Being a Follower

When leadership goes wrong

Now, you will move your focus from good leadership to bad. You'll consider the spectrum of poor leadership and look at the common mistakes that leaders make. Learning from those mistakes might help you to avoid making them yourself.

Watch the following video in which Lynne introduces the week.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• recognise poor leadership in different forms
• reflect on the impact of poor or weak leadership
• describe ways in which leadership mistakes might be avoided.

Source: OpenLearn, https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=68671
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

What is poor leadership?

Poor leadership can be described on a spectrum. In this course, you'll concentrate on the poor leadership that you are likely to encounter in your workplace, ranging from the common mistakes that many leaders make, to leaders who are 'destructive'.

Figure 1 Poor leadership can damage your team.

At some point in your life, a leader in your organisation, or in the public domain, will have made a decision you disagree with, or upset a group of people with a damaging comment or announcement. They may even have exhibited negative behaviours over a longer period, having a detrimental effect on the morale of you and your colleagues.

Have you ever taken a step back and wondered why they did what they did? Was it the pressure they found themselves under, the circumstances they were in, or did they lack the skills to handle the situation appropriately?

Activity 1 Your experience of poor or weak leadership

Think of a time when you've felt shocked, offended, disappointed or angry at an action taken by a leader you follow.

Write a brief summary of the situation and how you felt. What do you think made it poor leadership?

Now try to put yourself into the leader's position. What could you have done differently?

Sometimes the poor or weak leader might be you. Have you ever had feedback that surprised you? Have you ever had coaching that encouraged you to reflect on your own actions?

Professor Jean Hartley explains the importance of making time to review yourself and reflect on your leadership.

There are many things that can impact on your own leadership ability, from being forced to lead on a vision you don't share, to a lack of confidence in your own skills and abilities and a feeling of being out of your depth. Sometimes you might just have a bad day!

Many leaders find coaching and reflection invaluable tools for reviewing their actions.

This part of the course is designed to help you recognise the wrong behaviours and consider more rewarding or successful alternatives. The leadership journal you started in Week 3 will also be a useful tool. Use it to identify where you might be going wrong and to consider ways to improve.

If you feel your leadership isn't going well, Professor Hartley has the following advice.

Defining poor or weak leadership

Now that you've considered your own experience of poor leadership, in this section you'll look at definitions that researchers and business experts have developed.

Figure 2 Bad leaders can be found in both real life and fiction.

There is a growing academic interest in the negative side of leadership, and Schyns and Schilling (2013) outline two main reasons for that:

• prevalence of destructive leader behaviours in organisations, and the associated costs
• findings that the effects of destructive leaders on their followers are severe.

Researchers have defined several types of negative leadership, often using different terminology. Three key categories are outlined here.

Ineffective leadership

Barbara Kellerman (2004) defines seven types of bad leadership and uses numerous high-profile case studies in her book Bad Leadership: What it is, How it Happens, Why it Matters. She first divides bad leadership into two broad categories:

1. Ineffective leadership ‘fails to produce the desired change. For reasons that include missing traits, weak skills, strategies badly conceived, and tactics badly employed, ineffective leadership falls short of its intention'.
2. Unethical leadership ‘fails to distinguish between right and wrong'.

For the purposes of this course, you'll concentrate on the first category, ineffective leadership, which Kellerman (2004) divides into three groups, illustrating each with a range of case studies:

1. Incompetent – lacks the will or skill (or both) to sustain effective action; does not create positive change. Case study: Juan Antonio Samaranch (business leader)
2. Rigid – stiff and unyielding, unable or unwilling to adapt to new ideas, new information, or changing times. Case study: Mary Meeker (business leader)
3. Intemperate – lacks self-control and is aided and abetted by followers who are unwilling or unable to intervene. Case study: Marion Barry Jr (political leader)

Destructive leadership

Other authors have focused on the concept of destructive leadership.

Following a comprehensive review of the literature, Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser (2007) set out five features of destructive leadership:

1. Destructive leadership is seldom absolutely or entirely destructive: there are both good and bad results in most leadership situations.
2. The process of destructive leadership involves dominance, coercion and manipulation rather than influence, persuasion and commitment.
3. The process of destructive leadership has a selfish orientation; it is focused more on the leader's needs than the needs of the larger social group.
4. The effects of destructive leadership are outcomes that compromise the quality of life for constituents and detract from the organisation's main purposes.
5. Destructive organisational outcomes are not exclusively the result of destructive leaders, but are also the products of susceptible followers and conducive environments.

Both Kellerman and Padilla et al. include followers in their definitions, making the point that bad or destructive leaders can't have the same impact without either bystanders who look the other way, or colluders who join in the destruction. You'll investigate followers and followership in more detail in Week 5.

