David N. Berg, Ph.D. Resurrecting The Muse: Followership In Organizations (1998)

 

FROM: THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF LEADERSHIP

EDITED BY

EDWARD B. KLEIN, PH.D.

FAITH GABELNICK, PH.D.

AND

PETER HERR, M.A.

PSYCHOSOCIAL PRESS

MADISON, CONNECTICUT

 

What are the psychological consequences for organizational members of the current focus on leadership?  What have we been asking of organizational members and how has it affected their ability to work?  When we promote leadership, what exactly are we trying to change about people's relationship to work?  Are we being successful?  What is the connection between leadership and followership?  What are the ways in which these apparent opposites are similar?  What have we been denying about each that has left the other impoverished and hollow?  Is it desirable from the individual or organizational point of view to change the way we think and feel about followership and leadership?  Is it possible?

Much is made of leadership these days.  In the political arena especially, when the frustrations and failures in the public sector involve a breakdown in hierarchical relationships as much as the insufficiencies of an individual at the top, the call goes out for better leaders.  In corporations and schools, the overwhelming emphasis is on developing leadership skills, for it is on these skills that the future of our competitiveness as a nation rests.  Followership, on the hand, is rarely brought up when leadership is being discussed, in spite of its obvious importance in the grand leadership plan (Kelley, 1988).  The proliferation of university courses and organizational training sessions that have leadership in the title is not matched by complementary attempts to teach and learn about followership.

 

 

This is a troubling state of affairs. It raises a number of questions that I would like to explore in this paper.  Why have we created an emphasis on leadership, an emphasis which makes it difficult to include an examination of followership?  Does this emphasis compensate for something in our culture or our organizations that fills us with an exaggerated need to promote leadership and to silence whatever haunts us about the notion of followership?  These questions and answers to them have not yet become part of our conversation about influence and authority in organizations.

Throughout this paper, in an attempt to address these questions, I will refer to my experience in 10 short workshops on the topic of followership and leadership in which I asked participants to explore what these terms mean.  I began these workshops a few years ago in my early forties.  It occurs to me now that my growing interest in the historically neglected topic of followership may have been an expression of a parallel theme in midlife:  a return to aspects of the self neglected or left behind in early adulthood (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978).  The participants in these workshops were all managers, mostly, though not exclusively, white and male, from a variety of countries.  Many of the participants are also at midlife.  My goal in these workshops has not been to convey information about leadership, but instead to give participants the opportunity for serious reflection about followership, an opportunity along with me to revisit a neglected topic.

 

 

FOLLOWERSHIP

The first thing I do in the workshop is ask people to write down two or three words that come to mind when they hear the word follower.  Most of the class members have little trouble doing the task, though a review of this apparently simple

Acknowledgements.  I would like to thank Clayton Alderfer, Marshall Edelson, MaryLou Phillips, Elana  Ponet, and James Ponet for thoughtful contributions to this chapter assignment reveals that there is some difficulty reporting uncensored thoughts and feelings.  After all, the request to write down one's associations to the word follower signals that this session on "Leadership and Followership" is going to start at the "bottom."  In the vast majority of organizational settings in which I have asked for such associations, the initial reactions are negative and demeaning: "sheep," "passive," "obedient," "serf," "lemming." Subsequent comments seek, in my opinion, to rejuvenate the image of a follower: "implementer,"  "cooperative," "team player," "learner."  This collective effort to resuscitate the notion of followership is only partially successful.

To the extent that the participants engage in this associative exercise, I think they have passed through a variety of stages in their relationship to the role of follower, a role each of them plays in their organization.  First, the participants articulate the negative reactions associated with a role that has, for the most part, been demeaned by the institutions and the society in which they function.  The frequency with which certain words are reported suggests that these are cultural or collective images that have been accepted by individuals.

 

 

Second, the vast majority of the participants have split off the follower role in the face of the organization's devaluation of it.  Who wants to acknowledge being a follower when the role is so organizationally and psychologically devalued?  To make matters worse, all of these participants consciously believe they have come to this class because of their "leadership" qualities.  They have come to enhance their leadership, sent by organizations increasingly calling for employees to be (transformational) leaders (not managers and certainly not followers).  In such a group, the question, "How many of you want your reputation to be that of a superb follower?" elicits only a handful of affirmative responses.  Yet most were probably selected as much for their unarticulated followership qualities than for any other attributes.

 

Finally, I think the members of the class begin to realize that they often find themselves in follower roles and more important, all of them supervise people who might legitimately be considered "followers" in some sense.  The desire to rejuvenate the concept of followership may reflect the group's effort to create a positive image of follower as they begin to reclaim it.  As they begin to describe followership in positive, valued terms it becomes easier to acknowledge and to claim their own followership. By the end of this part of the class, someone asserts that good leaders are really good followers and vice versa.  Followership, transformed into leadership, can now be accepted.  But what kind of follower has been "taken in"?  In the context of current organizational life, what does it mean to be a team player, or an implementer or a cooperative employee?  What kinds of followers have we allowed inside our organizations and why?  What kinds of leaders do they require?

 

 

LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS:  A COMPENSATION?

