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Can You Follow A Dead Leader?
By admin | March 29, 2008
Martin Luther King, Jr. is long dead but people still follow his lead when they promote human rights. They may not achieve his oratorical brilliance, but they are inspired to act by his courage, his willingness to take personal risks to challenge the status quo. Aspiring leaders wishing to champion any cause, not just human rights, can be inspired to act, and their courage can be fortified, by reading about the lives of dead leaders. Present day activists could follow the lead of Mahatma Gandhi and practice non violent demonstrations.
This odd point about dead leaders has significant implications for the old truism that you can’t be a leader without followers. Some people think that we can’t fully understand leadership without understanding followership. Because followers can have an impact on the leader’s effectiveness, so it is argued, leadership must be seen as a dynamic, two-way relationship between leaders and followers, not something that one does to the other.
But, wherever we follow dead leaders, no such mutual influence is possible. Here, leadership is clearly a one-way impact. Actually, we don’t need to rely on this inconvenient fact to halt the followership bandwagon. Even in Martin Luther King’s day, the real target of his leadership efforts, his protest marches, was the U.S. and state governments. When he demonstrated against segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama, he showed leadership to three levels of government. His leadership succeeded when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such segregation unconstitutional.
King showed leadership to people in government with whom he had no working relationship. While his leadership could not have succeeded without people following his vision, many followers did not even know him personally, let alone work with him. King’s leadership was from the sidelines. He was an outsider relative to the government he sought to lead. The bottom line is that leadership cannot be conceptualized so that it depends on an active role for followers or a working relationship between leaders and followers.
There are lots of similar examples in business. Microsoft is a great follower of its competitors. It followed Apple when it switched from DOS to Windows with its graphical user interface and Netscape when it introduced its web browser, Internet Explorer. There are other examples where followership, as normally conceived, does not apply. Consider bottom-up leadership, where front-line knowledge workers champion new ideas to their bosses. The senior executive team may hardly know front line knowledge workers let alone have a working relationship with them. If the company buys a bottom-up leader’s new product idea, then the executive team are in the role of followers but this is only a one-off instance, not an ongoing two-way relationship.
Why should we be interested in such rather odd instances of leadership? Surely we should focus on team leadership in large organizations where there is in fact a working relationship between leaders and followers. The problem with this angle is that it creates a very distorted picture of leadership. It is in this supposedly paradigm, but actually narrow, case where leadership and management are the most difficult to separate. In our postmodern world, our respect for authority is fast disappearing.
The competitive pressure for faster innovation and continuous process improvement demands leadership from all employees. But dispersed leadership that is simply an extension of the conventional jumble of leadership and management elements does not capture thought leadership – the bottom-up promotion of new ideas. Leadership in a postmodern world can come from outside one’s immediate group, bottom-up or outside the organization altogether. There are no enduring authorities; hence anyone with a better idea and the courage to promote it can show leadership. Such leadership is an occasional act, not a role to be monopolized. It is also more democratic if only because no one has a monopoly on good ideas.
Leadership is not a relationship
Leadership that can come from outsiders is clearly not based on a working relationship with followers. The old truism that leadership implies followers still holds, however, but only because leadership is a relational concept, like eating and drinking – you can’t eat or drink without eating or drinking something. Impact is also a relational concept in that it implies a relationship between one object and at least one other. But notice that eating, drinking and impact are relational concepts that do not imply personal or working relationships between people. Leadership is a relational concept in this logical sense. It is only situationally an actual working relationship between people. Hence, if we want a generalizable concept of leadership, we cannot make any reference in our definition to working relationships with followers. The whole followership bandwagon rests on confusion over the meaning of relational.
Conclusion
The effort expended to upgrade the role of followers in organizations is important but we go too far when we try to define leadership so as to imply a necessarily active role for followers. Certainly, followers may be actively involved in determining organizational direction but then such people are showing leadership and those in “leadership” positions become the followers. The whole idea of leaders and followers rests on the old fashioned idea of one person occupying an ongoing leadership role. When we conceive of leadership as a dynamic, floating, occasional act, the relationship between leader and follower can cut across or totally reverse actual working relationships. You might ask: “How would the leader get anything done without followers?” Well, that is another story but the short answer is that getting things done calls for good management. Leadership cannot entail getting things done if it can be shown from the sidelines, bottom-up or by dead leaders, hence by people who have no involvement in implementation.
See http://www.leadersdirect.com for more information on this and related topics. Mitch McCrimmon’s latest book
Tags: bottom-up leadership, dead leaders, dispersed leadership, followership, innovation, Martin Luther King
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