Followership Assessment Tool
The ultimate proof of leadership lies not in the actions of leaders but in what their followers actually do
There is no leadership without followership. Indeed, the ultimate proof of leadership lies not in the actions of leaders, but in what their followers actually do. As such, it is important to distinguish ‘leader’ from ‘leadership’. The former is a person and the second is an act. While not everyone can be a leader, everyone can demonstrate leadership. On the same token, everyone can (and ought to) demonstrate followership. An effective follower adopts a leader’s ideas as their own and applies critical thinking and effort to achieve it. It is an agentic action to achieve an outcome ideated by someone else. In this sense, followership is leadership and vice versa.
Ultimately, it is a collective act (by both leaders and followers) to get stuff done!
A follower is someone who makes rational choices about their behaviour (engagement and critical thinking) in response to leadership. As such, we can look to the behaviours of our followers to assess the effectiveness of our leadership.
Robert E Kelley created a framework of ‘follower types’ that reflected the level of a engagement and critical thinking exhibited by a follower. Kelley found that organisations need people who will both challenge and commit and so reflect the x-axis and y-axis of his framework. He considered high levels of critical thinking combined with high levels of engagement to be rare and required leaders to create conditions where both can occur.
As such, it is important to remember that follower types are not character flaws nor virtues. Rather they are a rational adaptation to environmental conditions. While leaders do not represent all environmental conditions (culture, resourcing, climate, etc) that shape followership, they still loom large in the formation of followership type.
Ultimately: •There are many things you cannot control, but you can control your leadership:
What are you doing or not doing that is contributing to followership in your world?
Kelley, R. (1992). The Power of Followership. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Use the tool below to consider what you can start doing (or stop doing) to get the followership you need