Research on leadership in the social sciences has paralleled society’s interest. Researchers have studied charisma, leadership styles and decision making, leadership traits, the functions of leadership, autocratic and democratic leadership, leadership and authority, and, of course, the personality of leaders.  But the last decade has seen this interest mushroom.  It was said in the 1970s that all biological research needed to be presented as cancer related in order to have a chance of being funded.  Leadership is, excuse the analogy, the cancer of the behavioral sciences in the 1990s.  Not only does the topic attract research dollars, it has also lent its name to an increasing number of chaired professorships, executive development courses, journal articles, and position descriptions within academe.

Outside the university, the development of leaders has replaced management, participation, strategic planning, and organizational change as the single most important issue facing modern institutions.  It is the leader who provides vision and inspires commitment within organizations.  Global thinking, customer focus, continuous improvement, and cutting edge technology are some of the tools needed to maintain competitive productivity and service, but it is leadership that makes it all come together.

 

 

The organizations of the 1950s and 1960s had done a very good job of creating loyal, obedient, hard-working employees.  In the United States, the psychological employment contract that emerged after the Second World War promised security in exchange for loyalty and the willingness to follow direction.  Leaders, those at the top of the organization chart, set the course, and the rest of the organization followed.  Managers made things happen as efficiently as possible.  Large private corporations became famous for voluminous job descriptions that provided detailed outlines of each job's duties and responsibilities (AT&T), for "management training" programs that taught employees the latest methods for improving production and quality (General Electric), and for consistent standards of behavior that were reliably observable throughout the organization (IBM). The Second World War also placed the United States in the driver's seat of the world's economy.

 

 

In conceptual terms, one could argue that the economic dominance of the United States had allowed leaders in this country to ignore the relational aspect of leadership.  It was as if the follower did not exist as anything or anyone other than the object of leadership.  The decades immediately after the Second World War gave rise to a psychologically impoverished notion of follower.  In the movie Twelve Angry Men (1961), for example, a "working man" is asked to "suppose" that the apparently guilt defendant is innocent. His response, "I'm not good at supposing, my boss does the supposing, but I'll try one . . .“ This meager view of followership was all that leadership in the United State needed from its followers.  Why complicate the leader-follower relationship when a simple one will suffice?  Why ask more of leaders and followers when less will do?  Why examine the leader-follower relationship, when focusing exclusively on the leader appears to yield the desired results?

 

 

When competition from both home and abroad began to put pressure on organizations in the United States the status quo no longer had the same appeal.  "Leaders" began to realize that in training obedient "followers" they had created a workforce that was ill-equipped to take initiative, envision problems, or opportunities and act upon them, and perhaps most important, collaborate with those above them.  They began to complain about employees who retreated from organizational problems by contending that solving such problems was "not my job."  These same leaders began to notice that their employees had been taught methods for handling relatively stable economic conditions but were unable to manage in "turbulent," changing work environments. It became increasingly clear that the behavioral norms intended to ensure consistency and conformity had worked too well.  Independence and creativity were in short supply. Everyone seemed to complain about the people below them.  No one seemed to realize that someone was complaining about them.

 

 

There arose a "progressive" call to harness the expertise that existed at all levels in the organization, to free the voices and the wisdom that had been locked up inside most employees by formal, rigid hierarchies.  Now, all of a sudden, those at the top wanted their followers to speak up, to offer new ideas, to criticize if such criticism could improve organizational performance.  The whole notion of management came under attack from academics and corporate leaders.  The consummate manager was now inadequate for the task.  Organizations needed leaders at all levels, people with initiative and vision, not just people who followed directions.  Those aspects of most people's jobs which had just recently been rewarded were, over the course of a decade or so, devalued.  What had been a limited but valued concept of followership was replaced by the notion that organizations didn't need followers at all, they needed more leaders.

 

 

When the story is told this way, the current emphasis on leadership in organizations can be interpreted as compensation for the limitations of the followership model created and nurtured in America during the 1950s and 1960s.  The contemporary value placed on leadership is the organization's attempt to adjust to defects or inadequacies in the hierarchical relationships it has fostered.  The defects in the leader-follower relationship have not been addressed directly, rather they are being compensated for by a renewed emphasis on one side of the relationship, the leader.  This conscious emphasis seems to suggest that if the follower were more like a leader, the organization would be better able to face and solve its problems.  The focus remains on the subordinate rather than on the leader-follower relationship and the implicit devaluing of followership is now total and complete.  The ideal organization is populated exclusively with leaders who, paradoxically think and act in accord with the leader at the top of the hierarchy.

 

 

To anyone familiar with organizational life, small-group dynamics, or collective endeavor of any kind, the idea of a group or organization filled with leaders and only leaders is not an appealing one.  Task-driven systems cannot function without responsible followership, so what can it mean when current conventional wisdom exhorts everyone to be a leader?  My answer to this question is that the new emphasis is what Smith (1984) would call a "morphostatic" shift.  The lexicon has changed but the underlying structure of the leader-follower relationship remains the same.  The responsibility for making the leader-follower relationship work remains with the "follower."  In the past the follower was asked to sign on, get with the program, follow orders, and support the boss.  More recently, this same follower is asked to be a leader, to have a vision, inspire others, solve problems, think long term, and be prepared to move on when opportunity (better offer) or circumstance ("downsizing") arise.  In both the old and the new version the leader-follower relationship stays the same.  The underlying paradigm of obedience remains, and the demands on the person in the "leader" role remain unexamined.

