Management skills articles

One important aspect of leadership is that one can only be a leader if you have followers to lead. Therefore the ability to inspire “followership” is an essential for effective leadership. In this article, we explore some of the factors that create “followership” which leaders can develop in themselves.

Leaders accumulate their followers in a number of ways. They may “inherit” them, for example when promoted or appointed into a vacant position heading an existing team. They may “choose” them, for example when assembling a team to tackle a new venture. Or they may “attract” them, by appealing to something that people want, so that followers gather around the leader voluntarily. Most obvious examples of this are visionaries or spiritual leaders, although examples exist in every field.

An inherited team is common in both a military and a business environment. In this case, the leader may not have paid any attention at all to the need to inspire followership, since they walk into a situation where their followers already exist. Such a leader typically focuses their leadership activity on the traditional functions of leadership - setting strategy and direction, and organising resources towards achieving goals.

One of the commonest mistakes that a leader of an inherited team can make is to assume that because they already have followers, they do not need to work on the notion of followership. This leads to teams where the members might resent the leader. This commonly happens where the leader has been promoted out of the ranks. If the new leader does not work on developing followership then the leader’s former peers will find it hard to trust or be loyal to the leader. The effort that the leader spends on strategy and resources can be diminished in effectiveness because of resistance by the followers. Such a leader would do well to understand the role that inspiring followership plays in making their job easier, and their team more willing to work together towards the desired goal.

The leadership theorist R.E. Kelly (”The power of followership: How to create leaders people want to follow and followers who lead themselves.” 1992 New York: Currency Doubleday) talks about 5 different categories of followership, with the “ideal” being the “exemplary followers”. He identified 15 key characteristics of these people, i.e. that they think for themselves, go above and beyond the job, support the team and the leader, focus on the goal, do an exceptional job on critical path activities related to the goal, take initiative on increasing their value to the organisation, realise they add value by being who they are, their experiences and ideals, structure their daily work and day-to-day activities, see clearly how their job relates to the enterprise, put themselves on the critical path toward accomplishment, make sure the tasks they are to perform are on the critical path, review their progress daily or weekly, increase their scope of critical path activities, develop additional expertise, and champion new ideas.

From these 15 characteristics, it becomes clear that strategy and resources will only address about two thirds of them, and so for the leader to turn their “conscripts” into “exemplary followers” it is supremely important to add an additional focus on the inter-personal relationship. Discussions on leadership often focus on character traits or personality types, as though you either have them or you don’t, and if you don’t then you can’t be a good leader. You might hear comments like “He just oozes charisma”, or “There’s just something about her”, and yet guidance on developing charisma, or developing that special “something” is pretty hard to come by. Simple direct observation of the many leaders that we encounter in our daily lives shows that charisma, or “something”, tends to boil down to some key interpersonal traits that certainly can be learnt. Below I have outlined just two of the many skills that we teach to leaders, which seem to make a real difference in inspiring followership:

Appealing to core values

The inspirational leader will take the time to understand what’s important to the followers. The most useful question they can ask is quite simply, “What’s important to you about …?” and “Why is … important to you?” These questions will go a long way to understanding the values and drivers that lie behind surface level behaviour. The leader will then find ways to appeal to these values when influencing his or her followers, personalising the vision to make it one that each individual follower will find appealing. Effective politicians do this when they paint word pictures of the lives of the people that they most want to attract. The Conservative refrain of “ordinary, hard-working families” struck a chord with people who unconsciously thought “yes, that’s me”, which in turn sets up the listener to be open to receiving the remainder of the message.

When we teach leadership, we help leaders to learn ways of discovering the core values of their followers through key observation, questioning and listening skills. We teach them to evaluate their own core values, and compare these against the values of their organisations. They learn to recognise when values are congruent (matching), or where they are incongruent, and therefore a source of potential conflict or blockage. They learn to address these incongruences, and also to use their inter-personal skills to frame their message in a way that appeals to the individual value sets of each of their followers. Followers who can clearly see how their own values are being met, who hear language that is consistent with their values, and feel that their values are being respected will fulfill many more of the characteristics of the “exemplary follower”.

Appealing to different thinking styles

Humans develop different preferences in the way that they learn, filter information and think. An inspiring leader will tailor their communications to appeal to all the different thinking styles in order to increase the influence that their messages have. NLP pioneers modelled the communication skills of inspirational speakers such as Martin Luther King, and noticed patterns that had a particularly charismatic impact on the audience. The Charisma Pattern makes use of their findings, specifically that a message which paces through the three major representational systems (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic) in sequence will rapidly build rapport with the whole audience, and create a platform for the remainder of the communication to be well-received. Some NLP Practitioners use the Charisma Pattern just in short bursts. For example, to increase the effectiveness of a training programme or a presentation the opening paragraph might be delivered in Charisma Pattern, starting with a low, slow vocal tone, whilst tuning into feelings (kinaesthetic), moving into a slightly faster, more melodic vocal tone whilst appealing to sounds (auditory) and finishing in a light, high, rapid vocal tone whilst creating a word-picture (visual). However, this can lead to a mechanical approach resulting in a sense that the speaker is thinking “Well, I’ve done that, now back to normal”.

When we teach leadership, however, we help leaders to develop the Charisma Pattern across the entire spectrum of their communication, moving between the representational systems (and including the lesser used systems of taste and smell that can add real depth to their communication) so that people’s preferred thinking styles are consistently and frequently being attended to. The leader can increase their personal influence and charisma through regular practice and integration of this skill in all their communication.

In conclusion

Followers tend to exhibit their followership in direct response to the leader’s style. This means that a leader who focuses on goals and resources without taking into account the need to inspire followership will themselves be mechanistic and uninspired. A team who is inspired by their leader will themselves be inspired to achieve success.

A leader who creates a chosen team starts with an advantage because the team members will typically begin with a sense of pride in having been chosen, and shared values that brought the team together in the first place. This might be seen, for example, when a manager of a complete team leads an exodus from one company in order to start up a new venture. The key for the inspirational leader is to keep on appealing to those core values as the new venture matures and evolves, and to keep communicating with the team in the ways that best meet their needs.

A leader who attracts their followers by definition must already have the attributes required to inspire followership, otherwise what would the followers have chosen to follow? Look at the words of any inspirational leader that you admire, from Jesus to Winston Churchill, from Mother Teresa to Benazir Bhutto, and notice how they continually use their communication so that they are inspiring, appealing to core values and literally speaking their followers’ language. These are the qualities that all those who aspire to leadership can hone and develop as they increase their ability to inspire followership.