Followership

We all want to become leaders. Leadership is built with vision, knowledge, experience, and probably, hundred other things listed in thousands of books written on this topic already. Further, the process of becoming is accrued over time while working with different teams and its metric is the success of team in achieving its outcome. However, if we take a sample of failing teams and determine the root cause, we will find that not only poor leadership or lack of it in a team leads to unsatisfying results. It is spectacular what happens when everyone in the team tries to be a leader, everyone with a unique thought process and opinions about people and situation. Thus followership is the second most important component to the success of the team.

However, not much has been written on this. The idea scared me as well when it first crossed my mind. Will it ruin my career, writing about follower when the whole world seems to be running to become the leader? However courageous that I am, I shall not undermine the role any more.

There are multiple cases of team dynamics. First, consider team with informal structures. The team chooses its leader voluntarily, or one may say, the leader emerges so one leads and the others follow. It is important for the members to bet on the right person within a highly (or similarly) competent team. Two different people may lead to completely different outcomes and it becomes followers’ responsibility to foresee and determine which approach to adopt.

Second, teams in which one formal leader is to lead the pack, however, he is fails to meet the expectations of its followers. In this case the team members may choose a substitute within the team or may decide to criticize him and do nothing about it. The onus is completely on the followers.

Third, even when formal leader is adept to lead, it becomes important how followers co-ordinate amongst, feed correct information in the system and fill in for the intricacies. Thus, as important it is to find a correct lead, so is the task of collecting right mix in a team to execute. In a perfect team, each follower is capable to become leader, but each values the leader and focuses on achievement on result.

A follower is also a leader across time and tasks. Hence it is up to her to draw leadership lessons across situations and people to become best of all the leaders she has ever known.