Ira Chaleff is a pioneering thought leader in the field of followership. He was recently named one of the 100 Best Minds on Leadership by Leadership Excellence Magazine. His landmark book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and For Our Leaders, is now in its third edition and is considered a seminal text on the subject of leader-follower relationships.

In conversation with Catalyst editor Lesley Griffiths, Ira explores the principles of followership and the business case for a culture of effective leader-follower partnership.

What inspires you about followership?

It’s a universal instinct to want to create a better world. We know that takes a very high quality of leadership but there’s a conundrum: effective leadership requires the beneficial use of power while, as Lord Acton famously observed, power tends to corrupt. History and business is strewn with the terrible mistakes of leaders who acquire power and are seduced by it. We need leaders with strong egos. It’s not that we want to make them more docile or risk-averse, but we also need some sort of balance. My observation is that those who work most closely with a leader have to become that balance. They have to be courageous and effective in telling the leader - whom they often revere (and sometimes fear) - their candid assessment of their impulses, initiatives, plans, behaviours, etc. I’m looking at how we use power better, more beneficially through the lens of the courageous follower.

Why do we follow destructive leaders?

It’s a hugely important question. My colleague Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen wrote a book, The Allure of Toxic Leaders, in which she presents some profound insights about our need for security in the world, of being part of greatness. Leaders who have done quite grievous harm often start out with very attractive messages and people are very easily drawn to them. It’s only as they evolve that the toxicity begins to manifest - by the time we realise it’s often too late. We need to get much better at detecting and interrupting the early expressions of toxicity.

You acknowledge that certain negative connotations are often associated with the term ‘follower’. How can leaders overcome this?

We are absolutely enthralled with leadership - from your earliest time at school you are told you are supposed to be a leader. Although the ‘great man’ leadership model has been largely abandoned in academia, it still prevails in business and government and those leaders, in turn, look to recruit for leadership skills. I believe that we mistakenly regard ‘follower’ as a personality type, but leadership and followership are acts that we perform regardless of our position in an organisation. We must recognise that all contributing individuals in any team or organisation move between these two roles. High quality and reality-based decision making and execution require both roles to be played strongly and assertively - not passively. I think we need to step back and rethink our language and our mental concepts.

Followership requires responsibility and accountability - what’s in it for the courageous follower?

There’s a belief that being courageous and speaking candidly only contains downside risk. In fact, if the person is a high performer and displays integrity, candour and courage, they will often find their careers advanced by that and not retarded. But I find that people need a framework – they’ve never thought about this before so I developed a self-assessment instrument that describes styles of followership. This gives people a language on what their style is and why; how it serves them, the leader and the organisation; and how it could be better.

As with all human growth, it takes time for us to reflect on why we believe what we believe. We need to essentially re-evaluate our relationship to authority. Unfortunately, relationship to authority is very deeply programmed from an early age and that’s not necessarily the way we best serve our organisations as professionals.

In fact, one of Microsoft’s business competencies is ‘Comfort With Authority’. As in all competencies they have four or five levels, from novice to complete comfort around authority - to express your views, engage in dialogue and not be intimidated by the differences in positional power. Some people are naturally great at this but most of us need to think it through and practice our skills.

What is the business case for a culture of leader-follower partnership?

If you develop a culture where people are encouraged to be ‘intrapreneurial’ (entrepreneurial from within) you will get better ideas and be able to seize opportunities that could otherwise be missed. But in a culture that frowns on candour, the potential mistakes can be tremendously costly - sometimes fatal – to the leaders and to the business. For example, the current hit that Toyota is taking is enormous and several credible analysts have cited that Toyota’s culture of over-deference to the hierarchy made it very difficult to send unpalatable news upwards, costing them billions as a result.

Interestingly, an organisation is most at risk when it is most successful. When a business is really flying high, the shareholders’ returns are fantastic and the leadership seems to do no wrong. That’s when you have the Icarus factor of leaders ‘flying too close to the sun’. It becomes extremely difficult to be a nay-sayer in that environment and extremely easy for the senior leaders to discount what seems like negativity. Enron is the iconic case but there are many others. In terms of risk management, having a culture of leader-follower partnership, rather than extreme subservience, significantly reduces risk to the high-flying business.

As a leader you have a lot of power to reward the desired behaviour as long as one is committed to it and pays attention. There will always be some moment in a multi-level meeting where somebody rather junior gets up the courage to say something candid and everyone around the table holds their breath, thinking ‘we don’t say that kind of thing in this organisation!’ At that moment, if a leader has the presence to say ‘I really appreciate that viewpoint. I know people around the table are aware that it runs up against what I’ve been saying and I still may come down where I started, but I need your help to ensure that I don’t have a blind spot.’ You can even occasionally reward constructive dissent, it goes a long way. Unfortunately, too many of us are timid, thinking ‘this is going to be a career stopper if I say this’. You only need one or two examples in the culture where it becomes a career enhancer and people relax.
If you improve the courage on either side of the relationship people grow in both their leadership and followership. You don’t have to wait for the payoff. You’ll see results in teammanship quickly.

Is followership more readily embraced in the commercial or public sector?

