One day, I was having lunch with colleagues and sharing my experiences with different leaders in my corporate life.
I indicated that I have been lucky in that most of the leaders I have worked with were great! They gave me a conducive work environment and I was able to thrive under their leadership.
One of my colleagues, who was listening intently as I spoke, asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that the good leadership you experienced might have also been due to the fact that you were delivering on your mandate and perhaps rarely gave your leaders reason to stress about that? Maybe you could have been a great follower which in turn made it easier for your leaders to exhibit their good leadership skills”.
I then realised that I didn’t quite look at my experiences of being a follower from the perspective of what role a follower was expected to play to catalyze good leadership. I spoke of a “conducive environment” that was graciously accorded to me by my leaders but never thought that I had an ethical responsibility to contribute to the creation of a conducive environment for my leaders to lead me and others in the organization.
I asked myself whether in all those great times, I understood the assignments, did my best to deliver in accordance with expectations, aimed to exceed expectations and went the extra mile to produce desirable results, etc. It was humbling to realise that the adage “it takes two to tango” was resounding even in organizational behavior.
It is of great value to know that as followers we have a duty to contribute to what we call a “good” outlook on our leaders and their performance as such.
Mindful of the fact that human beings have diverse personalities and that some who are privileged to be in leadership positions may have certain characteristics or extremities that make good followership close to impossible, it should be the exception, rather than the rule. This way, it is more realistic to develop positive interventions to address these “falls from grace”, so to speak.
The invitation is to introspect and recall… what role have you played to good leadership as a follower?
