There are times, not just in business, but in our everyday lives when we need to lead. Whether a scout group, a football team, an aerobics class or an IT team, the fundamentals of leadership remain the same.

So what makes a good leader?

Leadership vs Management

Leadership is not management.

A manager is generally someone who makes sure things happen in a certain planned or pre-determined way, keeps on top of things and tracks progress. A leader is someone who inspires and gets things done more through vision and showing the way.

A manager can be a good leader, but doesn’t necessarily need to be in order to be a good manager.

Likewise, a leader can be a good manager, but doesn’t necessarily need to be in order to be a good leader.

Indeed these two things often get confused and can even get in each others way – for example it could be difficult to galvanise and inspire a team (leadership) whilst micro-managing that team, questioning their progress etc (management). In general managers tend to be more Theory X & leaders more Theory Y.

Qualities of a Good Leader

To touch more on the conflict between leadership and management, the qualities and tendancies of leaders are often the polar opposites of those of managers, so we’ll start with these then I’ll elaborate on some further qualities of good leaders:

Managers are risk averse whereas leaders are less risk averse – so a good leader would be someone who is comfortable with risk and knows how to use it to their advantage (and perhaps capable of dealing with the fallout should that risk backfire – by logical extrapolation, someone who is not afraid of failure).

Managers tend to motivate people with rules, plans and procedures whereas leaders motivate people with vision and inspiration – so a good leader would be someone who can motivate people with very little.

Managers tend to mis-trust people or at least need elements of control in place to track progress (i.e. to manage them), leaders tend to need less controls in place instead trusting people. This combined with their appetite for risk means that a good leader empowers people, pushing people to be the best whilst still making them feel safe because this pushing and encouragement comes from a position of trust and empowerment rather than targets.

Great leaders have faith in their beliefs and vision, they can’t expect others to follow otherwise.

A good leader will also always genuinely make time for people. Criticism of a good leader may be that he/she never does any work. A good leaders work is strategic, motivating people, directing, course-correcting, galvanising the team and empowering people to achieve as much as they can. Because of all of these factors, good leaders tend to have more time for people. This is their work. That is not to say a good leader can’t do other work (and often do to lead by example which in turn can build relationships and trust in teams) but often good leaders don’t need to.

Good leaders rarely struggle to find resources for all of the above reasons.

Leaders make difficult choices in order to improve the lives of those around them. They see the bigger picture, have a wider, strategic focus and therefore can take setbacks. One downside of this is that leaders, even good leaders can tend to be light on detail (which managers are very good at).

Good Leaders know and value people. They know their teams or get to know them very quickly and they care about them. Above all, good leaders know very well the importance of followers and followership.

Followership

Some years ago I went on a leadership course called LTP (the Leading Together Programme). A huge amount of time on this leadership course was actually spent on teamwork and more specifically on followership. This 3 day programme was actually part of an induction process I needed to go through when joining a particular niche consultancy (I can’t remember for sure whether it was for certain grades of employee but I seem to remember it was for all employees).

There are various ways to test aptitudes in various things, our drivers and psychology (we did a Myers Briggs test as part of this course) and our success in various roles (leader, manager, follower, team player).

What I discovered on this programme is that there were two of us in the same assessment group who stood out from the crowd as far more inclined toward leadership than the rest of the group: myself and Sean (which was further underlined with some of the tests we needed to take). The group were all assessed in various roles, so at times I was leader, at times others were.

Having seen ‘another leader’ quite early on, I prepared myself for Sean being disruptive and trying to take over in my task as leader. I’m sure he felt similarly. As it turns out, it wasn’t our time to take that role for the first time until quite late in day 1 and before then there had been about 6 others taking the role of leader (there were 12 in the group).

What we both found, when others were leaders and when we were is that we managed to resist the temptation to step in and take over when things got tricky in the tasks, but instead became more supportive of the leader (easier said than done in some cases, especially when some who were clearly not cut out to be leaders were making really bad choices). This was actually easier with two of us in the group who wanted to help the leader and therefore not one person obviously taking over, creating more of a team dynamic and rather than taking over, instead leading the way in showing others in the team how to listen to and support the leader and constructively collaborate and offer alternative views without being threatening.

The training was really instructive. It’s quite subtle and not an easy skill at all to be a good follower – perhaps even more challenging than being a good leader because the role is not explicitly defined. The goal is to help the leader, eve guide them to the right answers but without undermining them in any way. In this way you need to show your support and earn their permission to offer your input before doing so. It’s not always easy to hide leadership tendencies either. If things go wrong and people start to follow you instead of the appointed leader, then it is important to be a good follower and bring the focus and attention back to the leader which with the right will is easy enough, perhaps again by simply asking permission ‘What do you think?’, ‘Is this OK?’ etc.

When it came to Sean’s turn, he knew who his champion was going to be & by then no longer had any concerns about me derailing him or undermining his leadership – and vice versa. We pretty much guaranteed each others success in those tasks with good followership (which we’d both learned and enhanced along the way in the 6 or so previous tasks with others as leaders, all the while keeping a watchful eye on each other). Sean knew, without saying, that I would be his most supportive and helpful follower, as I knew he would be mine.

That’s not to say it’s easy – particularly for those who really really want to lead, who can’t help themselves – you need to bite your tongue sometimes. Followership is a skill just like any other, just like leadership or management or teamwork, it is a skill that needs to be developed, honed and fine-tuned.

So a good leader should make a great follower, because they know how important good followers can be.

First Follower Theory

So a leader needs support in the form of loyal followers.

A great example of this support is the enthusiastic first follower. Particularly in newly formed teams (see my article on Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing for more theory on team development challenges) or when trying to mobilise groups of complete strangers, the first follower plays a crucial role in giving authority and credibility to the leader.

Take a look at this video:
 

Link

Embed

Copy and paste this HTML code into your webpage to embed.

Final Thought

What makes a leader?

Followers.

A leader without any followers is not a leader. Leaders need to inspire people, often to direct and course correct and they need their followers to trust in them and follow.

Motivation ideally comes from admiration, trust or inspiration but it could just as easily be fear, money, blind faith or something else. Wherever the motivation comes from, people need to be motivated to follow the leader in question.

In my view, great leaders are also great followers. When it is their turn to be a part of the team, they don’t disrupt or take over but instead do what they can to assist the leader because they understand implicitly what that leader needs.

So if you’re looking to build your leadership skills, don’t forget to give some time to those followership skills too.