The dynamics of relationship to authority apply across the sectors, though there are distinctions. In the very entrepreneurial part of the private sector, knowledge and expertise often trumps hierarchy. There are other places where the risks are so high that there is an implicit or explicit acknowledgement that hierarchy does not trump safety - in aviation, for example, there are very well documented examples of the necessity to break down the impact of authority. We see it also in medicine now: in the States, deaths due to medical error far exceed automobile deaths. To remedy this, operating procedures are moving to a checklist approach where any member of the team can question and delay the procedure until there is clarity over some point of safety. In the traditional doctor-nurse relationship, the doctor’s position of prestige made it very difficult for a nurse to speak up, but very often it was the nurse who identified problems. I think we’re moving in the right direction now.

What is the future of followership?

I can only speak aspirationally, but I’ll give you an illustration: If you apply to university in the States every application asks what leadership roles have you held? This creates enormous anxiety to demonstrate one’s leadership experience. A recent book that I co-edited, The Art of Followership, included a chapter by a young woman applying to university who took the whole admissions process to task saying, “hold on a minute, doesn’t my role as a constructive participant and follower in the classroom count for something?” I think she was right to do so. Our attitude to authority starts in the educational system so I would like to see courageous followership recognised at that level.

I’m also intrigued by something IBM is doing. They have introduced a reverse mentoring process where every young graduate recruit from a top technical school is assigned to a senior manager with the mandate of mentoring the manager on emerging technologies. The partnership benefits from mutual mentoring - the experienced executive helps the graduate understand and navigate the culture, while the younger person has a platform from which to courageously ‘uptrain’ the executive they’re reporting to. This is still on the margins of the cutting edge but I do feel we have a wave going and we will see a better balance emerging.

Trust is a key element of followership. Is this challenged by globalisation and technology?

The original model of courageous followership is premised on building a trusting relationship with the leader. The third edition of the book addresses the fact that in very large or global organisations you can’t always realistically build a relationship with the most senior leaders. Does that leave you powerless and your leaders vulnerable to massive blind spots? I think it cuts a couple of ways:

In some senses the follower loses the potential power of relationship. When you can build a relationship in which the leader knows you have their best interests at heart, they will be more open to you telling them things they are not comfortable hearing. But this can rarely be done when there are five levels of hierarchy between you and the CEO or other senior leader.

On the other hand, any alert leader has to understand that in this day and age a conversation that is not allowed to happen within the organisation will probably find its way outside the organisation on discussion boards, social network sites, blogs etc. They have to think proactively about how they can support, encourage and listen to those kinds of conversations in their globalised, diverse empires.

In reality, we all know that senior leaders have to focus on strategic priorities. They don’t have the time or energy to get involved in a hundred different things - doing so would cause them to fail in their leadership responsibilities. Leaders pay attention to great opportunities and great risk, so a follower needs to step back as objectively as he or she can and decide if what they are talking about is a great opportunity or a great risk? If not, don’t expect it to get the attention of the most senior levels. Instead, figure out how to deal with it locally – maybe do a pilot and demonstrate good results that will percolate into the global organisation. On the other hand, if it’s a matter that does rise to the highest opportunity or risk, the follower has to think about what platforms exist to bring it to the attention of senior people. We’re all still learning, but it’s  necessary for us to come of age in this dimension.

The power of followers has dramatically changed. We see it in government, where political activists start a movement that topples their repressive governments or ushers into office little known candidates because they have access to a modem. We see it in consumer campaigns with consumers’ collective outrage at a move to limit their freedom of access to information.

These are healthy developments in my book and they brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation: it’s all about using power well and balancing excessive power that resides in the tip of the pyramid, which can start to distort the behaviour at that level. More open interchanges have to occur between the outside and the inside of an organisation and the different levels of the hierarchy.

Really smart organisations and leaders will pay attention to that.

Creating a courageous leader-follower culture

Leaders have to model the behaviour they want to see in people. Senior Executives also play a follower. How do you model courageous followership towards your CEO, for example? People do observe how you behave. You can’t preach supportive candour and not live it.

To develop a business case for creating this kind of culture requires the correct language  and tools. These will  help organisational leaders build a healthy and meaningful conversation. The fundamental principles of the Courageous Followership model are outlined below:

The courage to assume responsibility. This is the behaviour leaders value most in followers. Once you understand the organisation’s mission and your mandate, you act and assume responsibility for your actions.

The courage to support formal leaders - not just by doing your job but by paying attention to the pressures leaders are under and how you can help ameliorate them. Too much pressure on leaders will bring out their least desirable characteristics.

The courage to challenge. In addition to requiring courage,  a lot of skill is needed to maximise receptivity when questioning a leader or expressing divergent viewpoints. Developing and even role playing these skills pays dividends.

The courage to participate in transformation. This cuts several ways. It’s personal transformation and organisational transformation and it’s also sustained support when a leader is trying to personally transform. It’s always easier to see what the other person needs to change, but followers must also examine and improve their own behaviour and relationships.

The courage to take a moral stand. Situations requiring a moral stand happen rarely but when faced with a moral issue a principled response may be the most important thing one ever does for one’s career, for the organisation and, perhaps, beyond. 

The courage to listen to followers. In every major failure we find there were people trying to warn their leaders who were not given sufficient attention. Leaders must create the environment for minority viewpoints and early warning signals to be given serious consideration.

The courage to speak to the hierarchy. When problematic policies come down from five levels above, followers can feel quite powerless. Strategies for getting those policies reviewed must be understood and supported.

Click here to download the article as a pdf