Abstract
Followership is valuable for personal and organizational success, whether success is measured by satisfaction with work, improved team relationships, obtaining promotions, or quality and quantity of work output. Furthermore, senior executives and coaches recognize it as a critical skill. Despite this, creating effective followership training in the classroom is challenging because of media messages that preference leadership, internal schemas held by students that ignore followership, and cultural biases against it. This article presents a memorable kinaesthetic, visual classroom activity that introduces followership in a theory-agnostic way. The exercise begins with students introducing each other as leaders or followers, and then debriefing that activity using the Describe, Analyze, and Evaluate methodology from multicultural training. Over a 10-year period, the exercise has successfully engaged undergraduate and graduate students, MBA candidates, and working professionals from frontline to senior management.
A survey of successful collegiate coaches (Benson, Hardy, & Eyes, 2015) identified four followership qualities possessed by ideal athletes in team sports: collective orientation, active independent thought in the context of team values (see also Kelley, 1988), relational transparency, and the ability to process self-related information from leaders. The coaches also noted that team athletes have to possess situational awareness of followership such as knowing when to carry out specific orders or when to take a more proactive stance. The coaches approached leadership and followership as universal dynamic roles rather than as positions in a fixed hierarchy, specifically:
Everyone, even the head coach, takes on a followership role from time to time.
There has to be agreement on who is leading and who is following at any given time.
This acknowledgment is unusual; most discussions about team effectiveness focus on leadership. Leadership is promoted as aspirational and valuable (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985), while followership is considered unimportant or even demeaning. However, the assertion that followership is unimportant has never been validated. The few studies comparing contributions to team outcomes have shown an equal or greater influence of followership (Hoption, 2016; Rieck, Hausdorf, & Callahan, 2015; Sy, Tram, & O’Hara, 2006). Followership also has individual impact: early-career jobs involve greater followership than leadership skills (although see MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Paine, 1999), the attainment of managerial positions depends on followership (Agho, 2009; Latour & Rast, 2004), and one of the primary causes of executive derailment is poor followership (Gentry & Shanock, 2008; Lombardo, Ruderman, & McCauley, 1988; Van Velsor & Leslie, 1995).
Clearly, there is a need to change attitudes about the relevance of followership and improve understanding of what constitutes effective followership. The difficulty with this prescription, however, is the paucity of resources available for teaching followership in the classroom (e.g., Hurwitz & Hurwitz, 2015; Hurwitz & Koonce, 2016; Koonce, Bligh, Carsten, & Hurwitz, 2016; Morris, 2014; and some leadership texts now include a chapter on followership).
Introducing Followership to the Classroom
When I started teaching followership in the early 2000s, most clients refused to allow the use of the word follower, instead insisting on euphemisms such as leader support or partner. Undergraduate and graduate students were equally resistant to the idea; some held the opinion that followership was leadership poorly enacted, while others interpreted it as settling for a lesser position. About 5 years ago, attitudes began to change. When asked, students told me that following is an expected, healthy part of a reciprocal relationship in social media and that it did not carry negative connotations to them. Since about 2014, my professional and organizational clients have also stopped requesting euphemisms for followership, and adult workshop participants have been less uncomfortable with the term.
Even though attitudes are changing, there are still many hurdles to introducing followership in the classroom:
Schema incongruity from followership training, that is, the paradoxical outcome that followership training could enhance existing leadership schemas (Sullivan & Durso, 1984);
The followership label—whether other- or self-generated—has been found to result in lower positive affect and fewer extrarole behaviors (Hoption, Christie, & Barlow, 2012);
Difficulty remembering or encoding followership concepts due to the lack of relevant, existing schema (Poppenk, Köhler, & Moscovitch, 2010; van Kesteren, Ruiter, Fernández, & Henson, 2012);
Heterogeneity of implicit followership theories within the classroom, not so much by gender but certainly culturally based;
A lack of interest in followership, which could impair the encoding and retention of concepts (e.g., Schiefele, 1991).
Learning Objectives
With these constraints in mind, an effective introductory exercise has to normalize followership, foster an appreciation of its importance, develop self-awareness, distinguish leadership from followership, and promote a motivational orientation toward learning more about it. Specifically, the exercise has to be memorable, incontrovertible, and theory agnostic, that is, independent of but complementary to existing leadership and followership theories. Complementarity is critical because followership training is usually given in the context of a leadership course which is often either a survey of theories or based on a particular leadership model such as authentic leadership, transformational leadership, The Leadership Challenge, and so forth.
Introductions With a Twist: An Experiential Activity
The activity itself is straightforward. It works best before students know each other well or at the beginning of a leadership/followership workshop.
Recommended Audience and Use
I have used Introductions With a Twist with professional and student groups. It generates less discussion with the youngest students, but still has considerable value even with college freshman. The activity is optimal for groups of 60 students or less and it can be done in as little as 30 minutes although with an extensive use of the debrief questions, it could extend to over 3 hours.
Steps
Step 1: Ask students to partner with a person they do not know well. If there are an odd number of students, allow for at most one group of three people.
Step 2: Instruct students that they will be required to introduce their partner to the rest of the class.
Step 3: Give them 3 to 7 minutes to exchange information with their partner. If you are questioned on what information should be discussed, tell students to learn the name and a unique strength their partner is bringing to the classroom.