Narcissistic leadership

Maccoby (2004) investigates narcissistic leadership, highlighting the following characteristics:

• Strengths – great vision; scores of followers
• Weaknesses – sensitive to criticism; poor listeners; lack of empathy; distaste for mentoring; an intense desire to compete.

His article includes numerous examples of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) who fall into this category and he makes the point that a challenging external context has caused us to rely on these leaders due to their big personalities and engaging oratory.

Have you ever encountered a leader who falls into one of these categories? Can you recognise any of those characteristics in yourself?

Activity 2 Categorising poor leadership

Refer to the example of poor leadership you thought of in Activity 1. Looking at the various types and definitions listed in this section, can you fit that leader into any of those categories? Summarise your thoughts.

Now that you're familiar with some of the ways in which leadership can be poor or weak, the next step is to consider the impact of that poor leadership on individuals, teams and businesses.

Exploring the impact of poor or weak leadership

Figure 3 Poor leadership can be shattering.

The impact of poor leadership can be felt in many ways across an organisation. In their meta-analysis of destructive leadership, Schyns and Schilling (2013) propose a framework made up of four concepts:

1. Leader related
   • Followers show resistance towards a destructive leader e.g. ignoring requests
   • Followers lose trust in the leader
2. Job related
   • Job satisfaction diminishes as the environment becomes less pleasant
   • Followers become less dedicated or motivated
3. Organisation related
   • Commitment reduces as followers feel the organisation has failed to protect them
   • Productivity and turnover is affected
4. Individual follower related
   • Followers experience stress and there is a negative impact on well-being
   • Followers reduce their efforts, leading to poor performance

You can see from this framework that the impact of negative leadership can have profound consequences for everyone involved.

In Activity 4, you've started to consider ways you might mitigate the impact of poor leadership. You'll explore these ideas in more detail in the next section.

Common mistakes leaders make

You don't have to be a poor leader to make mistakes. All leaders will have good and bad outcomes regularly throughout their careers, no matter how good their intentions. The point is to learn from those mistakes and, even better, learn from other people's mistakes before you make them yourself!

Rebecca Fielding offers the following advice:

Activity 5 encourages you to consider some common examples of leadership mistakes, and to suggest possible solutions.

Activity 5 Common mistakes and possible solutions

Here are six examples of common leadership mistakes. Use the space below each one to propose possible solutions, and then reveal the comment.

Your team doesn't know why they are doing something or what they are working towards. They don't have a sense of what success looks like. They lack direction and waste time on activities that might, or might not, be Poor communication

Individuals don't know what you want from them or whether you think they are doing a good job, so they feel uncertain and lack commitment. They don't know how best to communicate with you so they stop trying.

Your team members feel that you don't trust them or value their input, and are demotivated. They start to wait for your instructions and are less likely to show initiative.

Individuals who lack key skills or have the wrong attitude can be very damaging to both team morale and the progress of a project. If you thought that person would fit in, what does that say about your opinion of everyone else?

You haven't invested in upskilling your team, yet your expectations are high and keep growing. Employees feel unappreciated and out of their depth, losing confidence and motivation.

Advice for leaders

If you are worried about making mistakes, there are several avenues of support available to you. Rebecca Fielding explains how employers often support their leaders and how leaders can better support themselves.

As you can see from the examples used in Activity 5, much of the impact of poor leadership is felt by the followers. Based on findings from her extensive case studies, Barbara Kellerman (2004) has some advice for leaders wishing to work more effectively with their teams:

• Establish a culture of openness in which diversity and dissent are encouraged.
• Install an independent person to review complaints and maintain standards.
• Bring in strong and independent advisers who aren't afraid to tell you the truth.
• Avoid 'group think' as it discourages healthy dissent.
• Get reliable and complete information, and then disseminate it.
• Give a senior manager, who knows the organisation well, responsibility for ensuring the mission continues to matter.
• Establish a system of checks and balances to avoid policies and procedures that support bad leadership.
• Make sure you connect to all your constituents and not just a chosen, like-minded few.

Advice for followers

For a follower on the receiving end of poor leadership, she has this advice:

• Make bad leaders pay for their transgressions.
• Find allies.
• Develop your own sources of information – don't rely on information provided by your leader.
• Take collective action e.g. get a small group together to talk to the boss.
• Be a watchdog.
• Hold leaders to account.

Some of these actions won't be easy, and you'll need to adapt them according to your context – but Kellerman's key message is don't let them get away with it. Whether your action is to discuss the issue directly with your boss or to escalate things appropriately, followers play a crucial role in leadership and business success, and this includes when your leader is failing.

You'll look in more detail at followership and its close links with leadership in Week 5.

