3 Can you be a leader without followers?
The answers to this question are varied, with some commentators delivering an emphatic ‘no’ and other experts exploring whether there needs to be a leader at all.
In a comprehensive review of the existing followership literature, Uhl-Bien at al. (2014) conclude that in the emerging field of followership research, there are two key approaches:
- Followership as a position or role – this approach considers how followers’ identities and behaviours influence leader attitudes, behaviours and outcomes
- Followership as a social process – this approach looks at followership and leadership as being co-constructed in social and relational interactions between people.
In both scenarios, followership and leadership relationships are closely linked, each influencing and interacting with the other to create the best possible outcomes.
Taking this a step further, Kempster et al. (2020) ask the question ‘Where have all the followers gone?’ Their interviews with a number of Executive MBA students revealed an ‘absence of follower identification in their everyday working lives’, leading them to ask ‘Can we, as researchers, label practices as leading or following and label our research subjects as leaders or followers if they themselves reject those identifications?’ They go on to discuss types of leadership where the roles are more fluid, such as distributed and collective leadership, describing ‘a flow between people leading and following – rather than designated, materialised leaders permanently leading and followers following.’
You’ll explore some of these perspectives on leadership in the next section.
Activity 4 Leadership from a dancing guy
In the following video clip, a man is dancing and others are encouraged to join him. Watch the video and consider what characteristics the man exhibits that persuade others to participate:
In the box below, make a list of your observations.
Discussion
The man’s enthusiasm and commitment to his activity is infectious. Once people start to join him, the overall mood changes and everyone wants to participate. This tells us that anyone can start something without followers, but if they have a clear vision that is easy to follow – followers will join them.
This is transferable into a workplace leadership role too. For example, you might find that a project or change proposal starts off as unpopular – people are reluctant to embrace it with enthusiasm. However, if you communicate effectively and can inspire them to get involved, their approach to followership will change. If you can convince one or two of your team members to support an idea, they might advocate for you across the wider team, inspiring others to come on board with enthusiasm too. You’ll cover this in more detail in Section 5.
While it is widely acknowledged that followers play a key role in leadership success, there are approaches to leadership that blur the traditional roles of leader and follower.
Shared leadership
Shared leadership is defined by Pearce and Conger (2003, p. 1) as ‘a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both’.
This means that leadership behaviours are exhibited by a set of individuals rather than following the more traditional model of a single person. Leadership is no longer seen as a role, but as a shared function or activity.
Shared leadership can create a strong sense of shared responsibility and facilitate effective collaboration, but relies on excellent communication and without this, can impede the decision-making process.
It can be a useful approach in a complex, technical environment where the expertise of different members of a multidisciplinary team becomes relevant at different stages of a project.
Other versions of shared leadership that you might come across (referred to by Kempster et al. above) include collective and distributed leadership.
In collective leadership, ‘a group of people with diverse skills and experience come together to work toward goals that they develop jointly… the group empowers the person or people with the most relevant expertise to tackle particular problems and implement solutions.’ (Shonk, 2023).
Distributed leadership can be described as ‘collaborative, autonomous practices managed by a network of formal and informal leaders across an organization’ (Ancona, quoted in Somers, 2022).
Another, more radical approach, known as ‘Holacracy’, attempts to distribute leadership between all employees, removing the traditional leader–follower relationship altogether. You’ll find out more about this in Week 7.
Even within these different approaches, each individual will have needs and responsibilities that require nurturing and support. In the next section, you’ll explore these needs in more detail.