What is at the core of leadership management and followership?

Many people use “management” and “leadership” interchangeably, but there are important differences between them, even though both are needed for organizations to function well. There are hundreds of definitions of leadership and adjectives that describe the leadership (visionary, charismatic, servant, transformational, etc.).

Leader

Traditional notions of leadership involve:

• Innovating, synthesizing, inspiring, aligning, and reducing boundaries
• Being more people- and change-oriented
• Using “heart” skills such as character, empathy, courage, and emotional intelligence
• Focusing on opportunities, what might be possible, and the long-term
• Focusing on strategic issues, connections with people, listening, asking questions, helping others grow, and serving
• Asking “what” and “why”

Follower

Followers are essential for any organization. But passive followers are not as useful to achieving organizational objectives as engaged followers.

Passive followers are:

• Not particularly loyal, committed, connected, or engaged
• They take direction, do what they are told, and sometimes deliver results
• They work independently
• They are reactive, compliant, and more personally driven
• They often say, “That’s not my job”

Engaged followers on the other hand are invaluable to an organization.

Engaged followers are:

• Loyal, committed, connected, and engaged
• They take direction but they use their initiative, follow through, and hold themselves accountable to deliver results
• They collaborate
• They are proactive, reliable, professional, diligent, and thorough
• They often say, “I’ll help with that,” even if it is not  in their job description

Different Roles

Manager, leader, follower: different roles. But the complexity of organizational dynamics does not allow for clear separation of these roles.

At the best, people are not only leading, or managing, or following. These activities ebb and flow in the same person, depending on the situation, the people, and the choice of the person. A dynamic dance.

Sometimes we must lead. And sometimes we must manage. Sometimes we must follow. They go hand in hand—more than we think.

• Those who are always leading may miss important opportunities to help others develop their own leadership abilities and may neglect the tactical issues of keeping the trains running on time.
• Those who are always managing may miss opportunities to see beyond the current fray and help the organization and its people rise to a new level.
• Those who are always following may miss the chance to learn, grow, and stretch themselves by taking on challenges and risks and fighting for larger causes.

Core Concept

Great leadership is a blend of leading, managing, and following.

Practical Applications

1. What role do you play most often at work: leading, following, or managing?
2. What’s keeping you from exploring and integrating other roles?

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. It will help you develop self-awareness and identify ways to improve your leadership.

Take the Assessment

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bob Vanourek and Gregg Vanourek are leadership practitioners, teachers, trainers, and award-winning authors. They are co-authors of Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations, a winner of the International Book Awards, and called “the best book on leadership since Good to Great.” Take their Leadership Derailers Assessment or sign up for their newsletter. If you found value in this, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

To optimize innovative leadership and followership, we offer the merging of two conceptual models. The “Innovative Leadership Model” [, ] and the “Leader-Follower Framework” [, , ] complement each other and overlap with a differing depth of emphasis on essential leadership and followership elements and processes. Together they provide new insights into a broadly inclusive structure to develop optimal leadership and followership. These two approaches recently have been applied together to optimize the development of innovative leaders in health care [, ]. Yet, they also can be applied more broadly to enhance the innovative leader and follower development in all settings.

The Innovative Leadership Model is a five-element roadmap to becoming an innovative leader [, ]. The elements of the Innovative Leadership Model are ():

• Leader Type

• Developmental Perspective

• Resilience

• Situational Analysis

• Leadership Behaviors and Mindsets

Figure 1.

Overview of the innovative leadership model.

The Leader-Follower Framework [, ] includes four “C” elements:

• Character

• Competence

• Context

• Communication

• Personal

• Interpersonal

• Team

• Organizational

The Innovative Leadership Model and Leader-Follower Framework are valuable to develop both as leaders and as followers. To be an effective leader, you also must be willing and able to develop followers. It is essential for leaders and followers to understand, develop, and know when and how to lead and follow ().

Figure 2.

The leader-follower framework.

