The next meditation on followership from Ira Chaleff’s excellent book “The Courageous Follower” is: I have the power to help leaders use power wisely. The use of power and influence is fundamental to leadership. Nothing is accomplished without the use of power in some form. The wise use of power advances the shared purpose of all constituents (e.g. employees, customers, community, shareholders) of the organization, instead of advancing the limited agendas and self-interest of the privileged few.
When purposeful leaders use their power wisely, they merit our loyalty and commitment. Because our loyalty is to the purpose and never to a personality, if our leaders wander off purpose, they need our help to get their behavior back on track. If we want to become truly courageous, purposeful followers, that is not an option – it is a fundamental responsibility.
Our power is rooted in our posture of assuming full responsibility for ourselves. We empower ourselves by seeking peer relationships with everyone at work. We give 100% percent to mastering our current responsibilities, then we find ways to partner with our leaders to continually improve our processes. We find smarter ways to do old jobs, new ways to attract customers, we take risks and we learn from our mistakes . We hold ourselves to the highest values we can envision. In every way that we can imagine, we share responsibility for our group and it’s success. An indispensable part of that responsibility is having the courage to take moral action to confront inappropriate or harmful behaviors and policies of our leaders when necessary.
When we behave like this, we are a force to be reckoned with. We do have power; consequently, we too must learn to use it wisely.
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Bret, your statement that “our loyalty is to the purpose and never to a personality” is on that bears repeating these days as there are many examples that can be seen where people are following a leader for their personality and not because of a shared purpose.
In fact, I would say in some cases, the disappointment people can have with their leaders comes from letting the leader run off course for so long as a result of ‘buying in’ to the personality, instead of keeping the focus on what it is they want to accomplish as a group.
As always, some fascinating insights, Bret. Thanks for sharing them.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Concur, Tanveer. Folks also seem to be very willing to allow themselves to become dependent on others, which is what the culture of personality feeds on. It is a big problem. Thanks for sharing! Bret
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