The Most Important Skillset We Almost Never Talk About

Leadership cannot exist without it.  Your performance review and your career depend on it.  It’s the most important skillset we almost never talk about: What it takes to be an effective follower. 

Modern research on this topic suggests that followership is so much more than passive obedience; it’s an active role we play in making our leaders, our teams and our agencies successful. 

Effective leaders require effective followers, and yet you’ll be hard pressed to find a “followership development program” or a resource list of followership coaches, classes, articles or books to support you with cultivating the art of effective following in yourself or in others.  

Let’s identify and address some of the challenges to making this skillset accessible and even something that we or others would want to aspire to.  The first obstacle to overcome is reaching a healthy definition of active followership.  Here is my research-informed top 10 list of following skills and it looks a lot more attractive than you might expect:

1. Independent Critical Thinking — Enhancing discussions and decisions with unique, constructive and careful analysis
2. Active Engagement — Demonstrating high energy, commitment and involvement that is agnostic to surrounding circumstances
3. Accountability — Owning it, whether it’s “yours” or not
4. Courage – Being proactive; saying and doing what needs to be said and done
5. Supportiveness — Helping colleagues succeed; championing our results, not just your results
6. Competence — Being an expert; consulting with others in ways that elevate their impact and minimize their pitfalls; doing quality work; continuously improving
7. Adaptability — Pivoting efficiently and demonstrating resilience
8. Emotional Intelligence — Relating with others optimally based on an accurate awareness of self and others
9. Influence without Authority — Gaining trust along with the ability to persuade and inspire
10. Stewardship — Managing resources wisely and acting in the public interest

Would you want to supervise someone who possessed these attributes?  Would you want to lead a team of people who approached their public service this way?  Anyone would. And therein lies the opportunity, because effective following starts with us.

A second obstacle to overcome is bringing followership to the surface so it can be central to our performance and development.  Some ways to do that include:

• Elevating service to mission and the public as a core value that defines our impact
• Identifying three or four areas from the list above where we have an opportunity to become better followers
• Sharing the list with our teams in the context of building self-awareness and valuable skills
• Considering how in touch we are with what our agencies, our leaders and our peers are trying to accomplish, and getting in touch with these things if we’re out of touch

Followership is a set of skills that deserves to be talked about.  Join the conversation or start the conversation where you serve. I suspect you’ll be amazed by where it takes you.

Ernest currently serves as a Personnel Research Psychologist within the Chief Human Capital Office of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He earned his Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Akron in 2016. Over the last 20 years, he has worked in for-profit, non-profit, and government settings while holding a variety of individual contributor and leadership roles. His areas of expertise and experience include assessment for hire and development, leadership development, employee engagement, performance management, and organizational change and transformation. 

Photo Credit: Mauro Motozono at pexels.com