3.1 Elements of innovative leadership

The Innovative Leadership Model [, ] focuses on:

• Developmental maturity – developing the advancing meaning-making capacity to easily and intuitively identify complexity, approach others without ego, embrace both tactical and strategic concerns, and embrace transformation (i.e., capabilities to execute highly effective Competence and Communication at the Interpersonal, Team, and Organizational psychosocial levels)

• Self-understanding – the inner process including Character and outer behaviors including Competence and Communication (i.e., three of the C’s of the Leader-Follower Framework at the Personal psychosocial level)

• Understanding organizational culture and systems (i.e., Context within the Leader-Follower Framework at the Organizational psychosocial level)

The Innovative Leadership model addresses: Leader Type, Developmental Perspective, Resilience, Situational Analysis, and Leadership Behaviors and Mindsets.

Leader Typerefers to the core predispositions, traits, and attitudes of each person. These attributes influence who we are as a leader, our responses to stress, and how other people (including followers) experience our leadership. There are several valuable tools to help describe our Leader Type: Enneagram []; Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [, ]; Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) []; True Colors []; Big Five Personality Test []. The DISC Profile [] and StrengthFinder 2.0 [] provide additional, useful information relevant to Leader Type.

Self-awareness is the practice of engaging in self-reflection and achieving clarity of insight. Internal self-awareness refers to our own understanding of ourselves, whereas external self-awareness refers to understanding how others perceive and understand us. Self-understanding, understanding how others perceive us, and the extent to which perceptions about ourselves are accurate and compatible with others’ perceptions play a pivotal role in our effectiveness and leader-follower relationships. Self-aware individuals possess high levels of emotional intelligence; self-regulate behaviors, cognitions, and emotions more effectively depending on the situation; and continually evaluate their impact on others [, , , , ]. These attributes allow self-aware individuals to become more versatile, adaptive, and may perform better. The ability to use deep self-reflection relies on developing self-understanding and self-awareness, features of emotional intelligence. Self-understanding and self-awareness allow us to expand our perspective and to understand others better. A clearer understanding of ourselves and others can help build interpersonal, team, and organizational effectiveness. Feedback from trusted colleagues, family members, and friends in psychologically safe contexts is extremely valuable to develop self-awareness. Leader Type is an aspect of Character.

Developmental Perspective or Developmental “Maturity”refers to stages of personal development that include perspectives, experiences, and capabilities to make the meaning necessary to execute change initiatives [, ], solutions to complex problems [, ], and organizational transformations [, ]. Developmental Perspectives affect how we view our roles, how we interact with other people, and how we solve problems. In other words, this perspective can be described as “meaning-making,” or how we make sense of experiences using the Leadership Maturity Framework (LMF). The LMF considers cognitive complexity, emotional competence, and behavior and holds that we can progress through maturity levels as we learn and evolve. Moreover, more mature or evolved individuals are more effective at leading complex organizations in times of change. In contrast, individuals at an earlier level of developmental maturity rely on rules to make decisions and determine appropriate courses of action, whereas individuals at later stages use their values to guide decision-making and to determine what actions to take.

Developmental growth occurs as other capabilities expand in our lives. By understanding and building upon our Leader Type and Character, we can continue to grow, increasing access to and capacity for additional skills and capabilities. That is, we can develop our capacity to build beyond the basic skills we have now by moving through more progressive stages. The successful individual has a broad repertoire of mindsets and behaviors and can select the most appropriate ones depending on the context.

Resiliencereveals how much disturbance we can withstand before breaking [] and also refers to the ability to adapt to change while continuing to be both fluid in approach and driven toward attaining strategic goals []. Addressing and strengthening resilience is critical to manage stress and increase capacity to function in stressful environments and situations.

Innovative leaders and followers must adapt to volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) situations and demands while maintaining physical, psychological, and emotional health to have the resilience essential for success. They must build and sustain flexibility, adaptability, and focus; regain balance after disorienting situations; and be able to support and inspire others. Resilience can inspire and positively impact others.

