What About Followership?
by Doaa K. Darwish
Who Are Followers?
Followers are a group of people who share the same leader. They may vary in status, education, genius, cultural background, beliefs, values, and may have the same or drastically different aspirations.
Followers can be led by real leaders or pseudo leaders, ‘good leaders’ or ‘bad leaders’. Nevertheless, for them to be called followers, they need to share the same ‘mission’ with their leader. Example of followers can be middle management who ‘Follow’ upper management or assembly line employees who follow a factory manager. Followers can come from different departmental levels if they are still influenced by the same leader.
Followers Hate to Be Leaders
It’s because of an inbuilt nature inside of them. Followers will have a natural tendency to ‘Follow’ somebody they believe in – who is working on the same mission they aspire to live with or at least somebody who works on a mission they admire or respect.
It doesn’t matter how high in the hierarchy a manager can be – he would still have the need to follow somebody he can trust. And would like to occupy their thinking about the person they are led by or themselves. Therefore, followers can easily bundle up in sharing their own personal concerns and relate to each other’s problems. Not necessarily finding solutions to them. But most certainly they will group together to understand, interact and sympathize- consciously or subconsciously- with one another.
Followers are a group of people who share the same leader. They may vary in status, education, genius, cultural background, beliefs, values, and may have the same or drastically different aspirations.
Followers can be led by real leaders or pseudo leaders, ‘good leaders’ or ‘bad leaders’. Nevertheless, for them to be called followers, they need to share the same ‘mission’ with their leader. Example of followers can be middle management who ‘Follow’ upper management or assembly line employees who follow a factory manager. Followers can come from different departmental levels if they are still influenced by the same leader.
Followers Hate to Be Leaders
It’s because of an inbuilt nature inside of them. Followers will have a natural tendency to ‘Follow’ somebody they believe in – who is working on the same mission they aspire to live with or at least somebody who works on a mission they admire or respect.
It doesn’t matter how high in the hierarchy a manager can be – he would still have the need to follow somebody he can trust. And would like to occupy their thinking about the person they are led by or themselves. Therefore, followers can easily bundle up in sharing their own personal concerns and relate to each other’s problems. Not necessarily finding solutions to them. But most certainly they will group together to understand, interact and sympathize- consciously or subconsciously- with one another.
The Power of Majority
Followers may not have any Power of Authority, like their leaders. But they definitely possess another kind of power which balances out named; “The Power of Majority”. This power is the result of the interaction of people – who follow a certain leader – they will build together a certain pattern of reactions which will synchronize with the type of leadership they are facing with. The Power of Majority can be expressed subtly in the form of people having lack of trust among one another, people who are careless towards their client’s problems and take the attitude forward by using cold body language which has a lack of empathy, it be in delaying daily processes, or developing an attitude of ‘blame’ in the company culture. Other positive ‘subtle’ form of expressing Power of Majority can be staying late beyond working hours to finish work, being helpful in areas beyond an employees’ job description, smiling to each other, etc…
On the other hand, Followers can express their power in an obvious and direct manner such as work stops and group absences. Because a follower has less power as an individual he/she will always revert to their groups to build and push for an opinion.
How Followership Influences Leadership
Followers have the power to choose their leader. If a leader is not elected by the people they manage they will not be able to make the best outcomes out of their subordinates. Followers who vote for a leader must be asked again and again on intervals to make sure that the leader they are dealing with is still fit to take charge of his people-power.
Every leader must get through the “Followership” process: In essence any leader will start off as one of a group until his/her skills are tested and evident for leadership skills.
Who should be followers?
Anybody beyond the Director level in a company or corporation. Directors and any management level beyond must be examined before they are entitled to go for these positions; they will either have the evidence from all the years of their experience that they were able to influence a group of followers or not.
How should followers be appraised? 360. To hunt for potential leaders in the future. Followers are not risk takers by nature and in essence must have at least 80% of their income as a fixed monthly fee.
Some other characteristics for ‘Followers’ include:
- Like to think most of the time about how other people’s actions will impact them
- Don’t necessarily like to engage with many people daily; the fewer the better
- Hate risks
- Are concerned about their security, financial stability and social status and may dismiss any idea goal which interferes with their stability
- Hate to listen to ‘odd’ opinions which seem ridiculous
- Feel secure when they are almost ‘invisible’ in the middle of a group
- Hate to listen to people who like to talk about themselves they want to listen to people who like to talk about them.
Why Followership has been badly promoted over the ages:
- Leaders don’t like to make subordinates acknowledge the power they have, to stay in control
- Leaders usually have more financial power and use it to monopolize on decision making
- Leaders wish to maintain power and not allow their subordinate to threaten their dominance
- Leaders wish to make the rules that will serve mostly their self-interest (especially when it has to do with money)
- Leaders which make followers think it’s them who can fire or hire followers and never the other way around.
The Risk of Continuing to Ignore the Power of Followers and Effects of Insisting to Underplay their REAL Power:
When leaders de-power followers they also cannot help but demotivate them. The creativity, productivity and vision they could use from their followers will be diminished to it’s minimal levels just to keep them ‘hired’ in the business. This is why in USA “Of the country’s approximately 100 million full-time employees, 51 percent aren’t engaged at work -- meaning they feel no real connection to their jobs, and thus they tend to do the bare minimum.
Another 16 percent are “actively disengaged” -- they resent their jobs, tend to gripe to co-workers and drag down office morale as a result” (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-so-many-americans-hate-their-jobs/).
- Monopolizing decision making could work again the business because a leader maybe mislead by their own thinking – when they do it alone.
- When you enforce a leader to take dominance with a group who don’t wish to follow, this will cause loss of loyalty of employees to the business. In which case followers will try to steer in the opposite direction of their imposed leader and will find round about ways such that they subtly breakdown his power; E.g. by with-holding important information from this leader, being secretive and not sharing lessons learned with them.
- When leaders put plans and rules alone – they lose their people’s buy-in. Whenever followers are not supervised: they will be happy to break the rules. Also when company rules guarantee that business income is not fairly distributed: Such as when there are losses the Director still earn their big (sometimes six-figure) bonuses as opposed to front line employees who get deprived of their allowances or maybe even laid-off, this will result in that the corporation will eventually lose all the ‘intelligent’ followers on the long term. Because nobody with a fair sense of logic would accept this unless their skills are so poor they can’t get hired anywhere else.
- When you deprive Followers from their right of majority to choose their leader, you pump leaders’ egos to a limit that will hurt the business – they will lose the motive to pay attention to developing their leadership skills and to take care of their followers.
Source: www.trainersbox.net
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