A Different Way of Looking at the Leadership Environment

Another Dose of Followership

Bob Molenda, Likes to go from nothing to something

6 min readJul 5, 2024

Article 12 in a Series

by Two Guys From Stillwater, Minnesota

John Buettner and Bob Molenda

Another Dose of Followership

What happens when you take Followership characteristics and subtract the characteristics they have in common with Leadership? Hey, we engineers and chemists know how to add and subtract things that we cannot ever see. This is something that we can see. It looks something like this; F-C = F(unique). It means that we end up with characteristics that are ‘unique’ to good Followers.

Difference Leader/Follower-R. Molenda Image

This sounds like fun, doesn’t it? I mean the ‘F-C’ thing, yes, that’s it ! When we accomplish this ‘rocket science’ feat we can see what the difference between Followers and Leaders are.

This is one of those pesky word problems, y’know, the ones we all hated? Just make sure you spell everything correctly because instead of numbers and equations, we are using ‘words’.

We already know some of the Characteristics of Followers, so it seems that if we can identify the Characteristics of Leaders, we should be able to find out what Leaders have in common with Followers. Once we know that, we can subtract them and end up with what might be called ‘Unique Characteristics of Good Followers’.

We should be able to solve this task in a heartbeat, learn something about Leaders and Followers, then have time to go out and get a pizza and a beer. Medium might even bump for it if a few readers learn some algebra along the way. Are we dreaming?

Follower / Leader Characteristics and Sources

From what we learned last time, some people think there are twenty characteristics of Leaders and others think there are hundreds.

The good thing here is it does not matter which of the surveys we use. We should get pretty much the same results. This is one of those cases where science helps out the humanities.

Other people who wrote about Followers came up with ten to fourteen characteristics for being a good Follower.

I hear some mumbling about using the horse race results to deal with fewer Leadership Characteristics. We went to the Leadership Horse Races last time. So, why not look at the list of the top twenty horses that ran in the Leadership Race and see where that takes us? That seems like a good idea, but it does not matter if we use the top twenty or the top five or even if we work from the most recent racing form.

What about the Entropy Device? Can we use that like we did to separate things into the two buckets? Yeah, they both sound like good ideas that we can play around with for a minute or two. Who knows where this will take us? There has never been a bad experiment or hypothesis, after all. Good Ideas, all of them, but for now, let’s just run the ‘Subtraction’ experiment.

We looked at the horse race data and the survey contributions that were found. What Leaders and Followers had in common were:

When we subtract these from the characteristics of good Followers, what is left is those which are unique to Followers. Here are the unique ‘Follower Characteristics ‘from the horse race data and survey:

Follower Characteristics-R. Molenda Image

So What?

One of the great take-aways from this is what Leaders and Followers have in common. Once again, the important characteristics are Integrity, Honesty, Ethical Behavior and Loyalty.

This goes back two thousand years ago, when Aristotle highlighted these same characteristics and made statements that indicated Leaders must first be good Followers. Aristotle also thought these characteristics must be repeatedly practiced so that they became Habits and Virtues of both Leaders and Followers. Old Aristotle did not need a cloud or a smart pad to come up with that conclusion more than two centuries ago.

This is how Character is built, starting at an early age. It has not changed and is needed more today than ever before. What these four characteristics do is form the basis of a person’s Character. If encouraged, if rewarded, if repeatedly practiced, it becomes part of the person, the guiding light that is there when nobody else is and guard rails are not seen or may not even exist. It does not matter if you are a leader or a follower, you are a better person with that set of lanterns.

The innovators involved with writing code for AI should read a little about Aristotle and try to build these habits into their funny little, algorithms. Just a thought, but we digress.

This will also enable anyone to recognize these same characteristics in others that you meet. At some point, each of these characteristics are absolute and others will eventually know of any dishonest, disloyal, unethical or lack of integrity behaviors. It is extremely hard to regain trust after it is lost, just once.

The other take-aways come from subtracting the common characteristics found in Leaders and Followers from the characteristics of good followers. What remains is what is unique to Followers.

In the case of Followers, they are all pretty much “Mission-Oriented” characteristics dealing with technical competency, tasks, teamwork and getting the job done.

There are some requirements about respectfulness, suggestions and discretion needed in working with all members of the team. Beneath the surface, the foundation for the mission-oriented characteristics are those character traits that we all share in common with the leader and as a team.

The other fact to deal with is that we are all leaders and followers at the same time. Even the leader of your work team is very likely a follower at home as a parent, sibling or school board member. Followers on your work team are likely to be leaders in their families, baseball or soccer teams while also being another kind of follower in your community.

When you’re a leader, be sure to remember these heroes. When you’re a follower, wear your character as a badge of honor.

Where are we now?

Here is where we have been today; We used data from the literature on Follower characteristics and survey data from references on Leader characteristics.

We then found what was common to both Leaders and Followers. We know that leaders must also be good followers, which resulted in the need for Leaders to walk in the shoes of Followers first. We also found that Followers are held to the same standards as are Leaders when it comes to the characteristics that they have in common.

We later took the characteristics that were common to both Followers and Leaders and subtracted them from Follower characteristics. This gave us something we called ‘Characteristics Unique to Followers’.

This is the difference between Leaders and Followers. The differences are mostly related to technical competencies and skills in working with other team members.

We also found that Leaders and Followers have a lot in common. We are all both leaders and followers and sometimes we don’t even know it! We all carry an internal lantern with the common characteristics that will guide us when nobody else is looking or even present.

All those good followers are hungry and can already smell the Pepperoni on the thick crust. Never forget them!