Resilience requires physical and psychological health, a clear sense of life purpose, emotional intelligence, and strong supportive relationships. For most people, enhancing resilience requires personal change. Our view of resilience has four categories: maintaining physical well-being, managing thinking, working from the heart, and harnessing the power of connection. These categories are interlinked and all must be present and in balance to create long-term resilience. Maintaining resilience is essential to success. Improved resilience is accompanied by clearer thinking and greater positive interactions with others. Investing in resilience supports the entire organization’s effectiveness []. Resilience is a transcendent leadership Competence.

Situational Analysisinvolves understanding and adapting to Context; aligning and balancing self, individual action, organizational culture, and organizational systems; and performing to achieve the best outcomes []. This multi-pronged approach provides a complete and accurate view of events and context to create alignment across the Innovative Leadership Model on an ongoing basis. Understanding an organization’s culture and systems is essential to determine how to adapt our behaviors. We must understand the context and adjust to the situation and to the organization’s mission and goals.

In addition, innovative leaders and followers communicate with teammates and stakeholders relevant to the mission and goals of an organization. Effective communication requires “making meaning” of what is happening based on context, translated into words that senders and receivers mutually understand. We sense, receive, and convey messages verbally and non-verbally. Situational analysis allows us to make more informed decisions, and also helps to optimize performance within oneself, teams, and the broader organization.

Leadership Behaviors and Mindsetsrefer to leadership knowledge, skills, and attitudes and the resulting behaviors [] or Competence and mindset or meaning making. The mindsets inform effective behaviors. These behaviors are essential and measurable because they are the objective actions that leaders and followers take to impact organizational success. Effective behaviors of leaders and followers determine individual and team performance, team cohesiveness, individual and team morale, and organizational success. Conversely, ineffective behaviors of leaders and followers lead to poor performance, poor cohesiveness, poor morale, and organizational dysfunction or failure.

Knowledge of the key concepts described in the Innovative Leadership Model and associated skills and practice result in effective leadership behaviors and mindsets – the objective actions that leaders take to impact individual, team, and organizational success. Knowledge and practice of these same concepts result in effective followership behaviors. These behaviors align with the idea of developmental maturity and specify critical behaviors and mindsets associated with the most effective leaders in complex and dynamic situations. Therefore, it is important to understand the critical leadership and followership behaviors relevant to you and your organization. With this understanding, you can determine where you excel and where you need to refine your skills.

It also is relevant to consider and to develop your mindset to exercise effective leadership and followership behaviors. lists seven mindsets and associated behaviors that effective leaders and followers put into action regularly [, ].

Examples of Innovative Mindsets and BehaviorsProfessionally humbleCares most about team’s and organization’s success

• Commits to the team and organizational mission

• Cares most about the organization’s success

• Gives credit to others

• Puts principles and values ahead of personal gain

• Commits fully, drives hard, and focuses.

• Stays the course when under pressure

• Changes course when a better approach emerges

• Understands the relevant systems, constraints, near term, long term, and secondary impacts of strategy and decisions

• Balances interests of multiple stakeholders

• Commits to continuous learning and building learning systems

• Understands cross-organizational impact and interconnections across multiple complex systems

• Thinks in terms of systems, constraints, perceptions, and context when making decisions

• Interested and involved with areas beyond comfort zones

• Considers ecosystem, including industry-wide activities, political developments, and the international landscape

• Uses external interests to make contributions

• Commits to personal growth and development

• Helps others to grow and develop

• Open to feedback and non-defensive

• Seeks out discussions and feedback

• Manages emotions

• Maintains perspective under stress

• Confronts challenging situations

• Continually looks for ways to enable the organization to improve its ability to meet its mission efficiently and effectively

• Diffuses conflict without avoiding the sources of conflict

• Creates psychologically safe spaces and puts people at ease

• Relates to a broad range of people

• Connects projects to individual talents and goals

• Provides resources and removes barriers for followers to succeed

• Provides feedback to others that supports recipient’s’ growth and development

• Seeks input and values diverse points of view

• Synthesizes multiple perspectives into new solutions

• Creates solutions to problems by developing new approaches

• Understands that input from multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives is required to achieve the best results

Table 3.

Examples of innovative Mindsets and Behaviors [, ].

