I'm not sure what leadership is. Are you? In my quest to find a defintion I have come across some three hundred plus definitions, none of which have been very useful in helping me predict who in a group of teens or college grads will eventually rise to the top. It's easier to look at successful leaders in retrospect and say "Ah, so that's what it takes to be a leader". However, successful leaders come in all shapes, sizes and flavors, so for every "Aha!" moment I have on what a leader is, I have quite a few "Huh?" moments.

It wasn't really until I started examining leadership from the other side of the equation - followership - that I started to achieve far more aha's than huh's. In the vast number of cases, a leader starts out as one of the crowd, or should I say one of a group of people with shared interests, values and ideas in a specific area of life. Look for the person who appears to have the most success within that group, the person who best personifies the group's shared schema, and you'll find the person most likely to become its leader.

One or two people in the group start to notice that person's success and emulate him or her, drawing the attention of others. If the leader-to-be is lucky, some of those initial followers are aggressive in their promotion of him or her and a group of supporters begins growing rapidly. Absent the aggressive promotion, the growth of a supporter base is slower and may not lead to the type of ardent "following" that produces results. A "leader" is born either way though.

The thing to notice here is that the followers aren't truly loyal to the leader ... they are loyal to the idea, values and interests of the group as represented by the leader figure. The leader figure is disposable and replaceable, especially if he or she stops being successful within the shared scheme of things.

That leads me to a defintion of followership. I want to avoid the watering down of defintion suffered by leadership so I'd like a solid definition of followership that can be used to predict the behavior of followers and the creation of leaders. Quite a task but let me give it a try .... followership is an active choice to agree with the elevation of a person from the ingroup to a leadership position and to engage in activities that support the elevation of that person as long as the person fills an ingroup need and guides ingroup action in accordance with a set of shared ideas, values and interests.

Followership is active, not passive. It is supportive, not passive. And it is at least as powerful or even more powerful than leadership.

In my next post I'll explore how people wanting to be elevated into leadership can capitalize on followership.