How to Become a Powerful
Follower...and a Good Leader
The
suicide mission came directly from the president of the United States in 1898:
Go behind enemy lines in Cuba, find rebel commander Calixto García at his base
in the inhospitable Sierra Maestra mountains, and win his support for the
American campaign against Spain. One solider, Lieutenant Andrew Rowan,
volunteered to follow this seemingly hopeless order. But Rowan ultimately
succeeded in the mission, convincing the Cubans to join the American cause and
winning the nation’s second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross.
This mission became the historical
context for the 1899 essay “A Message to Garcia” , written by
Elbert Hubbard, which is still used to train aspiring U.S. Army infantry
officers on the essence of followership. And although the study of leadership
outshines that of followership in both the military and the corporate spheres,
followership is an important concept in both realms. Followership doesn’t mean
blindly following orders, or turning into a sycophant. Rather, followership is all about interacting in a skillful way
with your leadership to benefit both you and your organization. What’s more,
learning how to be a great follower is a requirement to becoming a truly great
leader.
In the iconic leadership tome Good to Great, Jim Collins
introduced “Level 5” leaders, those executives with the highest leadership
capability. Collins and his colleagues studied companies that appeared on the
Fortune 500 list between 1965 and 1995 and identified those that were able to
beat market industry returns significantly over a period of at least 15 years.
One of their key findings was that the presence of a Level 5 leader at the helm
distinguished great companies from good. These are leaders who build enduring
greatness through a “paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional
will.” Collins described these leaders as “more like Lincoln and Socrates than
Patton or Caesar.” In Collins’s view, practicing followership helps inculcate
the sense of personal humility central to becoming a Level 5 leader. Great
followers “[channel] ambition into the company, not the self,” Collins wrote.
A great follower can use the daily
process of doing work for someone to become an opportunity to develop personal
humility. On a daily basis, followership means subjugating your will to the
will of your leader or organization. How you spend your time, where you work,
when you take lunch, and often where you live is subject to the leader’s
decision. Accepting these strictures without mindfulness will not make a person
a great follower. Rather, practicing great followership means doing these
things with a very specific purpose. Robert Kelley, Distinguished Service
Professor of Management at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, has
studied and written extensively on followership. His research reveals that
effective followership comes from a combination of critical thinking and
enthusiastic participation. Successful followers can thoughtfully transfer
their goals, ambitions, or ego to their leaders. When their leaders succeed,
the followers’ needs are met.
These
insights allow us to construct a few basic tactics for developing a fail-safe
and effective followership practice.
Know your leader’s comfort zone.
A great follower understands how
external conditions and their actions affect the leader’s well-being. Their
comfort zone is informed by a number of factors including the work on their
plate, their competence, and their life outside of work. As a follower, you
know your work may be a small part of your leader’s day. It is important, then,
to pay attention to what irritates your boss and how you can avoid sparking
negative emotions.
When
a colleague was concerned about a combative relationship with her boss, we
analyzed their relationship and found something interesting. Arguments tended
to occur on calls when she emailed the discussion material five to 10 minutes
before the meeting. Conversations with others who worked successfully with her
boss helped us identify the root cause: He used an iPad, and PowerPoint–format
presentations were displaying as distorted on his device. He became irritated
because he could not understand what he was seeing. When my colleague, now
cognizant of the need to stay in the leader’s comfort zone, started sending
PDFs in addition to PowerPoint files, their relationship changed dramatically.
Of
course, understanding the comfort zone goes deeper than getting a handle on
what device a person uses. You have to grasp how your leader has developed his
or her personal operating system. Ira Chaleff highlights several more personal
and psychological questions to help you understand your leader’s comfort zone.
These include:
·
Where
has she come from?
·
What
are her values?
·
Does
she feel supported or lonely?
·
Is
she genuinely confident or insecure?
·
What
are her failures, fears, or aspirations?
Stay within the comfort zone.
Once the borders of the comfort
zone are identified, it’s important to stay within them. A colleague of mine
was reporting directly to the leader of his practice on a short-term project.
The leader was mild-mannered, but would occasionally express concern that
progress on a deliverable “made him nervous.” Clearly, staying on track and
meeting deadlines was a crucial value and need for the leader to stay in his
comfort zone. Rather than dismiss the comments, however, the colleague quickly
marshalled resources to ensure rapid progress was made. As a result, he not
only had a successful project, but he also was rated very highly during our
annual review process.
Work to expand the comfort zone.
At an organization I once worked with,
they had a saying: “We throw you in the deep end and, if you tread water, we
throw you a 10-pound weight.” Warm and fuzzy? Maybe not. But it
highlights how leaders are willing to expand their comfort zone when you do the
work, anticipate needs, and willingly shoulder new responsibilities.
In his book Team of Teams, General Stanley
McChrystal tells the story of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander Conway (a
pseudonym used in the book). Conway was sent to be a liaison between the U.S.
embassy of an “unstable Middle Eastern country” and the elite task force
hunting al Qaeda in Iraq. He was unwanted by the leaders at the embassy, whose
insular culture viewed him as an outside agent and potential threat to their
careers. And so even though he was a SEAL, with numerous skills to help the
embassy leaders achieve their aims, he was ignored. Rather than resort to passive
aggression, though, Conway labored to make his new leaders more comfortable
with him. He volunteered for the one task on which they would accept his help:
He emptied the trash every afternoon. Over the course of three months, he
worked to “expand the comfort zone.” Then, as the threat from al Qaeda grew in
the country, he saw an opportunity and assumed new responsibility — helping the
host country develop new force-protection measures.
The idea that leadership and
followership are separate is false. And maintaining that stark divide
ultimately hurts our ability to build and create, together. As Susan Cain,
author of Quiet: The Power of
Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, put it in a
recent New York Times article on the
need for more effective followers: “Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the
outsize glorification of ‘leadership skills’ is to the practice of leadership
itself — it hollows it out, it empties it of meaning. It attracts those who are
motivated by the spotlight rather than by the ideas and people they serve.”
Like
a bird with two wings, leadership and followership are part of an inseparable
system. Using the tactics of fail-safe followership can make you more
successful in your career and prepare you for leadership role
Augusto Giacoman
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/How-to-Become-a-Powerful-Follower?gko=f3bdb&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171024&utm_campaign=resp
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