3.2 Leader-follower framework

To develop as innovative leaders and followers, it is helpful to reflect upon, consider, and continuously develop Character, Competence, Context, and Communication across the four psychosocial levels – Personal, Interpersonal, Team, and Organizational [, , ].

Characteris the “who” of leaders and followers. It includes all aspects of who we are psychologically (self-awareness, honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, reliability, personality, values, biases, leader type, developmental maturity, resilience) and physically (demographics and physical attributes). Self-awareness includes internal self-awareness (i.e., our own awareness of the many aspects of our Character) and external self-awareness (i.e., our awareness of how others including peers, followers, supervisors, stakeholders, friends, strangers, family members, perceive us and all aspects of our Character and the extent to which the perceptions of ourselves and others are consistent or inconsistent). Understanding oneself is essential to innovative and effective leadership.

Competenceis the “what” of leadership and followership. It includes what we know and do concerning role-specific knowledge and skills relevant to our specific role or job (e.g., as a parent, administrator, health care professional, attorney, entrepreneur, teacher, carpenter, artist, athlete, etc.). Competence also includes transcendent knowledge and skills relevant to all roles and positions (e.g., critical thinking, problem-solving, motivating others, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution). The leadership and followership behaviors described above are examples of the practice and execution of competence. Leader type, resilience, and developmental maturity all impact ability to exercise the behaviors associated with successful leadership and followership. Competence reflects knowledge, skills, and applications.

Contextis the “when” and “where” of leadership and followership. It refers to when and where leadership and followership occurs, physically (i.e., time of day, climate, nutritional state, tiredness), psychologically (i.e., behavioral health, biases), socially (i.e., size of the group, group dynamics), culturally (i.e., cultural values, practices, attitudes, beliefs), and situationally (i.e., what’s happening around us as well as stress). Context is the meta-framework that contains the individual and the organization at any point in time. The leader must consider the entire context and apply Situational Analysis to make decisions while being able to align all elements of individuals and the organization on an ongoing basis. Followers also should be aware of and work to align elements of individuals and the organization to optimize performance.

Communicationis the “how” of leadership and followership. It includes sending and receiving information verbally (oral and written) and non-verbally (body language, facial expressions, paralanguage). Communication is separated from competence because it is such a key component of successful leadership and followership behaviors. It is critical to recognize that the purpose of communication is to achieve understanding. Moreover, the key to effective reception of communications as leaders and as followers is embedded in the word “listen”; that is, rearranging the letters spells “silent” – how we should listen to others to truly hear what is being said.

Leadership and followership operate at four psychosocial Levels:

Personalrefers to the individual and focuses on self-awareness (internal and external), knowledge and skills appropriate for one’s role, effective communication, and appropriate situational awareness. Unless we understand and work to develop all leadership aspects of ourselves, we will be in no position to be innovative or effective for others. Focusing on personal development is particularly important of early stages of Developmental Maturity.

Interpersonalrefers to dyadic relationships, such as leader-follower, supervisor-supervisee, teacher-student, athlete-coach, parent–child, spouse-spouse. Interpersonal focuses on working and communicating effectively and respectfully with other individuals in all situations, understanding the other individual, knowing how one is perceived, and applying appropriate knowledge and skills in relationships with others. It is important to adapt to each individual with whom we interact to optimize innovative leadership and followership.

Teamrefers to a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to common goals. Teams build shared values, trust, and cohesiveness, work together, communicate effectively in various situations, understand team dynamics, and respond appropriately. Optimizing team performance and relationships among all members of the team poses a substantial challenge because it requires understanding and interacting with every individual in that group and with all combinations of members of this group.

Organizationalrefers to large groups, institutions, and systems. It focuses on vision and mission and understanding systems, processes, and various cultures. Innovative and effective leadership at the organizational level requires advanced Development Perspective. In addition, leadership and followership at the organizational level requires consideration of the needs and goals of the large group, system, and culture, rather than on the individual members of the group.

What leadership skills encourage effective followership?

Why is followership important to leadership?

What is followership in management?

What is followership in leadership nursing?