In this section, you've considered common leadership mistakes and possible solutions. In the next section, you'll explore some of the key skills that a leader requires if they are to recognise their mistakes and improve their poor leadership.

Developing key skills

In Week 3, you looked at the skills and abilities a good leader needs. In this section, you'll focus on some of those that a poor leader can lack and how to develop them.

Figure 5 A gap in your leadership skills?

While there are many different skills that could be listed here, those that have the most impact on leadership often involve how an individual relates to, is perceived by, and communicates with other people. You will explore some of these issues in the following sections.

Lack of emotional intelligence

In Week 3, you identified the importance of emotional intelligence in good leadership. It incorporates elements such as empathy, self-awareness and self-regulation, all of which are potentially missing or under-developed in many of the types of poor leadership outlined this week.

The video you watched in Week 3  included an explanation of how emotional intelligence can be developed. Bariso (2016) suggests seven steps:

1. Reflect on your own emotions
2. Ask others for perspective
3. Be observant
4. Use 'the pause', i.e. stop and think before you act
5. Explore the 'why', e.g. ask yourself: 'Why does that person feel the way they do?'; 'Why do I feel differently?'
6. When criticised, don't take offence. Instead ask: 'What can I learn?'
7. Practice, practice, practice.

Point 7 is an important one. These are steps that won't come naturally at first and require perseverance over time to become embedded.

Lack of integrity

Integrity is always high on the list in surveys of leadership skills or when recruiting leaders. The Oxford English Dictionary (2017) defines it as:

It might also be described as always doing the right thing and being honest.

Amster (2015) offers the following tips to help you strengthen your integrity in the workplace:

• Fulfil your promises
• Keep appointments
• Before you make a commitment, reflect on whether you can deliver
• Get comfortable with saying no.

A Mind Tools (n.d.) editorial on 'Preserving integrity' recommends analysing every choice that you make and asking yourself the following questions:

• If my choice were printed on the front page of the newspaper for everyone to see, would I feel OK about it?
• If I make this choice, will I feel OK with myself afterwards?

Tips like these can provide a helpful checklist if you're unsure about how to proceed.

Summary

By now, you should have a better idea of what constitutes a poor leader and the negative impact of poor leadership. You've also considered how you might rectify some of the common mistakes leaders can make.

You should now feel that you can:

• recognise poor leadership in different forms
• reflect on the impact of poor or weak leadership
• describe ways in which leadership mistakes might be avoided.

Next week, you'll change perspective and start to look at leadership from the follower's point of view, moving on to consider your own followers and how you might develop them further.

Why is followership important?

Introduction

Previously, you looked at what you could learn from different types of bad leadership and the common mistakes leaders make. Now, you'll focus on followers and the part they play in effective organisations.

If you're primarily interested in leadership, don't view this week as less relevant – many of the qualities of a proactive follower are the same as those of an effective leader.

If you don't yet have very much leadership experience, becoming an effective follower is an excellent starting point.

If you are currently a leader, you'll already know the value of positive relationships with your followers. This week, you'll look at how to develop them and encourage your followers to consider their own leadership journey.

Now watch Lynne introduce this week.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• recognise different types of followership
• describe the benefits of effective followership
• identify followers' needs
• describe ways of engaging and developing your followers.

Different follower types

As you saw when defining followership in Week 1, the concept has been studied since the 1950s, when the focus was mostly leader-centred i.e. framing followers as recipients of leadership.

Figure 1 Followers have an important role to play.

The body of research continues to grow, taking a more follower-centred approach and currently investigating the interdependence between followers and leaders. This section explores the different types of followers you might encounter. Understanding the characteristics of different followers can make you a better follower and a better leader.

There are several follower typologies in the literature, mainly taking the leader-centred focus. One of the earliest and most widely cited is by Robert Kelley (1988), who describes five groups:

1. Sheep – passive and uncritical, lacking in initiative and a sense of responsibility. They perform the tasks given to them and stop.
2. Yes people – a livelier but equally unenterprising group. Dependent on a leader for inspiration, they can be aggressively deferential, even servile. In later work, Kelley refers to them as 'conformist followers'.
3. Alienated followers – critical and independent in their thinking but passive in carrying out their role. Often cynical, they tend to sink gradually into disgruntled acquiescence, seldom openly opposing a leader's efforts.
4. Survivors – perpetually sample the wind and live by the slogan 'better safe than sorry'. They are adept at surviving change.
5. Effective followers – think for themselves and carry out their duties and assignments with energy and assertiveness.

He makes the point that 'followership is not a person but a role' and explains that 'effective followers and effective leaders are often the same people playing different parts at different hours of the day.'

