The Essential Nature of Followers
Why do Participative Leaders need followers?
Participatory Leadership has gained recognition as a style of leadership that allows for diverse perspectives to be heard. There are various styles of practicing Participatory Leader from Collaborative where the leader simply acts as a facilitator for a group, to Autocratic where the ideas of the group are noted but the ideas of the leader continue to carry more weight. There are, however, some consistencies that can be recognized across these variations. A blog article in the Career Guide of Indeed defines a Participatory Leadership as including group discussions, sharing information throughout all team members, the leaders roll as assembling the information and summarizing it to move forward, and shared implementation of the plan to move forward.
The benefits of Participatory Leadership area increased sense of self worth from participates and more innovative ideas. A leader who embraces this style of leadership has the ability to facilitate free-flowing and honest communication, remains easily accessible stresses development of all team members, expresses consideration and is willing to change.1 These characteristics are well researched but what about the follower? A participatory leader needs followers who are willing to participate for this system to be successful.
If the followers are not willing to participate and voice their opinions the leader is tasked with taking decisions without the benefit of a broader perspective of the problem. They are forced to depend on their own solutions to problems which will be more limited than a collaborative approach to which sparks innovation.
Followers can be grouped into several basic styles:
The Sheep - Passive people who look to the leader for direction
The Yes-People - Positive and diligent in their tasks but still looking to the leader for direction
The Alientated - Independent thinkers that carry negative energy - the glass half empty crowd
The Pragmatics - Fence sitters who tend to wait to see which way the wind will blow before jumping on board
The Stars - Think for themselves, active and positive energy
It may seem like Participatory Leadership would flourish with a bunch of stars at first glance but possibly a mix of these characters would yield the most innovative results. We need sheep and yes- people to execute and alienated people to push us to answer tough questions about our ideas as well as pragmatitst to maintain momentum in the proposed path of solution. And do stars remain stars in all situations and working in any topic or with any group or leader? Do different cultures tend to breed more stars and others more sheep? Would a bee hive work with a bunch of stars?
As Robert E. Kelly explains in Rethinking Followership, " We tend to believe that the leaders are in charge, directing and shaping followership behavior. Yet maybe leaders are malleable products of cumulative followership actions....possible interactions between different followership and leadership styles, and the complexity therein, would be fertile areas for research. It is a dynamic systems that changes consistently with the variety of problems a team may be tasked to solve where sheep may shift to stars and leaders may be more collaborative or more Autrocratic depending on the paramaters of the issue at hand.
How do we work to educate people to be effective followers then? Kelley outlines some key points such as teaching people that the followership role includes the courageous conscience, thus not only legitimating this responsibility but also mandating it; helping followers find the personal courage to stand up, and providing the societal supports that encourage people to exercise their courageous conscience; and preparing followers so that when they do stand up, they are successful. This success will lie in the interplay of these followers working with leaders ready to embrace a flexible form of Participatory Leadership and a culture that values the time it takes to allow this system to work.