Step 4: When discussion time is up, give these instructions: “In the interest of time, I would like you only to tell us the name of your partner and whether you think they are a better leader or a better follower. Do not elaborate on why you made your choice, and you cannot choose both.” Even after this clear instruction, often someone tries to introduce his or her partner as both a leader and a follower. Let the student know that saying both is not an option; insist that they choose one or the other. If you are not firm on this, the exercise will fail.
Step 5: Once everyone has had a chance to introduce his or her partner, ask all the people identified as better leaders to stand in a group on one side of the room; do not use the front of the room for this as it heightens the sense of inequity between leadership and followership and distracts from the main message. Ask those identified as better followers to stand on the other side. Be sure to wait until after everyone has been identified as a leader or follower (Step 4) before telling them to move or it will influence how people identify their partner.
This exercise is too long for groups with greater than 60 students in the full format, but it can be shortened in one of two ways:
Have a subgroup do the activity and ask everyone else to take on the role of Observer.
Have everyone do Steps 1 to 4 in subgroups of 8 to 10 people. Only Step 5 and the debrief are done as a large group.
Common Occurrences for Introductions With a Twist
Usually, this activity results in most students (those identified as leaders) standing on one side of the room, with a considerably smaller group (the followers) standing on the other side. It provides indisputable visual representation of the bias toward leadership and against followership. There have been a few occasions when this pattern has not emerged, generally in workshops within organizations where the culture emphasizes service to others. For example, in a workshop I did for a chain of seniors’ residences, about as many people were identified as leaders than as followers. This organization had been doing intensive work on the culture and climate because they recognized that resident care was a collective effort of a number of professionals, not the exclusive domain of physicians or nurses. They had invested a lot of effort to introduce servant leadership theory within the organization—the idea that leaders are at their best when they are supporting, developing, and “serving” their followers. The elevation of the value of service neutralized the leadership meme that dominates public discourse. People at this organization were more willing to self-identify, and identify others, as followers. Even in this case, however, the debrief proved valuable.
Other reactions you may encounter include nervous laughter, someone commenting on the visual disparity of the leader versus follower sides of the room, a student verbalizing that they were miscategorized, or even a refusal to move to one side of the room or the other. There is no need to respond to these reactions.
Debrief
The debrief uses a learning framework from intercultural studies, the DAE (Describe, Analyze, Evaluate) model (Nam & Condon, 2010) that was designed to engage a classroom in discussions that confront deeply held beliefs.
Each stage in the debrief consists of a number of questions. It is sufficient to ask the questions, solicit input from the students, and facilitate the discussion. Sometimes you might have to encourage students to elaborate on their responses. The exercise and debrief mirror Kolb’s learning cycle: the exercise began with an experiential activity (concrete experience), followed by the Describe and Analyze questions (reflective observation), and finally the Evaluate questions (abstract conceptualization). Homework exercises allow for active experimentation.
Depending on the size of the group, the room setup, and the time allotted for the activity the debrief can be done either as a whole-group activity or used after dividing the class into smaller groups, each of which discuss the question among themselves. The stages of the debrief can also be used as homework reflection (see the appendix).
Stage 1: Describe
In the description stage, the purpose is to describe what happened, not discuss subjective interpretations of why things happened. Ensure students are objective, avoid value judgments, and do not use interpretive words such as “think” or “because.” There are three prompts to facilitate discussion in this stage:
Describe what you saw in detail, but avoid saying why you think it happened.
What did you hear?
What else did people do?
Students will always comment on the visual disparity between the two sides of the room, whereas more nuanced behaviors are ignored. Encourage them to talk about what happened during the process; for example, have them describe the conversation they had with their partner prior to doing the introductions. This is important because most will not have discussed the topic of leadership or followership in their dyads and, if some have, it would be useful to understand what they actually said. Prompt them to discuss body language, or what people said specifically. These additional observations provide the raw data for Stages 2 and 3.
Stage 2: Analyze
In the second stage, students analyze why the events they described happened:
How do you think others made their choice? Was it due to politeness? Was it a halo effect? Was it because of a bias for leadership or against followership?
What were your reactions to the activity? Why do you think I gave you this activity?
How did you make a choice of labeling your partner a better leader or follower? How do you think your partner made his or her choice about you? Was it accurate?
Students sometimes proffer that they did not know what to choose and picked an option randomly. It is worth confronting that response because, if the decision was random, the two groups would have ended up approximately equal in size. The disparity in the number of people identified as leaders rather than followers suggests another mechanism, such as a bias against calling someone a follower, was the cause.
Stage 3: Evaluate
Here, students have to evaluate the outcome they observed (objective), their personal reaction to what happened (subjective), and consider how it relates to their current perspectives (personal development and takeaways):
What would happen if everyone tried to lead or follow at the same time? Can you think of examples where this happens? Note: You can prompt students with an example such as the U.S. Congress or a group trying to decide what movie to go see.
How did you feel being introduced as a leader or follower? How did you feel having to introduce someone else this way?
Is it possible to be both a leader and a follower at the same time? Have you experienced this?
Conclusion
After trying many different ways of exposing students to followership, Introductions With a Twist is one of the few that has quickly peaked interest and shifted attitudes. Many times, one or more students will say to me afterward that it changed the way they think about followership, and leadership, too. It normalizes the use of the term followership without needing to identify what is effective followership; different activities are available for that purpose. I strongly suspect that Introductions With a Twist also reduces some of the negative associations with followership. Importantly, it is a memorable activity that frames discussions throughout a workshop or course. Regardless of whether this is students’ sole exposure to followership or the start of a more in-depth exploration, it is one of the best opening activities I know.
Footnotes
Appendix
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.