Big change coming

It's been a year (already) of Follow & Lead. Thank you for joining me here and for your interest in followership. Here's one of my early posts which you might have missed...

Around 1943.5 million hours are spent in paid work in Australia every month. The annual training budget for each employee sits between $900 and $1400. With 13.8 million Australians in paid employment, we spend a lot of time at work and a lot of money on professional development. This isn’t small change…

So what might be the implications for doing things differently?

Workplaces are becoming more complex and demanding but traditional leadership and education and training to support leadership is failing. Only 20 percent of middle managers surveyed in 2022 said their organisations help them be successful people managers and as little as 10% of spending on corporate leadership training delivers concrete results.

If organisations are to modernise their structures and interactions beyond traditional hierarchical approaches we need to shift focus. Why? Because leadership may not be as important as we assume.

Leader traits and behaviours account for only 30% of outcomes such as how effective a leader is deemed to be, the performance of the group they lead, their followers’ job satisfaction, and their followers’ satisfaction with the leader. That means that other things, apart from the leader’s characteristics and behaviours, are more influential. When we consider the impact that the most senior leader has on organisational success a recent study suggests that the CEO’s influence might be 11.5% (so nearly 90% of organisational success cannot be attributed to their CEO). It has also been argued that the effect a CEO has on an organisation can’t be distinguished from chance!

Clearly the way many of us work isn’t working for us or for those we work with. Leadership may not be as important as we think, and good leadership alone is not enough. It is time to turn our attention to include followers and followership.

This shift in attention requires a significant change in mindset. It means recognising that everyone and the part they play at work is important. It also means that understanding how to build effective followership in oneself and others is crucial. Including followership would make a big change to how we work together and the professional development to support that work

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