At ATD TechKnowledge 2024, I will be presenting the session, Employee-Centered Diagnostics for High Trust and Precise Strategy, which will explore how to bring together leadership and employee perspectives for more robust and localized strategic plans. This blog post outlines some of the underlying philosophical approaches and how engagement and followership ties to employee diagnostics.
Let’s start with some simple questions: Can you lead if no one is following? What makes you want to follow someone else?
If you’ve spent many years exploring leadership, these questions might be surprising.
Pause for a moment, and consider the last great meeting you had. Was there only great leadership there? Or was there also strong support, active listening, insightful questions, and bold commitments? In other words, was there also great followership?
Because leadership titles, classes, books, and trainings are baked into most of our careers, we tend to focus on being the best leaders we can be and forget that all of us are sometimes followers, too—maybe more often than we admit!
Do you have a boss? Do you have a board? Do you have a client? If you aren’t following as skillfully as you’re leading in those relationships, they may not be as creative or rewarding as you’d like. Leadership and followership roles don’t come automatically with our rank or title; they are interpersonal, voluntary choices made on both sides. And they often change throughout the day. When we understand this, organizational life becomes a lot more dynamic and collaborative.
Leadership and followership are a matching pair of roles. When leadership charts the big picture, followership follows through with detailed execution. When leadership contemplates a choice, followership counsels to inform the decision. The two work together or not at all, like two blades on a pair of scissors. In reality, power is not in leadership alone, but rather from what happens when leading and following actions synchronize well.
Let’s look at these three exciting new ways of thinking about the followership:
Followership Is Strategic
You can hold specific responsibilities as a director and still follow a junior employee when they happen to have crucial subject matter expertise. Following someone else doesn’t make you less effective or less authoritative. On the contrary, it demonstrates that you know how to facilitate success. Being willing to follow others when appropriate can turn coworkers into allies and partners.
Followership Is Valuable
Think of the engineer who responds defensively to constructive feedback or the remote manager who disregards the concerns of her divisional boss. Negative human interactions ripple through organizations and quickly erode trust and productivity. Now think of the opposite: employees who act on feedback and improve, take responsibility for quality and safety, and maintain a positive presence that calms and inspires others. What if we could systematically get less of the former and more of the latter by acknowledging, training, and celebrating followership skills?
Followership Is Development
A growing body of research today suggests that it is time to flip what has been assumed to be a passive role, followership, into an active one. The next evolution in learning and development is the training of leadership and followership skills across whole organizations.
Here are a few practical tips to elevate your followership skills:
- Tune in: Communication includes listening as well as speaking. Prepare yourself to be a rock star listener by adjusting your antennae first. Take note of the other person’s posture, expression, and energy level. Do they seem tired, excited, hurried, tentative, happy, or worried? Observing others’ nonverbal signals does a couple of very useful things: First, like a mindfulness practice, it brings you into the present moment, making it less likely that you’ll get distracted by your own thoughts. And second, it gives you valuable information about the leader you can use to phrase your thoughts and questions in a way that optimizes your positive influence.
- Visually focus on the speaker: Wherever you look, that’s what you will be thinking about. Eye contact, at least in most Western contexts, signals to the other person that you respect them and that you are listening. A lack of eye contact often signals the opposite: disconnection, distraction, or disinterest. If you are working remotely, turn your video on and do your best to stay focused on the speaker.
- Back up a coworker: If someone else shares an idea you resonate with, add your support verbally. If appropriate, add a little bit of additional data or rationale. For example: “I agree with Maria’s point,” or, “I agree with Maria’s point, and last quarter’s budget report suggests the same conclusion.” Genuine solidarity is helpful to the leader and fosters a healthy team dynamic that supports everyone.
Join me at ATD TK for insights on how to use qualitative analysis to identify opportunities for improvement from voices at all levels, make your strategy more precise, and increase trust.