 

 

The defects or limitations of this relationship, the unchanging request for obedience, will continue to give rise to various forms of compensation unless they are examined and altered.  What would it mean to expand the meaning of responsible followership?  What would such a follower be like?

 

 

EXEMPLARY FOLLOWERSHIP: RECLAIMING WHAT WE KNOW

In the second part of the workshop I ask the participants to think about an exemplary follower, someone they would like to have working for them.  I ask them to consider followers from literature, mythology, life, movies, and television.  The purpose of the exercise is to see what images are in their minds about "good" followers and then to examine what it is about these followers that makes them exemplary.  Usually, I ask the participants to discuss their images in small clusters and then we list them and analyze the "nominations" in the large group.

 

 

The examples that are generated by this exercise are wide ranging, from Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame to the President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa, world famous for her work with the poor in Calcutta.  But there appeared to be some underlying "types": Spock (from the original "Star Trek" television series), Radar (from the "MASH" television series), and George Bush (during his years as Ronald Reagan's Vice President) illustrate the Second-in-Command follower.  These followers have a clear, military-style, subordinate relationship with the leader.  Most people, in describing why George Bush qualified as an exemplary leader, talked about his loyalty and his willingness to subordinate his own views in the face of his leader's goals and policies. This description makes it clear that people saw George Bush as having had his own opinions, different from Ronald Reagan's, and that he suppressed these in public for the sake of the leader.  Radar, the slightly goofy assistant to the colonel who commanded the mobile surgical unit on "MASH", is cited a follower because he always seemed to be able to bail the Colonel out of difficult situations by attending to things that the Colonel ignored or could not handle.  Radar was always there to clean things up in ways that almost always turned out all right.

 

 

Spock is the most complex of this group.  He is literally the second-in-command of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk's First Officer.  Spock is seen as an exemplary follower because he is loyal, smart, competent, dependable, and possessed of a set of skills that complement his captain's.  Like Radar, Spock sometimes rescues Kirk, but his contribution to Kirk is located as much in the relationship between the two as in Spock's personal qualities.  Where Kirk is emotional, instinctive, psychological, Spock is rational, analytic, and behavioral.  Interesting too, is the fact that Kirk is human, and his First Officer is part human and part Vulcan.  Spock is literally from another planet.

 

 

There is another "type" that resembles the second-in-command, but feels distinct because the hierarchical relationship between the leader and the follower is not a formal, organizational one.  These followers are sidekicks, assistants who usually accompany the leader, performing an important function but without an institutional role.  Tonto (the "Indian" friend of the Lone Ranger from the radio and television series), Watson (Sherlock Holmes' physician companion), and Lassie (the dog!) are illustrations of this follower.  Tonto is described as a loyal sidekick who, like Spock, has a set of skills complementary to those of the Lone Ranger and is often able to help his leader because of his relative invisibility ("no one pays attention to the Indian"), especially when contrasted with the Lone Ranger's imposing and distinctive persona.  Also like Spock, Tonto belongs to a different "group" from the Lone Ranger and many of his contributions (tracking, information, stealth) derive from his membership in this group.  Finally, it is clear from the description of Tonto that the Lone Ranger trusts him implicitly.

 

 

Watson is to Sherlock Holmes what Tonto is to the Lone Ranger.  Watson, too, has a unique set of skills that complement those of the Great Detective.  Where Holmes's mind is always racing ahead, Watson is left to tie things up, gather information, attend to details.  Holmes notices everything, Watson appears to notice almost nothing.  Yet it is to Watson to whom Holmes turns for important research and information.  Here again it is interesting to notice that Watson belongs to a different "group," he is a physician, what today we might call a medical examiner, whose skills enhance those of his leader, detective Holmes.  Unlike the second-in-command, these sidekicks are intimately connected to their leaders ("My dear Watson") in ways that make it almost impossible to imagine one without the other.  Bush went on to be President, Radar served at least two colonels on the "MASH" series, and Spock became a towering "Star Trek" figure in his own right.  But, it is hard to imagine Tonto without the Lone Ranger or Watson without Holmes.

 

 

The final sidekick is unusual.  Lassie is not only from a different group, but from a different species altogether!  Yet the themes remain.  It is precisely Lassie's difference that enables her to perform invaluable functions for her master.  Time after time, Lassie saves the boy by being able to escape, to track, to retrace steps, to intimidate intruders, and incite other animals as only a dog could.  At other times, and in an oddly psychoanalytic way, Lassie's inability to speak English allows the boy to express and explore feelings that might otherwise be impossible.  And of course, Lassie is dependable, loyal, skilled, and competent.

 

 

The third type of exemplary follower is the Partner.  In my experience with this exercise, partners are most often female just as second-in-command and sidekick examples tend to be male.  This is undoubtedly an artifact of the social roles that have been available and assigned to men and women in literature, movies, government, and mythology.  It may also be the way we interpret the roles that women have played in the leader-follower relationship.  It is also interesting to note that some might not even consider a partner to be a follower, and yet these relationships involve mutual contributions across a hierarchy, though a hierarchy that is societal rather than organizational and informal rather than formal.

