Is 'great followership' the real secret to great leadership?

Salaam and Greetings All,

 

Another interesting article. I read about followership some 20 plus years ago in a now defunct magazine “World Executive Digest”. Wished I had kept the magazine, but since I read it in the Army Camp library I was attached to, can’t possibly take it as mine.

 

What’s interesting is not just me having read it some 20 plus years ago, but I came from a school that puts emphasis on “Serve to Lead”.

 

Those words doesn’t really mean much except that when you were 16 & 17 years old, you tend to take it quite literally. You serve before you can lead. Not an entirely wrong concept.

 

However, past few years, have taught me that, leadership is also about serving. Serving your constituents, your followers, your people and also serving your bosses (in itself, means you are a follower). Of course it also begs the question, whether as a boss or a leader, you are worth being followed.

 

I too have made that error in judgement. As I forgot the very lessons I learned back when I was in high school. “Serve to Lead”. I focused on Leadership, because you tend to believe what you read, and there are more things written on leadership than followership. Also, that’s where the money is. The glamour and the visibility.

 

Too many organizations focused on the Top Talent for the investment in their development, and somehow putting in the back burner, the rest of the people. And basing on the article below, could have caused more damage than we actually thought.

 

Good luck…

 

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06/19/2013

 

Cop Gumbo

with Val Van Brocklin

 

Is 'great followership' the real secret to great leadership?

 

As long as we fixate on leaders at the expense of followers, we will perpetuate the myth that followers don’t matter much

 

Editor’s and Author’s Note: Val Van Brocklin and I would like to thank U.S. Fish & Wildlife Refuge Manager Ann Marie Timberman for suggesting that PoliceOne look more deeply into the concept of “followership.” Watch for more on this topic in coming months.

 — Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor in Chief

 

Leaders don’t accomplish the mission. Followers do. So why is it that all the attention, time, money, and resources are spent on developing leaders? Why aren’t we also developing great followers?

 

Maybe it’s because “great followers” sounds like a paradox in our culture. America is about celebrities, heroes, and individualism. What’s the first image that pops into your mind when you think follower? A sheep, a lemming, a faceless-one-of-many?

 

Followership is not something most of us aspire to.

 

The Corollary to Leadership

 As Don Mercer recently wrote in Followership: The Corollary to Leadership there’s a built-in assumption in our culture that everyone should strive to be a leader. That’s where glory lies. We can get a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership, but I doubt we’d find even an Associate Degree in Followership.

 

Leadership development is BIG business — a $50 billion industry. And that raises some important questions.

 

We seem to ignore the untapped resource of developing empowered followers, and few professional development programs or even in-service trainings spend time on how to develop an effective followership culture or skills. It’s as if the lone leader casts his or her magic wand and miracles happen without much — if any — attention paid to the followers doing the heavy lifting. So ask yourself:

 

•    What does that communicate about their value to the agency and the mission?

 •    Does all this focus on developing leaders nurture the wrong-headed thinking that being a great follower is not quite cutting it?

 •    And what about followers who work around failures of leadership to accomplish the mission?

 

The Rising Phoenix of Followership

Robert Kelley challenged the exclusive primacy of leadership research, training and development in his Harvard Business Review article "In Praise of Followers" (a best-selling reprint for HBR).

 

More recently, Harvard University scholar Barbara Kellerman wrote in her 2008 book Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, that as “long as we fixate on leaders at the expense of followers, we will perpetuate the myth that [followers] don’t matter much... In fact, as a result of forces now converging, followers are more important than ever before.”

 

Those forces include scandalously-failed political, economic, financial, and spiritual leadership on a global scale.

 

The United States Air Force decided that its focus on leadership development, while overlooking the development of a valued followership culture and skills, failed to optimize institutional performance. Lt. Colonels Sharon M. Latour and Vicki J. Rast bolster this conclusion in an informative, well-supported two-part article on Dynamic Followership. 

 

One of the things the authors looked at was how Air Force retention rates amongst “followers” were a persistent problem. The service sought to retain 55 percent of first-term airmen, 75 percent of second-term airmen, and 95 percent of the career enlisted force. It had failed to meet these goals for all three noncommissioned categories since 1996 (with the exception of 2002 when stop-loss measures prevented separation actions).

 

Air Force efforts to raise retention numbers focused on tangible, transactional issues such as better pay, housing and base facilities. While important, Latour and Rast noted these initiatives failed to address the important role individual followers play in accomplishing the mission.

 

They concluded: “Rather than focusing on the negative aspects of worker dissatisfaction, follower-development programs should take advantage of opportunities to instill/reinforce institutional values, model effective follower roles and behaviors, and begin the mentoring process.”

 

Leadership development has moved from transactional (economic exchange of material goods for services of the subordinate) to transformational (enlisting others in a united effort to meet higher, intangible needs) theories and models.

 

The authors recommend a similar strategy for followership development — a strategy they believe is more essential to mission success than leader development. And, just as leader development proposes competencies, skills, desirable traits, and educational programs and training to advance them — so, too, must any effective follower development program.

 

Followership in Policing

I’ve worked with law enforcement officers for more than 25 years. As someone who trains on leadership, I know I’ve committed some level of heresy in the above article. So be it. It’s time we trimmed some fat from the sacred cow of “leadership development.”

 

I’ve been as guilty as the rest of the profession in neglecting followership as a discreet resource worthy of separate training and development.

 

 

About the author

 

As a state and federal prosecutor for over 10 years, Val’s trial work has been seen nationally on ABC'S PRIMETIME LIVE, Discovery Channel's Justice Files, in USA Today, The National Enquirer and REDBOOK.

 

Described by Calibre Press as "the indisputable master of entertrainment," Val is now an international law enforcement trainer and writer who appears in person and on TV, radio, video productions, webcasts, newspapers, books and magazines. She has been a regular contributor to a number of law enforcement publications and has been featured in the Calibre Press Online Street Survival Newsletter, Police Chief magazine, The Law Enforcement Trainer magazine, and The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Gazette.

 

When she's not working, Val can be found flying her airplane with her retriever, a shotgun, a fly rod, and high aspirations. Visit Val at www.valvanbrocklin.com and contact her at info@valvanbrocklin.com.