On Leaders vs. Followers in business
I had to answer a few questions in my grad class on a very good article. The article is from the May-June 1990 issue of The Futurist, and is titled ‘The Importance of Followership’. Basically, it lays out the importance of cultivating an organization of employees that are happy to do their work, and are rewarded for acting on the best course of action for the organization, instead of trying to just be good employees because they’re afraid to stick out and lose their jobs. Having been written in 1990, it’s a little interesting to realize that most of the companies that survived the dot-com bust seemed to have understood this, and emerged as leaders in their fields. Here are some of my (short) answers to the discussion questions:
1. Distinguish between leadership and followership. What are the characteristics of successful leaders? Successful followers? Are the characteristics similar?
The article does a good job describing the roles of leadership and followership, and what makes each successful. What struck me is that the most successful leaders and followers are those that choose to carry the traits traditionally held by the other. That is, employees that take a more vested interest in leadership qualities in their organization, ad leaders who choose to be open to collaboration with their employees.
2. Why do you think so little emphasis is given to followership compared to leadership in organizations?
Unfortunately, our culture is shaped around celebrating the top percentage of success stories. We celebrate sports stars on winning teams, when there are usually multiple people responsible for their rise to greatness. In recent years, there has been more hopeful signs of celebrating the accomplishments of non-leaders. Just look at the online world for example — its equalizing tendencies are celebrating people for their accomplishments or ideas, as opposed to celebrating a leader for the successes of their organization.
3. Describe the ways organizations can nurture followership. What are the obstacles to implementation of these strategies, if any?
By including people in the operation of business and giving them a sense of ownership, they will be more inclined to operate on the behest of the organization’s well-being. By rewarding this behavior, whether it is popular or not, leaders can cultivate employees that are more interested in being dynamic producers than an army of followers looking for the answer people want to hear.
Addition: Coming from the IT field, I can see the organizations that survived the dot-com bust were ones that counted on, and encouraged, the initiative of their employees to be personally innovative in the best interests of the company.
Another good case of this was in the forming of Silicon Valley back in the 50’s and 60’s. The inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, won the nobel prize in 1956 and is generally regarded as the father of the computer age. He formed a company, and was set to be the first to build transistors, which led to semiconductors, which led to processors. He had an innate ability to hire geniuses, but due to his overwhelming desire to control people, and a fear that they would come up with greater innovations than his own. In the process, he almost immediately lost most of his first employees, who soon formed their own companies: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
William Shockley faded away from the birth of the computer age, and people like Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) eventually took his place as silicon valley’s innovators.
As a side note, later he basically went crazy, heavily supporting Eugenics, the belief that humans are in a form of “reverse evolution” by breeding “undesirable” traits more often than desirable ones. The Nazi party based their reasoning for the Holocaust on eugenics, so this didn’t make Shockley popular in post-WWII America… He died in 1989, and his ex-wife was the only attendant at his funeral.
If he had been able to foster a sense of “followership” as strong as his desire to lead, we would have undoubtedly been the most wealthy person in the computer age, either at or above the level of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
