Colleges, universities, and academic think tanks generate countless volumes on leadership and followers in relation to leaders. Rarely do these well-endowed institutions view leaders in relation to followers, from the followers’ perspective. As the study of followers evolves, its importance in organizational growth grows exponentially.
Historically, followers were considered workers who carried out the orders of supervisors and managers. The hierarchy shared just enough information for a worker to do, in general, their job. The worker had no idea how his piece fit into the whole. This industrial-age thinking was appropriate in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries when masses of generally less educated farmers and farmworkers abandoned farming for a more secure lifestyle in growing industrial cities.
Not only did adults enter the industrial workforce, but companies also employed children as young as tweens in dangerous and life-threatening jobs. Without a lengthy discussion of child labor and the multiple incidents of death and dismemberment that lead to strict child labor laws, it is important that there is a link between agricultural migration to cities and child labor laws. The puzzle pieces are complex and fitting them into an exact pattern is difficult, however, as part of the final analysis, the pieces lead to the establishment of public school systems and required minimum educational standards. Over time, public high schools and public universities began to provide advanced educational opportunities to more masses of people.
Workers receiving more education began to question supervisors and managers who felt their authority over workers diminished. The workers began to know and understand their organization and to know and understand their place in their organization.
Maybe an example from the text. Atomic: reshaping the business landscape in the new structures of tomorrow1 will provide a significant insight into the change. Most scholars cite Martin Luther as the main promoter of religious reform, the Protestant Reformation. It is true that Martin Luther was very important for many reasons, including the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. However, someone else some 75 years earlier had a different role that was perhaps more formidable.
Around 1455, Gutenberg, with his movable-type printing press, produced the first printed bible. Instead of waiting years for a monk to transcribe a bible manually, word for word, Gutenberg could write and reproduce hundreds of pages in days. Suddenly, people who could read could get a printed bible. No longer depending on the clergy in the pulpit to interpret the meaning of the Scriptures, the power of the clergy was broken. Workers who received an education similarly broke the power of supervisors and managers.
Martin Luther and Gutenberg did not cause the collapse of religion, they changed its face. People of faith did not stop being faithful, it changed the way they practiced their faith. The workers did not bring down organizations, they changed the face of management. The workers continued to work; however, the way they worked changed.
Significant change in religious practice and worker behavior did not come from a top-down pronouncement. Rather, the significant changes happened from the bottom up, from the follower who realized that something needed to change. In the mid-1800s in England and early 1900s in the US, sociologists and psychologists began to study something called leadership. Leadership was radically different from managerial ideas of command and control.
These early studies began to tell managers that Machiavellian practices of power over workers were not successful in obtaining worker compliance. They began to teach that workers do it because they want to contribute to the success of an organization. Previous thinking emphasized that organizations exist for people, so they have a place to work. The new thinking began to emphasize that organizations exist because of people who work because they want to.
Leadership was first defined around 1815 and, as already mentioned, leadership studies began in the mid-19th century. Around 1925, one hundred years after leadership appeared as an idea, the first reference to followers occurred. Defining followers sounds similar to a children’s game called “follow the leader.” Followers are an extension of their leaders.
Although these teachings were early leadership ideas, they were still top-down, applicable in the industrial age. Contemporary business is not industrial in 2008 as it was in 1908 and until the end of World War II. In addition, technological advances make information available to large populations through the Internet, organizational intranets, and extranets. The idea of supervisors and managers hiding information seems unimaginable in today’s corporations. The Internet today is Gutenberg’s printing press from 1455.
The shift to follower studies is seen in recent organizational studies that focus on the meaningful work of followers in organizations. Numbers vary, but researchers generally believe that about 75 to 90 percent of organizational accomplishments occur within groups of followers that receive about 10 percent of the credit. The research also evaluated the work of leaders in organizations. Although leaders have a position and a title, most spend about 70 percent of their workday in follower roles.
Even the great researcher and professor of management, Warren Bennis, admits that organizations work because of the followers he calls underestimated. Furthermore, his research findings explain how important it is for leaders to seek necessary information from followers while emphasizing that followers must tell the truth, tell leaders what they need to know, not what they need to know. they want to listen. If you can remember the song of the four seasons silence is gold, you may also remember the final lyrical line that exclaims, “…but my eyes still see.” Followers who see a need for change have an obligation to speak up with co-workers, leaders, and the organization. In business, silence is not gold, it is lead.
Is there a reason why there are no academic studies on tracking? Are organizations overlooking the potential of followers? To the first question, leaders underestimate the number of followers. Some studies conducted among organizational followers examined how followers felt about leaders, thus missing the opportunity to study how followers felt about themselves. To the second question, the answer may seem like a simple yes; however, yes is not simple and yes is not exact.
Terms like postindustrial and postmodern can confuse many people who study organizations, their leadership, and their followers. Perhaps researchers apply industrial-age corporate thinking to post-industrial and post-modern organizations. Research examining the sociotechnical climate of organizations recognizes the interconnections of people across industries, regions, national borders, cultures, and languages. The power of followers as generators of knowledge is a new phenomenon and an untapped resource. One statistic finds that among ten thousand workers today, technology allows up to five million potential interconnections. Their ability to share and collect information turns followers into knowledge generators and innovative problem solvers for their organizations, leading to greater efficiency.
The Boomer Generation reaching retirement presents contemporary businesses with opportunities to seek new leadership within their existing workforce. Developing internal potential allows organizations to project their values and vision into the future.
Achieving future projection goes beyond coaching and beyond training and development. Coaching, training, and development are top-down activities that ensure workers know and perform their assigned tasks correctly, efficiently, and repeatedly. The transfer of values and vision can appear from the top down; however, the transfer starts from the bottom up. A worker who wants upward mobility seeks a leader willing to accept the responsibility of a long-term mentoring relationship.
Leaders who accept a mentoring role in their organization project their interpersonal skills onto a protégé, developing, over time, a mutual learning experience that develops the protégé’s skills as the mentor learns new skills from the protégé. Becoming a protégé elevates a follower among their peers and elevates a follower among the leaders. Although the follower still follows, the follower makes a conscious decision to improve job skills, improve knowledge of organizational politics, and broaden understanding of organizational values, vision, and mission. Over time, the protégé begins to act as a leader within the ranks of the followers.
Leaders are transitory, so it is an obligation of leadership to train new leaders. The future of organizations is not within the existing leaders, but among the ranks of followers. Part of visionary leadership is seeing the future in existing followers.
Works Cited:
Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe (2003). West Sussex: Capstone Publishing Limited.