Several years ago, a couple of business school professors, William Litzinger and Thomas Schaefer sat down with a group Army officers, all of which were either teaching faculty or recent graduates from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The two professors asked a very simple question, "Since developing leadership is what this place is all about, how do you go about doing that task?"
The Army officers' collective answer was surprising in both its simplicity and its message. "We begin by teaching them to be followers."
As it turns out, this concept has been around for a really long time! The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in his book Politics wrote, "Who would learn to lead, must, as men say, first of all learn to obey." In other words, good leaders start out as good followers!
It should be fairly obvious (but I will mention it anyway) that in order to be a leader, individuals need to have followers. According to the visionary management and leadership expert Peter Drucker, "The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers." Of course, it's not quite that simple.
Take, for example, a new Army captain who is newly promoted to be the company Commanding Officer (CO) and is now responsible for the roughly 200 soldiers in the company. Suppose that the CO never actually leaves company headquarters and gives orders to the rest of the company only through subordinates. Technically, the CO has followers, but does that make the CO a leader? I would argue that it does not.
Ralph Nader once said that "the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." And that is absolutely true. However, as the former business school professor and leadership expert Warren Bennis observed, leaders are only as effective as their ability to engage followers. What is the best way to engage followers? Be a good follower.
Kim Peters and Alex Haslam wrote (see "Research: To be a good leader, start by being a good follower"), "...the key to success in leadership lies in the collective we not the individual I." They go on to define leadership as "a process that emerges from a relationship between leaders and followers who are bound together by their understanding that they are members of the same social group. People will be more effective leaders when their behaviors indicate that they are one of us, because they share our values, concerns and experiences, and are doing it for us..."
Peters and Haslam published a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry with the title "I follow, therefore I lead: A longitudinal study of leader and follower identity and leadership in the marines". They conducted several leadership assessments and interviews of 218 male Royal Marine recruits over the course of 32 weeks of basic infantry training. They found that recruits who considered themselves to be leaders were also seen by their commanders as leaders. However, the rest of their fellow recruits did not see it that way. The recruits who saw themselves as followers were the ones who ultimately emerged as leaders!
Perhaps not surprisingly, the commanders often envisaged a specific leadership phenotype (see my last post "Diamonds in the Rough") and rated the recruits who fit this phenotype as having the most leadership potential. Again however, the other members of the group just did not see it that way. As it turned out, the recruits who were rated as followers by both their fellow recruits and commanders were the ones who actually emerged as the leaders of the group.
Hopefully I convinced you in my last post that there is no such thing as a leadership phenotype. Now, I've expanded that discussion to include the observation that in order to be a good leader, you must first be a good follower. In a future post, we will discuss how to be a good follower!
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