LEADERSHIP
What Do Followers Want From a Leader?
Four words that capture the essence of a great leader
There’s a lot of information available about leadership, through books, articles, and online blogs. In contrast, I rarely come across articles or books about being a follower.
So why do people follow certain leaders?
In the book, Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, authors Tom Rath and Barry Conchie described their research. In their research, they asked followers to identify the leader that has the most positive influence on their daily life.
Once each individual identified their ideal leader, Rath and Conchie asked the follower to list three words that best describe what this leader contributed to their life.
Their findings concluded that followers have a very clear picture of what they need, want, and expect from a leader. Here are the top four basic needs:
- Trust
- Compassion
- Stability, and
- Hope
Here’s the thing. These four words, with respect to leadership competencies, do not figure in the top four.
By that I mean the top four metrics used to measure effective leadership don't include the four that the very people they lead identified as being the most important.
As such, effective leadership, from the followers’ perspective, is ignored.
Great leaders, who place a priority on relationships, are successful for this very reason.
Trust and Compassion
These needs have meaning for followers, as they aim to align with leaders who can relate to them as human beings. Followers want leaders who demonstrate that he/she cares about them, as people.
Trust is the foundation of any relationship.
The leader/follower relationship is no different. Without a sense of trust, there can be no team. Research has proven that when trust is high in a group or organization, members are more engaged.
In any organization, where employees trust leadership, they’re more likely to be engaged with the organizational goals. From experience and personal observation, teams high in trust spend zero time discussing trust; whereas teams struggling with trust spend a significant amount of time debating trust.
Teams high in trust are more effective.
Stability and Hope
Stability is more critical today in light of the global pandemic. Even before the outbreak of the Coronavirus, the business world had become a continuous rapid of change.
To help followers, leaders need to provide a foundation so that rapid changes can be managed. In the absence of a stable foundation, followers feel insecure, uncertain, and unsupported. Unloved really. When any employee feels this way, they have very little loyalty towards their leader.
This is the leader’s failing, not the followers.
In a stable environment, followers can begin to look to the future. Assuming that the leader has shared a vision of that future, a direction for the organization to get there. In this scenario, followers hope and believe that there will be more tomorrow than today.
Leaders who get caught up in day-to-day issues lack vision. Their followers worry about survival. They worry about what tomorrow will bring. Followers lose hope.
Cynicism, anxiety, and even depression can take hold, resulting in low morale, reducing productivity. So it’s critical that leaders understand the importance of hope by painting a picture of the future. This is even more important in current times.
Hope is a wonderful thing!
Final Thoughts
The purpose of leadership is to get things done by empowering others. That’s the primary function of a leader.
To achieve this it's essential that leaders understand what their followers want, what they need from them as their leader. Effective leaders understand human needs as good as the understand the economic landscape. These types of leaders work hard to deliver the wants and needs of their followers.
We don’t need research to tell us this. As human beings, we inherently know this.
If find yourself in a leadership role, stop and look around, to see if anyone is following you.
