Earlier in my career working in leadership development – it started some time ago – I remember being struck by just how many different ways there were to think about leadership. There were different definitions of leadership, different models for what effective leadership looked like, different approaches to developing it, and different lists of competencies that leaders were supposed to master. If you asked ten people to define leadership, you might get ten different answers.
Over the years, I came to believe that one of the problems was that we were often defining leadership by what leaders did rather than by how their actions affected the people around them.
Leadership isn’t necessarily about accomplishing results. Results are important, of course, but people in positions of authority can accomplish results without necessarily being effective leaders. Leadership isn’t simply getting work done through the efforts of others, either. Managers have legitimate authority to assign work, establish expectations, evaluate performance, and hold people accountable.
People can comply because they have to. So what makes leadership different?
For me, the answer became clearer when I was researching the relationship between leadership and trust. I kept encountering another body of academic literature that dealt with the concept of followership.
And the followership literature helped me recognize an important distinction between a subordinate and a follower.
A subordinate is defined by an organizational relationship. Someone has authority, and someone else reports to them. Followership is different. Followership involves a willingness to accept another person’s influence. Although the terminology varies across the academic literature, the idea of voluntarily following appears repeatedly in discussions of what separates genuine followership from simple compliance or subordination.
That distinction changed the way I thought about leadership. Leadership ability is best measured by the extent to which it inspires voluntary followership.
A title can give you authority and a promotion can give you employees. The organizational will show that you have subordinates. But none of those things automatically gives you followers. Those have to be earned.
This way of thinking about leadership isn’t particularly radical within the academic literature, but I don’t hear it discussed nearly as often in mainstream conversations about leadership. And I think that’s unfortunate, because it gives us a much clearer way to evaluate leadership effectiveness.
Instead of asking only, What results did this leader produce? or How effectively does this leader manage the work?, we can ask another question: To what extent do people willingly choose to follow this person?
Of course, that creates another problem. How do you measure it? You could simply ask your employees: Do you trust me as a leader? Do you believe I am effective? Do you willingly choose to follow my leadership?
And I can predict what most leaders would hear. “Absolutely.” “You’re doing a great job.” “Of course I trust you.”
The problem is that there is an enormous power difference between a leader and an employee. Telling your leader what you really think can have consequences—or at least employees may believe that it can. That makes the answers themselves dependent on trust.
If employees trust you enough to believe that honesty is safe, they may tell you what they really think. If they don’t, they may tell you what is safest for you to hear. There is an irony in that: the leaders who most need candid feedback may be the least likely to receive it.
That’s why meaningful leadership assessment requires more than simply asking leaders how they think they are doing. It requires creating a safe way to hear from the people who experience their leadership every day. And the question isn’t whether those people like the leader; leadership isn’t a popularity contest.
The question is what happens when that person attempts to lead. Do people trust their judgment? Do they believe their intentions? Do they accept their influence only because the organizational structure requires it—or have they developed enough trust in this person that they choose to follow?
That is the distinction that matters to me. After decades of studying, teaching, and developing leaders, I still appreciate many of the leadership models I encountered along the way. They help us understand the behaviors and capabilities that can make someone a better leader.
But ultimately, leadership isn’t proven by what appears on an organizational chart or by what a leader believes about themselves. The evidence is in the people who choose to follow.
Authority can be given with a title; compliance can be required as part of a job. Followership has to be earned.