Not All Followers Are Sheep

Have you heard the latest about followers? I read about it, yup, in The Wall Street Journal. Barbara Kellerman, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that companies need to pay attention to what the followers are thinking about.
    It makes sense to me and, besides, not everyone can be (or should) be a leader. And aren't the followers the ones who do all that work? Some of the most successful companies seem to be headed by people and management teams that make it a point to understand what everyone is doing, not just the upper echelon executives. What they're discovering is that the followers are often much more aware of what's happening and why than say that isolated manager on the 32nd floor of the headquarters building somewhere in Upstate New York. The article uses an example from Best Buy, but you could take any retail establishment and see how important is, especially if you're trying to increase sales, to understand who buys what and why. It's not the managers necessarily who are going to really understand buyer behavior unless they're on the floor with their staff all the time. Staffer absorb dialogue they overhear and watch what happens when customers get ticked off or are so delighted that they want to run around the store (the staffers and the customers for that matter).
    Wise leaders, however, should also be aware of Kellerman's compelling classifications of followers. It's not enough to simply recognize that they exist; you need to know what they're made of, too. In her book, Followership, to be published in 2008, she presents five kinds of followers: bystanders who watch what's happening around them and are satisfied with the way things are; participants, who are "somewhat engaged" and can be supportive or not of their leaders; activists, who are "eager, energetic and engaged"; diehards, who, naturally, are "highly dedicated"; and the inevitable isolates who don't really care, detaching themselves from their leaders.
    One of the things that strikes me about all this is how often we make assumptions about people. For example, we may think of followers in one way and one way only: sheep. But clearly there are degrees of followership. Plus, some people would rather focus on one project and give up the chance to move up the corporate ladder. Leadership isn't necessarily the goal for everyone. I remember working for a company many years ago. It was very early in my career so a lot of things were new and untested. It was a technical company and there were some people who'd been there for a while who preferred their scientist status and didn't want to be leaders of the company. The company accommodated them by allowing these employees to focus on their projects but still receive the salaries that were normally given to those who moved up.
    We're not black and white. We have tendencies and interests that fall within a range, a rather large range sometimes. We ought to remember that before we assume one's abilities and dreams.