Strategy - a followership perspective

tying knots or creating art...

This useful HBR article 3 ways to clearly communicate your company's strategy suggests that strategy is often communicated by senior leaders without the necessary context for employees’ understanding. It had me thinking about what we’d see if we took a followership perspective. 

 First, I’d reorder Markides and MacLennan’s suggestions. Involving employees in strategy development should come first. Not as a way to manipulate “buy in” but because good ideas don’t exist only at the most senior or well paid strata of a hierarchical organisation. The examples in the article reflect respect for the expertise of everyone in the organisation and the structuring of opportunities for conversation, dialogue and feedback. These are risky – people won’t necessarily tell you what you want to hear - but it will result in a more robust and authentic strategy than one delivered fully formed from on high. This approach assumes engaged, responsive followership as well as leadership. I have found that effective followership is facilitated when followers share information. And followers share information, insights, and expertise with leaders who are receptive and adaptable. They share with leaders who are able to change their minds in light of new information provided by followers.  

Linking strategy to purpose and being clear about what isn’t aligned with that purpose (as well as what is) are also valuable suggestions. My research into followership behaviours indicates that both leaders and followers expect followers to understand what they are doing and why. Indeed, effective followers actively seek information so that they can understand the broader context beyond their one-on-one relationship with their leader and know how their work relates to that bigger picture. Understanding the reason for their own work and how it fits more broadly means that effective followership involves exercising personal and professional judgement. Followers discern whether what is being asked of them is consistent with their understanding of their tasks, their professional role, the team and organisational purpose and values, and their personal ethics. Followers are not expected to follow blindly. The story that opens Markides and MacLennan’s article of the flight engineer mishearing the pilot and prematurely raising the aircraft’s landing gear is a story about unquestioning followership as much as it is about unclear context. 

In the interviews I conducted, followers described contextual awareness as an emergent understanding; growing out of knowing their job role and the tasks and responsibilities that entails to connections between their and others’ jobs, and links to organisational goals. 

…you can see very quickly those who are doing it because they understand the purpose and the end goal and those who are just going through the motions. (Interview 40, Leader) 

The emergence of contextual understanding as described by followers contrasts with line of sight - the connection from organisational purpose and plans though departmental purpose and planning to what followers do to meet those planned outcomes as communicated by leaders. The difference between line of sight and context emergance - the big picture which threads through each level and role in the organisation or the pieces of work coming together to build to purpose – is instructive. Leadership and followership suggests we see the same thing in different ways. Communication is necessary to reach a shared understanding. 

Please share Follow and Lead with someone who would find a different approch to leadership interesting.