 

 

Alice B. Toklas began a lifelong partnership with Gertrude Stein in the early 1900s. To the outside world, Gertrude Stein, born to wealth and endowed with a lively, poetic creative spirit was the artistic talent.  Alice B. Toklas was her companion and lover, whose support and management made Gertrude Stein's contributions possible.  Gertrude was the genius, Alice took care of managing this genius in public.  The relationship was more complex and textured than this simple story line.  Alice took care of the details, the shopping, cooking, scheduling, and finances, and these "chores" enabled Gertrude Stein to devote herself to writing.  Alice took to her work with the same energy and vitality that Gertrude brought to hers.  Both acknowledged that Gertrude's career could not have unfolded the way it did without Alice's many-faceted support.

 

One could also say that Alice was Gertrude's muse, the partner whose presence, intellect, love, and companionship provided the necessary stimulus for Gertrude's literary talent. Was Alice the leader and Gertrude the follower? It seems clear that Alice could not write the way Gertrude could. It also seems clear that Gertrude might not have been able to write, and certainly would not have been as successful at publishing, had it not been for the role Alice played in her life (Souhami, 1991). Did one "serve" the other?  It would seem so, but it remains a matter of frame to decipher who was the master and who the servant in the various domains of their life together. (Some have even argued that Gertrude wasn't a great literary talent at all, but, that Alice's management made her so. Who's the genius now?)

 

 

Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland and denied entry into the University there because she was a woman.  Early in her adult life she tutored the children of rich families to earn a living.  When she went to Paris, finally, to study physics, her life changed.  There she met Pierre Curie, a professor of physics, and together, first as student and teacher, then as wife and husband, the two discovered radium, won a Nobel prize (she won two), and pioneered a field that influenced everything from cancer treatment to atomic energy.  So why does Marie Curie's name come up when some people (men and women) are asked to think of exemplary followers?

 

 

To some extent the answer to this question is rooted in gender stereotypes, the historical diminishing of a woman's role in the domains of work traditionally dominated by men (like science), and the inevitable attempts by those who witness a collaboration to pick apart the contributions in order to answer the insidious question,  "Which of the two was really the genius?" When I look at the relationship between Marie and Pierre, embedded as it was in a world which had straitjacket expectations for both men and women (Marie Curie became the first female professor at the Sorbonne in its 650-year history only after the death of her husband), I notice two things that are strikingly similar to the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and therefore might explain a piece of the perception of Marie as a follower.

 

 

First, as was traditional in her time, Marie Curie took care of all the household responsibilities (including raising two children) in addition to her scientific work.  In this sense, the division of her energies enabled her husband (the older and academically more senior "partner") to devote his full energies to work.  Second, in dividing up the work on radium into the various investigations that needed to take place, Marie, in spite of her superior training and experience with radium, took the more tedious, mechanical work giving Pierre the more stimulating experimental tasks (Curie, 1937; Giroud, 1986).  In both circumstances the "choice" may have been overdetermined by the society as well as by contemporary marital arrangements.  As a consequence of these choices, Marie Curie not only did her own scientific work, but supported her husband's as well.

 

 

Eleanor Roosevelt too emerges in some discussions of exemplary followers, especially when both men and women participants are prompted to think about women in followership roles.  Again (and this is striking) the context for a leader-follower partnership is (at least initially) a love relationship, and again, the perception of the woman's follower role is likely to be heavily influenced by the construction of women's roles in society.  Eleanor Roosevelt was given a platform for the expression of her intellectual gifts, her vision for America, and the world, and her moral voice, as a result of her husband's election to the Presidency of the United States.  But her interests had been developed through long and sustained commitments and they were different from her husband's.

 

 

Though a leader in her own right after Franklin Roosevelt died, Eleanor Roosevelt used her relationship to the President to advance her concerns (e.g., The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights).  There is a way in which Franklin Roosevelt's leadership was enhanced, both during his life and after his death, by the independent actions and causes of his wife. Especially after the deterioration of their romantic relationship, the "marriage" was held together, in part, because each of them needed the other (Lash, 1971). Franklin needed Eleanor for political reasons; Eleanor needed the resources her association with Franklin could generate in order to develop her own projects.

 

Finally, the request for exemplary followers has elicited a fourth type, Groups. There were many fewer examples of this type, in part because the instructions suggested an individual follower.  The apostles of Jesus Christ are often mentioned.  This group of men carried on the work of their prophet, spreading his teachings throughout the Western world, and eventually founded a Church in his name.  The initial discussion of the Apostles emphasizes loyalty and commitment to the vision of the leader as the defining characteristics of their followership.  A second look reveals that most of them struggled with betrayal and doubt (Peter denied Jesus twice, Judas Iscariot betrayed him, and Thomas has lent his name to the expression "doubting Thomas") during their followership.  Some raised questions of Christ all along the way.  Others, in the face of danger and persecution, found it hard to acknowledge their allegiance publicly.  Still others fled the responsibility of discipleship when the leader died.  The story of the Apostles' followership is an account of both loyalty and betrayal; obedience, fidelity, and doubt.  It is a particularly valuable example of followership not only because it involves a group, but also because it testifies to the difficulties inherent in the most devoted of leader-follower relationship.

