courageous followership is built on the platform of courageous relationship. The courage to be right, the courage to be wrong, the courage to be different from each other. Each of us sees the world through our own eyes and experiences. Our interpretation of the world thus differs. In relationships we struggle to maintain the validity of our own interpretation while learning to respect the validity of other interpretations.

The danger in the leader-follower relationship is the assumption that the leader’s interpretation must dominate. If this assumption exists on the part of either the leader or the follower, they are both at risk. The leader’s openness to diversity, empowering others, breakthrough thinking, and being challenged and learning from followers will drop precipitously. Followers will abandon their unique perspectives and healthy dissension, which are at the heart of the creative process and innovation.

Contemporary leadership texts make compelling arguments for leaders to drive fear out of organizations, to share power, to invite feedback, to encourage participation. The leaders likely to read and respond to these arguments are the ones already open to change. What about those who cannot be their own agents of change, who do not walk the talk? I believe that courageous followers can and must be agents of change for such leaders.

But powerful socialization mechanisms, which served centralized bureaucracies well and taught followers to obediently follow, are still largely in force. The awesome shaping powers of school, organized religion, sports teams, the military, and large corporations are weakening, but still, whatever else they teach, they condition followers to obey. Expulsion for nonconformity is a very real threat. The conditioning begins at an age when children are still utterly dependent on their parents for survival and experience considerable anxiety about the consequences of not obeying. Our institutions play on this anxiety and, wittingly or not, reinforce it until followers often do become the timid creatures we emotionally reject identifying with.

We must examine this programming of the follower’s role and envision what the role can become. What are our attitudes toward leaders? Where do our loyalties ultimately lie? What outcomes are worse than expulsion? What power do we have to support leaders who are striving to serve their group? And what obligation and power do we have to change things when higher loyalties are betrayed? How courageous do we dare to be?

We have not had a lot of cultural support for doing this. Our mythology until recently has focused on hero-leaders who perform remarkable feats and successfully challenge villain-leaders. We have lacked common-man, common-woman heroes who stay true to their own lights while helping leaders follow theirs. Supportive “Number Twos” have not historically attracted much press coverage or six-figure publishing advances. Whistleblowers have fared considerably less well, their lives often seriously disrupted, with few rallying to their support. It is only very recently that we have begun to see some exceptions to this pattern. The time has come for leaders and followers to develop and honor new models for relating to each other.

I will first explore the dynamics of the leader-follower relationship. What binds the leader and follower together? What are the underlying moral, emotional, and psychological forces at work? What are the respective powers each has in the relationship? I will then present a model of how courageous followers can improve that relationship for the benefit of themselves, their leaders, and the organization.

There are four dimensions in which a courageous follower operates within a group, and a fifth dimension in which the follower operates either within or outside of the group depending on the response of the leadership. The model will explore each of these dimensions as a way to compare our current followership practices with how we might develop the follower role.

THE FIVE DIMENSIONS OF COURAGEOUS FOLLOWERSHIP

THE COURAGE TO ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY

Courageous followers assume responsibility for themselves and the organization. They do not hold a paternalistic image of the leader or organization; they do not expect the leader or organization to provide for their security and growth, or to give them permission to act. Courageous followers discover or create opportunities to fulfill their potential and maximize their value to the organization. They initiate values-based action to improve the organization’s external activities and its internal processes. The “authority” to initiate comes from the courageous follower’s understanding and ownership of the common purpose, and from the needs of those the organization serves.

THE COURAGE TO SERVE

Courageous followers are not afraid of the hard work required to serve a leader. They assume new or additional responsibilities to unburden the leader and serve the organization. They stay alert for areas in which their strengths complement the leader’s and assert themselves in these areas. Courageous followers stand up for their leader and the tough decisions a leader must make if the organization is to achieve its purpose. They are as passionate as the leader in pursuing the common purpose.

THE COURAGE TO CHALLENGE

Courageous followers give voice to the discomfort they feel when the behaviors or policies of the leader or group conflict with their sense of what is right. They are willing to stand up, to stand out, to risk rejection, to initiate conflict in order to examine the actions of the leader and group when appropriate. They are willing to deal with the emotions their challenge evokes in the leader and group. Courageous followers value organizational harmony and their relationship with the leader, but not at the expense of the common purpose and their integrity.

THE COURAGE TO PARTICIPATE_IN TRANSFORMATION

When behavior that jeopardizes the common purpose remains unchanged, courageous followers recognize the need for transformation. They champion the need for change and stay with the leader and group while they mutually struggle with the difficulty of real change. They examine their own need for transformation and become full participants in the change process as appropriate.

THE COURAGE TO TAKE MORAL ACTION

Courageous followers know when it is time to take a stand that is different than that of the leader’s. They are answering to a higher set of values. The stand may involve refusing to obey a direct order, appealing the order to the next level of authority, or tendering one’s resignation. These and other forms of moral action involve personal risk. But service to the common purpose justifies and sometimes demands acting. If attempts to redress the morally objectionable situation fail, a follower faces the more difficult prospect of whether to become a whistleblower, with the greatly increased risks this poses to both the follower and the organization.

THE COURAGE TO LISTEN TO FOLLOWERS

After exploring the model of courageous followership, I will conclude with an exploration of the leader’s responsibility to support the conditions of courageous followership and to respond to acts of courageous followership.

The world is fitfully evolving to a more egalitarian culture. Leadership and followership are evolving. As in any evolutionary process, the prospects for the emerging stage of development often look dubious. There will be times while reading this book when you might wince at suggested behaviors and think, “Get real!” For some leaders the suggested approach will be unreal. For others, who have allowed contemporary cultural changes to seep into their patterning, the approach presented here may be startling, but will also be fresh and welcome. The leader’s reactions are of secondary importance, however, to the actions of the follower. That is why this book focuses on the courage of the follower; we are not talking about comfortable, risk-free behavior.

Most of us will have ample opportunity to experiment with and develop new models of courageous followership in the course of “ordinary” living. We will help our organizations compete more efficiently, make them more “employee-friendly,” and help our community groups function more responsively.

But the extraordinary also occurs: the opportunity to help a leader make a bold peace initiative, the discovery of abusive practices that demand reversal, the chance to influence leadership practices that may bring an organization to a crossroads in choosing the values by which it will live. To the degree we have become strong and comfortable with new models of followership, those models will serve us well when we find ourselves in situations where the consequences are profound.

Whether we are dealing with the ordinary or extraordinary, the challenge a follower faces is significant. This book is designed to give the courageous follower the insights and tools needed to meet that challenge.