August 8, 2022

Better Followers Make Better Leaders

Posted by Jacqueline (Bonin) Gargiulo under leadership, Organization Development, People | Tags: , , , |
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I learned of the Milgram Experiment (https://youtu.be/nexpwnwonRc) in my Research Methods class, and I revisit that learning to this day. Coming out of WWII, the experiment was set up to research obedience. It has been performed many times since, and the outcome continues to be the same. Somewhere around 50% of followers will abdicate responsibility for their actions to authority willing to take that responsibility from them. Why? This remains a question, and one I continue to ponder, along with whether humanity might be able to evolve from it.

Where it made sense, much of my writing through that same education referred to what I call personal or self-leadership. There are many attributes we look for in effective leaders that are important for effective leaders and followers alike:

  • Responsibility
  • Accountability
  • Self-Awareness/Self-Agency
  • Integrity
  • Effective Communication/Feedback

There are others, certainly, but these are a good representation. And, when followers possess these traits, we are better able to hold our leaders accountable, as noted 25 years ago by Ira Chaleff in Courageous Followership: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders. In it, he defines Courageous Followership as follows:

Any organization is a triad consisting of leaders and followers joined in a common purpose. The purpose is the atomic glue that binds us. It gives meaning to our activities. Followers and leaders both orbit around the purpose; followers do not orbit around the leader. Courageous Followership recognizes that to be effective at almost every level of an organization, individuals need to play both the leader and follower role adeptly.

Further, Ira discusses Five Dimensions of Courageous Followership:

  • To Serve
  • To Challenge
  • To Participate in Transformation
  • To Take Moral Action
  • To Speak to Hierarchy

And, how well these concepts align with the self-leadership attributes listed previously:

  • To Serve requires taking Responsibility
  • To Challenge requires an understanding and practice of Accountability of both self and others
  • To Participate in Transformation requires Self-Awareness which leads to the Self-Agency to choose to change
  • To Take Moral Action requires Integrity to Purpose
  • To Speak to the Hierarchy requires effective skill in Communication and providing Feedback

With unemployment trending low for the foreseeable future and many employees seeking new opportunities to better fulfill a need for agency and autonomy to manage our lives across work, family and personal needs, it behooves us as a society to recognize that supporting an evolution to better followership through personal growth opportunities is in our best interest. In so doing, we develop better followers who in turn can better hold leaders accountable to purpose, whether organizational or societal.

As Leaders, we do well to develop and leverage Courageous Followership within our organizations to attract talent as well as define and remain true to organizational purpose. Developed followers could also better contribute to fluid leadership situations like self-managed and -directed teams. Whether stepping into fluid leadership or holding leaders to purpose, better followers make better leaders.

 

August 24, 2019

Better Followership

Posted by Jacqueline (Bonin) Gargiulo under leadership, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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I caught an interesting article recently on LinkedIn, Power Causes Brain Damage.  It got me pondering and recalling the impact the Milgram Experiment we watched in a Methods of Organizational Research class had on me where I realized our temptation to abdicate personal responsibility when someone will take that mantle from us.  Along with another part of my research on leadership, where I came upon how charismatic leaders can easily take up the responsibility of those in depressed, repressed or oppressed circumstances, it occurs to me that followers have a responsibility in the corruption of power, especially in leadership.

Effective leaders will keep those around them who are able to keep them in check and rooted in reality, even empathy.  Unfortunately, we see too many leaders who are not so effective, right?  Leadership can be isolating unless precautions are taken and that takes awareness.  Awareness takes learning.  Too often, those merely vocationally or academically skilled are promoted without learning how to lead others, let alone themselves.

Then there is the Navigating Conflict workshop I developed and facilitated based on the Peter T. Coleman and Robert Ferguson book, Making Conflict Work.  It reveals how power, relationship and goal compatibility impact how we navigate conflict.  Human sociology is naturally hierarchical, yet as even revealed in the book, we know the effective and compatible use of power when we encounter it.  Don’t we?  If we delineate power along a continuum of self-serving to common good or socially responsible, when those with power start leaning too far into self-serving, as followers, what do we do?  We appease, we submit, we navigate around.  It may work, at least in the short term, but how often do we let it become a long term proposition?  How often do we let the fear of self-serving power go unchecked?  It seems to me that in the face of self-serving power, we reflexively retreat to a follower’s version of it.  Do you witness that?  We retreat into fear and fall into protecting ourselves.  I see this retreat, however naturally human, as abdicating our followers’ version of social responsibility.  It creates an ugly cycle, doesn’t it?

I have long advocated and facilitated the idea of self-leadership being a skill for all to develop – those inclined to follow as well as lead.  It involves developing self-awareness, effective communication and relationship building capabilities, collaboration and teaming savvy, conflict navigation, emotional intelligence, and other ways of being more socially effective.  Anyone can pursue these concepts.  They can be naturally derived from effective family leaders, academic experiences that put us in circumstances that can organically nurture our need to be more effective with others.  Unfortunately, those same self-protective aspects of human nature can play out within those same circumstances, so we all need exposure to more effective and socially responsible ways of being.   This could even be the case for the more vocationally minded, whom we, in the US, have not seen fit to value and support with an educational path.

I see self-leadership as a way to developing better followers, better follower-ship, where we, with care and consideration, keep the powerful, especially those in leadership, in check, even if they haven’t chosen us to do so.

I welcome your thoughts on the matter.  Please chime in!

Most kindly,

~ Jacqueline Gargiulo, MSMOB/MA