Speaking at the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) Annual Conference and Exposition held recently in Las Vegas, training and leadership expert Cory Bouck analogized a modern playground to the business world—business isn’t yoga, it’s dodgeball. The yoga kids will end up working for the dodgeball kids. So how can you succeed in a dodgeball world where leadership is needed to stay ahead of your competition? Through followership skills.
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Bouck is the director of organizational development and learning at Johnsonville Sausage, LLC, and author of The Lens of Leadership: Being the Leader Others WANT to Follow (Aviva Publishing, 2013).
What Is Followership?
Bouck defines “followership” as “a set of learnable, practicable skills that make me professionally essential to my boss and teammates, and also regularly create opportunities for me to demonstrate my superior leadership skills.”
Bouck acknowledges that no one grows up looking to join the Future Followers Club. However, there is an impending leadership gap due to Baby Boomers retiring (“And why is this important?” interjected Bouck. “Because business is dodgeball.”) and the key to multigenerational leadership lies in the contradictory-sounding concept of followership.
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Bouck polled the crowd with the question: Is making your boss look great your most important or primary professional duty? 61% said Yes. Bouck suggested that the percentage should be higher. Why? Because in today’s business world, everybody has a boss (even the boss), and both leader and follower—which are paradoxically simultaneous roles—must know how to serve (i.e., follow) up, down, and sideways on any team. Followership is not a subservient inverse to leadership, Bouck emphasizes. (It’s notable that after his presentation, Bouck once again polled the crowd on whether making the boss look great was a primary professional duty. The second time, 83% said Yes.)
The Roles of a Follower
So, what are the roles of followership that allow employees to serve without being subservient? Bouck outlines four of them:
- Valet. This type of follower knows what’s ahead and lays everything out that the team needs to be successful, just as a valet lays out all of the clothing, gear, and equipment for the day. Think of Alfred, the butler, from Batman, says Bouck.
- Socrates-like Mentor. This followership role is good at asking provocative, counterintuitive questions to provide new perspective. Perspective is required in followership, notes Bouck. Often, team members need to have an understanding of not only their jobs but also their boss’s job (and sometimes, even their boss’s boss’s job).
- Chameleon. Have the professional maturity to know when to be visible and when to be subtle, or even invisible, says Bouck. Great followership is sometimes about not having to always be the center of attention.
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- Pastor/Parent. Be available to hear the sins and complaints of your team without recrimination, and also realize the proper time to have a loving, nurturing demeanor, says Bouck. However, the pastor/parent role also knows when to make others on the team take their medicine. Success in this type of followership will make you a trusted advisor and influencer.
Bouck says that if you can be an enabling valet, a provocative consultant, a situational chameleon, and a trusted advisor, you will actually be leading through followership. And why is this important? Bouck’s answer: Because business is dodgeball.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, more insight from Bouck on followership, plus an introduction to a free interactive webcast, Badges, Levels, Leaderboards, Accolades! Gamifying the Learning Experience.
I take some exception to a few of these comments and roles, having been both a “follower” and professional “leader”, starting young as a sales/marketing rep, into director of an international sales function, up to VP at a world-leading bank. Into retirement age now, I handle HR and recruitment for our family owned, commercial janitorial company, often hiring the most humble in society. This now, is the highlight of my career, as it has taught me many things I never learned about people through my life. In my earlier career, I also recruited, hired, as well as worked with many MBA’s and PhD’s as colleagues. I put forth my credentials because it’s important to know that “comments” are not strictly opinion, but from extensive experience, and heaven knows, a bit of acquired wisdom.
Valet: As described, sorry, this is a loaded word and subservient view. I think the better word is “professionalism”. A professional is a good technician who respects and helps prosper others’ success, from any position, leader or follower. This means he/she knows and shares the steps and the process that he is responsible for, and ensures the team understands how tasks meet and intertwine with his/hers, so that people can be knowledgeably cooperative. To me, a professional in a baton race realizes that if that baton does not get into the hands of his fellow runner, the game will not be won.
Socrates-like Mentor: To me the word should be investigative, as an important cog in a greater wheel. It is always important to understand what others, above and below are not only doing, but why. Each person’s work is not about one person, but an entire group or organization trying to accomplish goals for everyone’s needs and goals. If you want your goals to be accomplished, you’d better understand why you have chose a certain course. If you don’t, you cannot see how to change course if you need to. In a marketing plan, this is called the rationale for a strategy.
Chameleon: This one is a good one. Many people on the way up the corporate or business ladder think being in the limelight makes them important, to everyone. This is ego talking, not professionalism or competence showing. Way too inward to be able to be rational and objective. Unfortunately, some people are impressed by this and it puts the wrong people in position of decisions and authority. We all know the outcomes of ego driven life, and I must say, those who live like this waste everyone’s time. A good example in sports is the basketball “star” who hogs the basket in the game. Confidence, grown out of competence and perspective, on the other hand is a gem to never lose.
Pastor/Parent: I like this one too. Being a compassionate, non-judgmental person, colleague and boss, shows self-recognition that at any given moment, every person can make a destroying mistake. Helping people, anyone, get back their confidence, pride and effectiveness is a gift when you have a chance to give it. A sense of perspective is what we all need to practice, every moment. If you let those around you fall, or sabotage them by watching them fail, it not only weakens the unit, you may be the next one to stand alone. If your actions do not teach others around you the right ways to act, they cannot and may not help you when you need it. In any case, compassion and empathy are healing. However, allowing people to take responsibility for their mistakes should not be taken away. This is how we grow and learn to become better. You can be compassionate, and also say “no”. Did anyone ever teach you this? I sincerely doubt it. Accepting that “no” is as good an answer as “yes” may be the most difficult thing to learn in life. It is not about defeat, it is about accepting wisdom and self-constraint.
What concerns me the most, whenever I read about “words of wisdom” in business, is that no one can learn to exhibit the best and most effective attributes and behaviors based on words alone. And some people, through nature and nurture, can never learn to exhibit behaviors that, we hope, will benefit all on a team. People need to be facilitated, taught, rewarded, reminded, and given real, business-life examples to emulate. We must not only understand, we must internalize the meaning of why it’s essential. Then we need to demonstrate to the world that we have adopted what we have been taught. How this is accomplished is a slow process and requires a full support system. I would start with an intensive course of “empathetic listening” and “mediation”. This is how we can learn to stop and listen outside of our own perspective, try to understand, and find a productive course on which to proceed. I certainly don’t claim to be perfect at it, or business life. I only know that I can feel the rewards when I am effective at it.
Thank you for the opportunity to share my hard earned view.