 

 

Japanese Kabuki theater also provides an interesting example of a group of followers. In addition to the actors, Kabuki theater includes two other roles present on stage during the performance. One of these, kurago, refers to helpers who provide the actors with the props they need. These helpers are dressed in black (like the background of the theater) and become "invisible" to the audience, though present on the stage, throughout the play. The kurago are a necessary and integral part of the presentation, but their function is to supply the actors with what they need and thereby promote the action and flow of the story.

The third example of a group of followers also comes from Asia. There are many versions of the story of the famous leader Liu Pei, but all of them describe his relationship with three followers (Mercatante, 1988).  Liu Pei was a great, charismatic leader whose leadership appeared effortless, and he had had three followers.  Chang Fei was as strong as a bull but witless.  He was a loyal, obedient follower whose strength protected Liu Pei and all that he stood for.  If Chang Fei was a foot soldier, Kwan Kong was Liu Pei's General, an army chief whose combination of military leadership and worldly wisdom made him a valuable counselor.  Kong Wing was the clever assistant, strategic in his thinking and expert in charting a course through the political waters of Liu Pei's domain.  The story of Liu Pei's followers is often summed up: "Every hero needs three to help."

 

 

THEMES IN THE DATA

The richness of the examples generated in these workshops surprised me.  In light of the initial reactions that participants had to the notion of a follower, I expected their examples to be flat and forced.  I imagined the participant would draw the picture of a follower in muted tones, browns, grays, beige, to match the psychological image they carried around with them.  Instead, the exemplary followers were extremely interesting characters.  All of them were bold and colorful, the kind of people (and a dog) you would like to meet and get to know.

 

 

In almost all of the examples presented here, the follower is described as loyal and supportive.  Only in the case of the Apostles was there evidence of disloyalty and this was the unexpressed, "shadowy" side of a relationship that was offered as an archetype of discipleship.  Eleanor Roosevelt struggled with her commitment to Franklin Roosevelt in the aftermath of his infidelity, but she remained in the marriage and supported the president in the service of her individual and their shared goals.  In every other example, loyalty and support appear to be the bedrock of the leader-follower relationship.

Yet in most cases, the words loyalty and support, while accurate, do not capture the emotional connection between the leader and this "exemplary" follower.  In most of these examples there is more.  Affection, and in many cases love, is also present in these relationships.  Not only is it present where one might expect it, in the partners, it is also present in the military examples (the mutual affection between Spock and Kirk is itself the subject of a number of the show's episodes; Radar's relationship with the Colonel is warmly familial), in the sidekick examples (Tonto, Watson, and Lassie), as well as the follower groups (most notably the Apostles).

 

 

It is difficult to know whether affection and love are necessary conditions for an exemplary leader-follower relationship or whether it is a by-product of such a relationship.  The presence of these emotions suggests that, whatever their cause, they play an important role.  Perhaps the affection reassures both the leader and follower during those times when each must show his or her limits and weaknesses to the other. Love might serve as an antidote to fears of exploitation, allowing for the expression of vulnerability and increasing the chances of meaningful collaboration.  Mutual affection might enable the follower to express both competence and strength, contributions that might be suppressed in the face of a less accepting emotional relationship.  It is also possible that a leader-follower relationship that includes affection and love is better able to survive the strains such a relationship inevitably faces: conflict, disagreement, betrayal, tension, incapacity, and danger.

 

 

Another theme in these examples is that the follower seems to have his or her own distinct voice.  The follower's voice can be heard alongside the leader.  It is as if one is listening to music, a duet, or in some cases an ensemble.  Each voice is distinct and contributes an element to the overall sound of the piece.  In some of the examples, the actual voice is a concrete representation of this metaphor.  Spock, for example speaks in deep measured tones.  Lassie barks, Tonto speaks with the accent of a native American who has learned the language of the white man, Radar has the timing and cadence of a Vaudevillian comic, and Watson persists in posing questions.  One can also imagine Marie Curie's French spoken with a Polish accent.  In a more metaphorical way, Liu Pei's followers each had his own voice, each sang a different tune, each consistently played a distinctive theme.

In most of these examples not only do we hear the voice of the follower, it is also apparent that the leader heard this voice as well.  The ideas, concerns, special perspective, and even conflicting views of the follower do not go unheeded.  Alice B. Toklas succeeded in supporting and developing Gertrude Stein's career because the latter was willing to listen and be influenced by the former.  The Lone Ranger respected and relied upon Tonto's special abilities and skills.  He often wondered out loud about events that mystified him, thereby soliciting Tonto's thoughts.  Often Tonto's ideas became a catalyst for a plan or course of action.  In a similar way, Captain Kirk relied on Spock to provide information, perspective, and insight.  Like Gertrude Stein, the Lone Ranger and Kirk treated their "exemplary follower" not merely as a helper or source of information, but as a muse, a person who inspired their own thinking, their own creativity.

