The flip side of leadership is the little-studied aspect of followership

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Studies of leadership tend to ignore followership. Yet without followership, there would be no leadership.

We learn to follow as youngsters, in the family and in school. Later comes organizational leaders and managers and political figures. Somewhere in there, we are taught about following the law. To follow is human nature, academic Barbara Kellerman observes: “Submission is the human condition.”

We often follow because there are rewards for following as well as punishments for not following. Sometimes those are apparent, sometimes not. But she notes we can also follow out of inertia.

“We follow over, and then over again, simply because not following seems more trouble than it’s worth. Notably, this applies even when we think our leaders are bad – ineffective, unethical or both,” the founding executive director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School writes in Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.

Followership drew considerable research and experiments in the wake of the Second World War. Psychologist Stanley Milgram probed obedience to authority and various historians and writers looked at how ordinary people fell in line with Adolph Hitler. Prof. Kellerman wrote a book, Followership, in 2008 and has returned to the theme in books on bad leadership and The Enablers, about the team around Donald Trump during the pandemic.

She has identified 20 rewards for following a leader. Personal rewards that a leader can bestow to followers include safety and security, autonomy, money, success, ideological and policy alignment, and comfort and convenience. Interpersonal rewards are subtler, flowing from relationships to others. They include power and authority, identification with the leader, charisma, access and affiliation, connection and community, tradition and fun and games – smart leaders, she says, give followers a good time.

“Followers are like leaders – different from one another – as are the contexts within which leaders and followers are situated. Therefore, what prompts us to follow one leader in one situation will not necessarily prompt us to follow another leader in another situation,” she says.

Punishments, of course, can also be part of the equation. We follow to avoid or minimize punishment. Different followers, she notes, have different conceptions of what constitutes a punishment and different thresholds of pain. Punishments can serve two purposes: To hurt people who have failed to follow in the past or to deter people from not following in the future by threatening them, making clear, explicitly or implicitly, the consequences of not complying.

Punishments can deprive people of safety and security, money, power and authority or connection and community – mirroring the types of rewards leaders can use. But there are also punishments that compel someone to submit, by forcing them to endure fear or suffer pain, notably in political dictatorships.

She points out that psychological studies have found a natural bias called loss aversion. “We are more averse to loss than attracted to gain because they are not psychologically equivalent: We feel the pain of loss more strongly than the pleasure of gain,” she says. So if you are following someone you sense you shouldn’t, perhaps it’s the punishments you fear that are key.

The determination whether to follow or not can also be heavily influenced by the context. At work, you may question whether to follow your manager’s orders if nobody else on the team is doing so. But there is also a broader context that can influence you, the nature of the organization and even the country in which you live. In some cultures obedience and conformity are prized while in others disobedience and nonconformity may be more tolerated.

We follow so often and for so many reasons that she says it’s important we remind ourselves not only that some of the time we do not follow but also that much of the time we have a choice.

“We are human. Humans have agency. Which means that to some degree at least we can make our own decisions, shape our own lives, opt to take one path or another,” she writes.

In that vein, she reminds us that just as there are rewards for following there can be rewards for not following – rewards for being disobedient. She points to the archetype of the lonesome cowboy in American culture – Clint Eastwood, for example, as a glorified rebel. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are icons for their non-violent resistance.

Finally, she reminds us there can be punishments for following. Perhaps the best-known example are the Nazis executed after the Nuremberg trials.

A workplace example are the followers of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose company’s heralded main products turned out to be fraudulent. Investors lost money, members of the board of directors were humiliated and those who worked for the company ended up without a job and often rejected professionally for having followed her.

“People tend to forget that at least some of the time they are free agents,” she stresses. “Sometimes they can opt out, get out without paying much of a price. Nearly everyone who worked for Theranos or was associated with Theranos fell into that category.”

To follow or not to follow, that is the question.

Cannonballs

• Replace update meetings with question meetings, in which the team debates the best way forward on the most difficult questions the previously circulated updates raised. Organizational psychologist Rebecca Newton says it combats the “passive peace” problem: If everyone’s role in a meeting is to sit and listen, they will, and the productive discussion and conflict you need won’t happen.
• Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled large language models to produce expressions that seem empathetic to human users. But new research finds what is being called the AI empathy choice paradox: Participants significantly preferred to receive empathy from humans, yet they rated AI-generated empathetic responses as higher in quality and more effective at making them feel heard. The researchers say this suggests AI can be used in supplementing human emotional support but individual preferences must be respected.
• Canmore, Alta. consultant Michael Kerr advises asking team members: What’s one thing outside the realm of your current job you want to learn more about?