Developing followership competencies

Leadership without followership makes no sense. Both are important so here are 6 steps to develop followership competencies.

We have a lot of information (some good, some not so) on how to be a better leader. Recently this post by Professor Ron Riggio popped up in my LinkedIn feed. It contains useful, well grounded advice on how to develop leadership. But what about the other half of the equation?

Engage your curiosity and humility

You can’t follow well if you only focus on completing your work tasks without understanding how what you do fits into the work of your colleagues and the outcomes of your organisation. You need to be curious about why what you do matters.

Humility means you are ready to learn from others (curiosity and humility are also really important if you want to lead well – no all knowing superhero leaders here!)

Engage your willingness to take responsibility

Followership includes taking responsibility to do your job well, understand how and where it fits, to ask questions ,to give advice. It is not a passive, waiting to be told what to do, role.

Assess your current strengths and developmental needs

Any efforts to make improvements need to begin with a clear understanding of what you already do well and where you need to do more work. Curiosity and humility will be handy here too.

Know the core competencies followers need

We haven’t paid a lot of attention to followership competencies, tending to confuse behaviours (what we do) with attitudes (what we think). My research indicates that effective followership has two elements: stepping up to support leadership and stepping back to allow leadership to occur. There are some practical things you can do to engage in more effective followership. These include taking direction and doing what the leader asks (without following blindly). You might discuss and negotiate before you agree. Asking questions and seeking advice or guidance can also be helpful. But it’s not one way. Effective followership includes giving leaders advice and feedback as well as building a productive relationship.

Leadership and followership need to make space for each other and work actively in the space that is made.

As you step up and step back the leadership competencies of intelligence, emotional and social intelligence and good character (doing the right thing as well as doing things right) will help you. Perhaps they are core human competencies!

Set Goals

It is important to set effective goals if you want to see results. It helps if goals are SMART:

• Specific - know what competency you are focussing on developing

• Measurable – work out how you will know you are making progress. What difference will you and others see?

• Attainable – don’t set goals that are too ambitious or that you don’t have control over meeting - make them possible (but not too easy)

• Relevant – make sure they make sense for your job and what you are trying to achieve.

• Timely – set time frame. When will you see changes by?

Get Feedback

Check in with how you are going by asking others –a mentor, your manager, your colleagues, the people who you lead.

SMART goals and feedback are why I always ask workshop participants to commit to

• at least one thing they’ll do differently as a follower and as a leader,

• who they will discuss this with and

• when, and

• how they will know that they are on track.

Notice and celebrate your progress as you become more of the follower you want to be.

The most effective leaders and followers engage in both leadership and followership. By developing followership as well as leadership competencies you will be able to call on a broader range of skills to meet challenges. You will be able to swap between a leadership and a followership role as you work together with others to achieve shared goals.

I’d love to know what you will do to develop your followership competencies.

And if coaching or professional development with a focus on followership piques your curiosity you can find out more.