 

 

Many of the followers identified by participants were somewhat invisible to the outside world, they "labored in the shadow" of the leader.  The leader is the main character of the story, the elected official, the actor, the prophet, the colonel or the captain, the writer or detective.  The spotlight is usually on the main character and as a result the follower works in relative obscurity, off stage or behind the scenes.  Tonto is sent off to scout things out, Spock to do an analysis, Toklas to take care of the arrangements, Watson to provide materials and back up.  The kurago in Kabuki theater are dressed in black to match the darkened background so as to be literally invisible as they perform their function.  And, in the United States, Vice Presidents are known for disappearing right after the election for approximately 3½ years.  In some cases, these followers emerge from this relative obscurity upon the death or retirement of the leader (Curie, Bush, some of the Apostles).  In other cases, public visibility is never a part of their lives (Toklas, Watson, Tonto).

 

 

The phrase "laboring in the shadow" of the leader also has a psychological meaning, however.  This meaning helps explain the lack of public prominence as well.  In Jungian terms, the shadow includes those aspects of the personality that we want to hide or disown.  Often (though not always) it is that which we feel is inferior, weak, worthless, horrid or otherwise unacceptable.  The psychological work of becoming whole involves a kind of reconciliation with the shadowy aspects of our personality.  From this perspective, the follower works on those issues that the leader, for whatever reason, keeps hidden and cannot engage directly.  The follower may be invisible precisely because of the leader's unconscious desire to keep these shadowy issues from being exposed.

 

 

Spock, for example, represents pure rationality, a Vulcan trademark, while Captain Kirk symbolizes uncanny intuition and the importance of emotional connection.  Spock is thinking, rational and conscious.  Kirk is feeling, irrational and unconscious.  While Spock is fascinated with the existence and function of emotion in human beings, Kirk struggles against Spock's rationality, a quality that Kirk too must have in great quantity because of the training and selection required of a twenty-fourth century starship captain. Spock's work is in Kirk's psychological shadow and Kirks work is to maintain a meaningful conversation with Spock.

 

 

Tonto, in a similar way, can be seen as representing those aspects of the Lone Ranger that, especially in the Texas Ranger culture of that era, were deemed inferior and unacceptable.  Tonto was an "Indian," a Native American deeply connected to the land, essentially nonviolent-and nonwhite.  He was an outsider to the culture, imperiled because of his identity.  The Lone Ranger, white from head to toe, seemed to struggle with violence.  He carried two guns, was dedicated to bringing criminals to justice and to avenging wrongdoing, yet he always aimed to disarm or disable his attackers, never to kill them.  And, of course, his identity was a major source of struggle.  The masked man wore a mask because disclosure of his identity placed him in danger.

 

 

Alice B. Toklas took care of all those details that Gertrude Stein couldn't and didn't want to handle.  Perhaps most interesting, Alice managed Gertrude's career and made sure that Gertrude had the notoriety and exposure that she loved and enjoyed while at the same time sparing Gertrude from having to attend to such things.  Alice labored in those shadowy aspects of Gertrude's personality that Gertrude may have considered beneath her at worst and unappealing at best, but Gertrude knew how important this work was to ensure her satisfaction with life.  She maintained a loving and sustained relationship with Alice and through Alice with these mundane and ambitious aspects of herself.

 

 

This discussion of the shadow suggests that the role of muse has both personal and extrapersonal dimensions to it.  In addition to the ways in which a follower's different views, identity characteristics, group memberships, and experience can stimulate or inspire the thought or action of the leader, the follower can also allow the leader to develop a relationship with the leader's own unconscious, the hidden, shadowy issues that are simultaneously a source of struggle and creativity.  The follower can "help" in this way only if he or she can express these shadowy issues with some integrity and only if the leader is able to not only tolerate but engage them.

 

 

Finally, all of the examples describe a special leader-follower relationship which is collaborative and complementary.  The followers are not merely clones of the leader, each complements the leader in one or more ways; skills, views, commitments, experience, background, identity, group memberships, or emotional makeup.  As the picture of the follower is developed more fully it becomes clear that the leader could not have succeeded without this complementarity.  The relationship, rather than the individual (leader or follower), emerges as a unit that was able to accomplish what neither could have done alone.  The collaboration between leader and follower is a creative connection across one or more dimensions of difference.  It is the differences that make the creativity possible.  In some of the examples described above the differences involved organizational role, position in a formal hierarchy or authority in the wider world.  In other cases the leader and follower came from different worlds, both literally and figuratively, deriving their individual perspectives from the cultures in which they were raised.  In still other cases, background and training provided the complementary difference.  In all of the cases, the leader-follower relationship was far more than the obedient, faceless, voiceless image that most of us initially associate with "follower."  In its exemplary form, the leader-follower relationship is a collaboration.

 

 

IMPLICATIONS

A collaborative relationship between leader and follower, like any collaborative relationship, places a number of demands on both parties.  But unlike a collaboration between peers, the leader-follower collaboration is a hierarchical one involving differences in authority and status.  Such a collaboration makes special demands on the leader, the follower, and the relationship that binds them.