Ira Chaleff (2009) focuses his typology on levels of support and challenge. He describes four styles of followership:

1. The resource – low support/low challenge – does what's required but doesn't go beyond the minimum
2. The individualist – low support/high challenge – has low deference and isn't afraid to criticise
3. The implementer – high support/low challenge – does what is needed with minimal oversight or explanation
4. The partner – high support/high challenge – gives vigorous support but is also willing to question the leader.

While much of the research focuses on how follower styles and behaviours can support or derail the leadership process, Carsten et al. (2010) take a follower-centred approach and explore how style and behaviour can impact on followership itself. They asked people a series of questions about their role as follower, focusing on positives, negatives, personal qualities and behaviours.

They divided the responses into three categories:

1. Passive – taking and following orders, and deferring to the leader's knowledge and expertise
2. Active – offering opinions when given the opportunity but remaining loyal and obedient regardless of whether they agreed with the leader
3. Proactive – exhibiting behaviours more aligned with partnership than dominance and submission.

Carsten et al. concluded that 'followership holds a multiplicity of meaning for individuals occupying the role'. They found that the context of followership is important, and depends on variables associated with leadership style and working environment.

The benefits of good followership

Good followership benefits both followers and leaders in a variety of ways. When followers and leaders are working effectively together this will also have a positive impact on the organisation they work for.

Figure 2 When followers and leaders work well together there are many benefits.

It is clear that leaders and organisations benefit from effective, engaged employees, but there are benefits for the follower too, especially if they have an interest in developing themselves as future leaders.

Engaging and developing your followers

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.

Figure 3 Can you lead if you have no followers?

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:

1. Followership as a position or role – this approach considers how followers' identities and behaviours influence leader attitudes, behaviours and outcomes
2. 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.

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:

Make a list of your observations.

To use this interactive functionality a free OU account is required. Sign in or register.

While it is widely acknowledged that followers play a key role in leadership, 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.

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.

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.

You can find varied examples of shared leadership across the business world, for example:

• ICT solutions provider Huawei has three CEOs who each take charge for six-month periods in rotation.
• The Anglo European School in Essex has two Co-Headteachers working alongside each other full time, sharing executive authority.
• Shared leadership is the model that underpins the NHS's Medical Leadership Competency Framework – allowing multidisciplinary teams to pass leadership from individual to individual at relevant times along a patient's pathway of care.

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.

What do followers need?

Taking the time to understand the needs of your followers is an important step. Responding to and meeting those needs will allow you to form positive relationships with your team.

Figure 4 Followers' needs are important.

Jackson and Parry (2011) explain that followers have several needs that the leader must attempt to fulfil, for example:

• the need for clarity, for example, what should we be doing? Where are we going?
• the need for meaning, for example, what are we doing this for?
• the need for safety, for example, will it be ok if we do this?

A Gallup research team asked over 10 000 followers what the most influential leaders contribute to their lives. The research (Rath and Conchie, 2008) identified four basic needs:

1. trust
2. compassion
3. stability
4. hope.

In an interview in the Gallup Business Journal (Robison, 2009), the researchers elaborate:

• 'Trust is primarily built through relationships, and it's important because it's the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers'.
• 'Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they're doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization'.
• 'Followers need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Leaders need to build that foundation of stability, and hope sits on top of that'.
  
• 'At the individual level, compassion can manifest itself in many different ways. You can show you care, for example, by having tough conversations with people about their performance and their positioning'.

Considering the needs of different types of followers is an important exercise. If you currently have followers, it will allow you to interact with them more effectively. If you don't, it will be useful preparation for future leadership and may help you to pre-empt certain issues before they arise.

Activity 5 Identifying the needs of your followers

Choose a typology and think of some examples of different types of followers you have encountered. If you are not currently leading anyone, think about a leader you follow and consider your fellow followers and their types.

Answer the following questions:

• Did you observe behaviours that were positive or negative?
• What were the reasons for their engagement or lack of it?
• What do you think those followers needed?
• What actions did the leader take to identify the needs of those followers? What actions could they have taken?

Depending on the size of your team, you may not be able to address everyone's needs individually, but there are likely to be group activities, communications strategies etc. that you could facilitate or delegate. You'll learn more about how a leader might approach common challenges, including building teams and motivating staff, in Week 6.

A positive step towards engaging your followers is to emphasise your commitment to their development, and you'll focus on that in more detail in the next section.

Summary

At this stage, you should feel more informed about the concept of followership and understand why it is becoming such an important element of leadership learning. You've looked at followership from both the perspectives of follower and leader. You have also considered how you might develop as a follower yourself and how you might develop your own followers.

You should now feel that you can:

• recognise different types of followership
• describe the benefits of effective followership
• identify followers' needs
• describe ways of engaging and developing your followers.