There is a common misconception that being a leader means being the one to come up with the best ideas, that it’s about being powerful, or about knowing all the right answers. But being a real leader means knowing how to be a follower. None of us will ever know everything, and even more, so much of what we believe we know is subjective. There are two types of followership in leadership, the first is as a servant leader, following your stakeholders, and the second is following your team.
Servant leadership has become a more recently popularized concept, but has its origins as far back ancient China and the New Testament. The idea behind servant leadership is that the people who you are serving come first, and you create everything you do with them at the center. Much like human-centered thinking, servant leadership is about focusing on the people affected and involved, and making sure they are not only at the center of your planning but that their voices are the influencing factors in your decisions. How this relates to following, is that as a leader, you must invert the pyramid, where the base, or the stakeholders are on top, and the point, or the leader, is on the bottom. Leading from the back of the line means helping to keep people on the path that they want to be following, rather than telling them where they should be going.
Secondly, surrounding yourself with a diverse and knowledgeable team and then taking cues from them will allow you to be a more effective leader by practicing followership. Recognizing that you don’t know everything gives you the flexibility to be able to turn to those around you who might know better, or at least can share different opinions, in order to strengthen your programs and positions. The best thing you can realize for yourself is that working alone is not only counterproductive, it’s unnecessary. The more you look to people to break down your ideas and challenge them, the stronger you can build those ideas up into something more well-rounded and effective.
Taking the suggestions, thoughts, and inputs of all of these people and figuring out how to catalyze their collective ideas into reality is a true sign of leadership. This takes practice in being comfortable shifting seamlessly between being a leader and being a follower.
Being a leader who follows is not about playing it safe and doing what everyone else is doing, but rather, having the ability to dig deep into the needs of your stakeholders, empower and hear the ideas of your team members, and work to build a cohesive plan in collaboration with them and using them as your guide and inspiration.
The Modern Leader 