 

 

Demands on the Leader

Perhaps most important for the leader who seeks to create a relationship that enables the follower to contribute his or her skills, perspective and "wholeness" to the work is an acceptance by the leader of his or her own weaknesses and limits.  Most of us subscribe to the notion that all humans have weaknesses and limits, but many fewer of us are comfortable with the personal consequence of this notion.  It is difficult to take an intensive, systematic, and public look at our weaknesses, and the entire process of being reminded of our limits can be distressing.  Leaders in organizations face an additional hazard in acknowledging weakness and limitation: organization members tend to admire perfection in their leaders, thereby putting pressure on them to hide or cover up their shortcomings (Kaplan, Kofodimos, & Drath, 1987).  As a result, the natural inclination away from scrutinizing weakness, combined with the organizational press for perfect leaders, conspires to rob leaders of some significant self-understanding and followers of a chance to form a collaborative relationship.

 

In one recent workshop the participants were describing a valuable follower as a person who can save the leader when he or she gets into trouble.  Someone used the metaphor of "pulling the leader out of a burning house."  In our discussion of this metaphor, it became clear that the leader had to allow him or herself to be rescued.  The leader needed to accept help, to acknowledge his or her inability to survive alone.  In the extreme, leaders who could not accept their limitations (or the limitations imposed on them by a situation) would tell the rescuing follower to get out of the burning house shouting, "I can handle the situation just fine, thank you."  Such leaders would perish.

 

 

An acceptance by the leader of his or her imperfections and limits, allows followers the opportunity to contribute valued competencies.  I use the word acceptance because the challenge for the leader is not merely an intellectual understanding of the concept of strengths and weaknesses prevalent in the general population, but a personal understanding that allows weakness and limitation to coexist with strength and expanding potential.  Winnicott's (1965) concept of the "good-enough mother" would seem to be applicable to the leader-follower relationship as well.  The good-enough leader is someone who provides enough direction, guidance, skill, and influence to enable the follower to make their own contribution to the work but is not someone who conveys that he or she is able to know and do everything (better than anyone else).  The perfect leader leaves no room for the contributions of the follower.  Fortunately, there is no need for a leader to manufacture areas of weakness; the struggle is often to allow ourselves to acknowledge and accept them.

 

 

Hierarchical differences, formal and informal, between leaders and followers also raise another critical issue.  For those with authority the issue is how they respond to rebellion, and for those who feel without authority the issue is how to initiate and conduct rebellion. In many cases the act of rebellion is how followers make the relationship with leaders and institutions their own, how they develop an investment in something they may not have created but of which they have become a part.  I believe such a feeling comes, in part, out of a successful rebellion, successfully handled.

 

 

The leader-follower relationship must be established and then developed.  Since this relationship involves different levels of authority or power, one question confronting the relationship is how much influence each will have on the other.  Rebellion is sometimes the follower's expression of this question.  How that rebellion is handled is the authority figure's answer.  In its simplest form, a rebellion is handled successfully by a leader when he or she is able to convey that disagreement, even strong disagreement is a part of any leader-follower relationship and is often necessary for the relationship to succeed in its work.  This, of course, requires the leader to have a substantial level of comfort in the face of being challenged.  At the same time, the leader must convey that the expression of strong disagreement is part of a continuing relationship and is therefore different from an effort to destroy it, for such an intention, if recognized should be dealt with on its own terms.  This requires that the follower launch his or her rebellion from a platform of some significant commitment to the leader.

 

 

A final thought regarding the demands on the leader who chooses to move toward a collaborative relationship with a follower.  Striving for creative connections across inter-group differences (e.g., race, gender, ethnicity, social class) brings with it two kinds of struggles, ones that we have glimpsed in the examples discussed in this paper.  The connection across identity group boundaries always takes place in the context of both the historical and current relationship between the two groups (Alderfer & Smith, 1982). Kirk's relationship with Spock therefore occurs against the backdrop of Earth-Vulcan history as well as the current relationship between the two planets.  The Lone Ranger's relationship with Tonto is formed and maintained in the face of the historical and contemporaneous relationship between the white man and the Indian in America. Similarly, relationships across an organizational hierarchy (e.g., the army) are formed and sustained in light of the way those levels have interacted in the past as well as the present. If, for example, senior management has a history of exploiting middle management and has recently hired new senior level executives from outside the company instead of hiring from within, any leader-follower relationship will struggle with both of these contextual influences.

 

 

For the leader this means managing (1) their relationship with the group or groups to which the follower belongs, and (2) their own group's reactions to a leader-follower relationship that spans two different groups.  In the first case, the leader may have to cope with stereotypes, family experiences, cultural prejudices, ignorance and fear in order to make a relationship with a follower. The fire chief who hires a female firefighter into a historically all-male department, and the white store owner who hires a Hispanic clerk for the first time, face the legacy of their own group memberships as they reach across culture and identity to initiate this kind of new relationship.  Branch Rickey, the white owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers faced not only his own prejudice, but the wrath of baseball's other white owners when he signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in baseball's major leagues (Polner, 1982).

