Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Amy Edmondson argue in an article from last week that leadership and followership are a co-created, fluid process rather than a fixed hierarchy. They point to familiar exemplars: Satya Nadella rebuilding Microsoft not through top-down decrees but by listening to engineers, customers, and critics; Mary Barra deferring to the technical judgment of manufacturing teams and safety engineers; Tim Cook spending years as an operational lieutenant who followed data and expert input before leading Apple to its current valuation. (There are justifiable critiques of all of these leaders, but they've all also done a great job with the situations they found themselves in.)
The argument
- The heroic leader myth is the obstacle. Widely shared beliefs about leadership—that it requires commanding and inspiring others—actively prevent organizations from developing effective leaders.
- Followership and leadership share the same foundation. Meta-analyses show that personality traits predicting good followership are nearly identical to those predicting good leadership. This is not coincidence.
- Five capabilities matter most: Active listening, prioritizing purpose over personal credit, reliable execution, critical dissent, and coachability.
- Our conditions favor the shift. Complexity, specialization, and AI are eroding the value of command-based authority. Emotional intelligence and the capacity to synthesize diverse perspectives become relatively more important.
(I do wonder about this last point, though. It strikes me that we are either entering into, or already in, a state that feels like interdependence is eroding, where model-supported generalists can do more than they ever could before, and where winner-takes-all dynamics are accelerating. So while I agree with this article on a principled basis, I wonder if the conditions thing is...accurate.)
The OD implications
The authors recommend selecting and developing leaders with followership capabilities—but they stop short of asking how, given that the selectors themselves rose through the heroic model. Two structural interventions follow from their argument that they do not name:
- Design forums that require senior leaders to follow. The tension the article leaves unexamined—followership as stage versus followership as permanent practice—has structural solutions. Distributed Management breaks the manager role into component tasks assigned to the right person, creating regular opportunities for positional leaders to defer. Upward Representation brings elected team representatives into leadership meetings with equal speaking rights. Structured Decision-Making forces leaders to integrate input rather than simply collect it. Without scaffolding like this, "leaders should model good follower behavior" remains exhortation.
- Change who does the selecting. If those doing the hiring and promoting reached their positions by exhibiting heroic behaviors, telling them to select for humility is unlikely to work. Elections—peer selection of leaders, as W.L. Gore has practiced for decades—put the decision in the hands of people who have experienced candidates as followers, not just as leaders.
What to watch
- Leadership development programs. Most remain designed around executive presence and strategic vision. Whether they shift toward listening, feedback-seeking, and coachability will indicate how seriously organizations take this argument.
- Selection criteria for senior roles. The substantive test is whether organizations begin screening for humility and learning orientation alongside track record and industry expertise.
- The AI factor. If AI makes traditional expertise less exclusive, as the authors argue, I'd imagine that emotional intelligence and collaboration become relatively more valuable—and the followership model gains ground. But we'll see.