December 2007

What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers

There is no leader without at least one follower—that’s obvious. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all.

Good leadership is the stuff of countless courses, workshops, books, and articles. Everyone wants to understand just what makes leaders tick—the charismatic ones, the retiring ones, and even the crooked ones. Good followership, by contrast, is the stuff of nearly nothing. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders’ development rather than followers’ or mistakenly assume that followers are amorphous, all one and the same. As a result, we hardly notice, for example, that followers who tag along mindlessly are altogether different from those who are deeply devoted.

In reality, the distinctions among followers in groups and organizations are every bit as consequential as those among leaders. This is particularly true in business: In an era of flatter, networked organizations and cross-cutting teams of knowledge workers, it’s not always obvious who exactly is following (or, for that matter, who exactly is leading) and how they are going about it. Reporting relationships are shifting, and new talent-management tools and approaches are constantly emerging. A confluence of changes—cultural and technological ones in particular—have influenced what subordinates want and how they behave, especially in relation to their ostensible bosses.

It’s long overdue for leaders to acknowledge the importance of understanding their followers better. In these next pages, I explore the evolving dynamic between leaders and followers and offer a new typology for determining and appreciating the differences among subordinates. These distinctions have critical implications for how leaders should lead and managers should manage.

A Level Playing Field

Followers can be defined by their behavior—doing what others want them to do. But for the purposes of this article, and to avoid confusing what followers do with who they are, I define followers according to their rank: They are low in the hierarchy and have less power, authority, and influence than their superiors. They generally go along to get along, particularly with those in higher positions. In the workplace, they may comply so as not to put money or stature at risk. In the community, they may comply to preserve collective stability and security—or simply because it’s the easiest thing to do.

History tells us, however, that subordinates do not follow all the time. As the ideas of the Enlightenment took hold in the eighteenth century, for instance, ordinary people (in industrialized societies especially) became less dependent on kings, landowners, and the like, and their expectations changed accordingly—as did their sense of empowerment. The trend continues. Increasingly, followers think of themselves as free agents, not as dependent underlings. And they act accordingly, often withholding support from bad leaders, throwing their weight behind good ones, and sometimes claiming commanding voices for those lower down in the social or organizational hierarchy.

Witness the gradual demise of communism (and totalitarianism) in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and now China. And consider the social and political upheavals, all of them antiauthority, in the United States and elsewhere during the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, there has been a dispersion of power at the highest levels of American business, partly because of changes in the cultures and structures of corporations as well as the advance of new technologies. CEOs share power and influence with a range of players, including boards, regulators, and shareholder activists. Executives at global companies must monitor the activities of subordinates situated thousands of miles away. And knowledge workers can choose independently to use collaborative technologies to connect with colleagues and partners in other companies and countries in order to get things done. The result is reminiscent of what management sage Peter Drucker suggested in his 1967 book The Effective Executive: In an era dominated by knowledge workers rather than manual workers, expertise can—and often does—trump position as an indicator of who is really leading and who is really following.

Types of Followers

Over the years, only a handful of researchers have attempted to study, segment, and speak to followers in some depth. To various degrees, Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik, Carnegie Mellon adjunct professor Robert Kelley, and executive coach Ira Chaleff have all argued that leaders with even some understanding of what drives their subordinates can be a great help to themselves, their followers, and their organizations. Each researcher further recognized the need to classify subordinates into different types. (See the sidebar “Distinguishing Marks: Three Other Follower Typologies.”)