 

 

But these leaders also face another struggle, as potent if not more potent than the first. They must manage their relationship with their own group's reactions to the followers they have chosen or recruited.  The fire chief is likely to encounter significant anger and hostility from the male firefighters who not only resent the presence of women in the firehouse but now view the chief as a traitor.  The white storeowner may have to face jokes and innuendo from other store owners.  And Branch Rickey suffered the taunts and castigation of fans, players, and owners alike for breaking the color barrier in baseball.  A leader-follower relationship that has the potential for collaboration across individual differences also demands that both the leader and the follower contend with the groups to which each belong.

 

 

Demands on the Follower

This paper contends that the follower depends on the leader for many of the conditions that foster effective followership.  But a collaborative leader-follower relationship also places certain demands on the follower.  The follower must find his or her own voice and the willingness to use it.  The follower's voice is the vehicle by which he or she expresses an idea, a solution, a critical perspective, an opinion or a feeling.  Finding this voice means developing a way of communicating with the leader that allows for direct and relatively uncensored exchange.  Finding the willingness to use one's voice means developing the capacity to take the risks necessary to say what one actually thinks and feels, an especially difficult undertaking in a hierarchical relationship.

This last requirement points out that followers need a certain amount of plain courage to play their role. The strength to persevere when confronted with fear or difficulty is often crucial to the development of a collaborative leader-follower relationship.  While it is true that the leader, too, may be fearful at times, the followers themselves bear most of this burden.  Speaking up to or against someone with more power and authority always entails the risk of losing one's job, being demeaned, feeling inadequate, or being attacked. The hierarchical character of the leader-follower collaboration heightens the follower's need for courage.  As the relationship develops, the need for courageous acts might decline, but in a hierarchical world, it never disappears.

 

 

Demands on the Relationship

The leader-follower relationship is an entity all its own.  The stance taken by both the leader and the follower toward their relationship influences the degree of candor, conflict, support, and trust that develops between them.  In addition, there are many forces acting upon this relationship.  How the relationship manages these forces shapes the nature of the leader-follower collaboration.

 

 

In most organizations, for example, evaluation and promotion practices are part of the context in which leaders and followers are asked to work together.  In a world in which followers are competing for the jobs of those above them, is difficult to expect leader-follower relationships to discuss the limits of each other's skills.  If such a conversation were to take place, it is difficult to imagine that it could be free of concerns about the misuse of information in the highly charged promotional sweepstakes always at play.  On the other hand, this same environment raises concerns about exploitation, for the leader too is engaged in finding a place further up the hierarchy and may be tempted to present collaborative work as individually conceived.  These are just two examples of the potentially corrosive effects of "standard" organizational practices on a collaborative leader-follower relationship.  Although there are no simple remedies for these circumstances, a relationship that denies such forces exist or somehow reinforces in the leader and follower a belief that these forces will not affect them, is crippling itself. 

 

 

A collaborative relationship may also face the effects of shifting subordination.  Unlike a leader-follower relationship in which the leader's opinions and decisions always dominate, a collaborative relationship, by its very character, involves periodic shifts of influence.  The complementary strengths and weaknesses require the leader to follow (at times) and the follower to lead (at other times).  Can the relationship tolerate the leader being "down" or the follower being "up?"  Does this shifting subordinacy threaten to undermine the authority differential that is part of the leader-follower relationship?  How does this shifting subordination look to the world surrounding the leader-follower relationship?

 

 

This last question points to still other forces pressing on the leader-follower relationship. Among the many groups leaders and followers belong to are their peer groups within the organization in which they work.  Other "leaders" may be subtle or bold in the ways they communicate their reactions to a leader in a collaborative relationship. When, for example, a Board of Education president invites public participation at a Board meeting, he may hear from his colleagues (in Executive Sessions) about the need to be firmly in control at all times or he may receive a suggestion to limit comments by "visitors" to the final item on the meeting's agenda.  Followers, too, receive messages from other "followers" about how they should or should not relate to leaders (e.g., union members who have a stake in the status of leader-follower relationships throughout an organization).  As is the case with other "external" forces, the leader-follower relationship must provide a setting in which these messages can be discussed and in which both leader and follower can explore ways of managing them.  If the relationship cannot function in this way, the relationship runs the risk of being swamped by inter-group pressures or cut off from them, in either case limiting its viability in the organization.

 

 

Finally, the Latin roots of the word collaboration trace back to both colabor (to work together) and colapsis (to fall apart).  The emotional reality expressed in these apparent opposites describes the possibility as well as the hazard of collaborative work.  A leader-follower relationship must struggle with the inevitable strain of holding together a creative undertaking that is founded on nurturing difference as well as commonality.  To nurture difference is to cultivate precisely that which has the potential to divide, to separate, to inflame while simultaneously revealing connection and illuminating new possibilities.  Differences are at the heart of relational creativity (much like divergent thinking is at the heart of individual creativity), but these differences demand that a collaboration survive periods of conflict, disagreement and separation.

 

 

CONCLUSION

The increasing preoccupation with leadership runs the risk of relegating followership to the dim, grey often shameful back alleys of organizational life.  Paradoxically, the more we praise the virtues of leadership, the more we disparage the notion of followership; the more we encourage people to lead, the more we dissuade people from following.  It is the connection between leadership and followership that needs our collective attention.  If we create a relationship between leaders and followers that can enable and contain a full collaboration, perhaps we can release the vibrant, colorful follower present in each of us.

 

 

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