MARCH 2, 2021 – Yesterday, while walking home from my skiing, I pondered material for today’s post. A fertile patch: news items I’d scrolled through an hour before, just before heading out the door. One story in particular was Sunday’s CPAC appearance by you-know-who and a statement by South Dakota Governor Noem that “We aren’t sheep.”
You-know-who’s abysmal leadership skills, which attracted 75 million votes—the second time around—gave me what I thought was a bright (original) idea. How about looking at “leadership” turned 180 degrees? Call it “followership,” I thought.
In my upbringing, education, vocation, and volunteer activities, development of good “leadership” ability was always emphasized—for advancement within the organization. In school, sports, Cub Scouts, and later corporate life, people were invariably judged by their “leadership” skills. In the political realm, we talk about leaders and people who aspire to be leaders; who’s “a good leader” and who’s not.
But we never talk about “followership,” I thought, as I tried to stay upright on the icy sidewalks. Well, almost never.
“Followership” doesn’t appear in my Mac dictionary, but when I Googled it . . . voila! The term is anything but newly minted. In an instant I found an article by one John S. McCallum in the September/October 2013 issue of Ivey Business Journal, published by Western University in London, Ontario. The article was entitled, “Followership: The Other Side of Leadership.” It opened with the following:
The link between leadership, management and enterprise performance is widely understood and accepted. [. . .] That boards often change leaders when enterprises are slipping confirms the importance placed on leadership.
The flip side of leadership is followership. It stands to reason that if leadership is important to performance, followership must have something to do with it too. But curiously, followership gets only a small fraction of the airtime that leadership does.
The article went on to criticize MBA programs for their exclusive emphasis on “leadership” at the expense of all important “followership.”
Bingo!
If good “followership” skills are important to business organizations, they’re particularly critical to well-functioning democracy. The deplorable “leadership” of you-know-who reveals something far more disturbing about the state of our country: the abysmal condition of the nation’s “followership.” When the super-majority of Republican voters and high-ranking office holders follow a “leader” as awful as you-know-who, they are a lost flock. Yet Goernor Noem insists that “[Republicans] aren’t sheep. We can hurl invective at you-know-who till the cows–I mean, sheep–come home, but the real problem is with the “followership.”
Professor McCallum is definitely on to something. (I credit him and many others for having beat me to the punch.) But why limit good “followership” to B-school? Good “followership” should be taught wherever good “leadership” is–from grade school to corporate training programs and most critically, in high school civics classes. If I were in charge of the syllabus, a history of Germany and the story of America in its you-know-who years would receive top billing–to illustrate that behind bad leadership is lots of bad “followership.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
