Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Credit: Tutti Frutti (Shutterstock) Following the leader Most employers focus on leadership, but followership skills are important too BY LIZ BERNIER Imagine if we taught ballroom dancing the way we teach leadership in organizations: Take the leader into a room on his own and teach him to lead on his own while his partner effectively sits out in the hall — staring at the wall, twiddling her thumbs. "It sounds crazy. In ballroom dancing, we would never expect to get optimal results that way — but yet that's what we do in or- ganizations," said Samantha Hur- witz, Toronto-based co-founder and chief encouragement officer of FliPskills, speaking at a recent Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto. Most organizations have a very strong focus on leadership devel- opment. But there is no discus- sion of or support for develop- ing the followership role — even though every single person in the organization is, at some time or another, a follower. "We all have a leadership role and a followership role, and yet all we ever talk about is leader- ship, all we ever acknowledge is leadership, all we ever develop is leadership," said Samantha. "We're not saying that leader- ship isn't important — leadership is important. Leadership is a chal- lenging job, but it's not the only job you have. It's half your job — it's half the story. If you want more leadership, better leadership, bet- ter organizations, you need to bring focus to the other half of the story, and foster followership too." e followership role needs to be acknowledged, recognized, given feedback and developed. "Unlike dancing, we don't stay in one role all the time — we're not a leader all the time or a follower all the time. Rather, we take on a leadership role or a followership role as the situation requires. e same person who's a great leader one moment has to flip to being a great follower the next." Necessary condition for success A University of Indiana survey by professor Augustine Agho of 300 C-suite executives found senior leaders almost unanimously un- derstand the impacts followership has on work, said Marc Hurwitz, co-founder and chief insight offi- cer of FliPskills. "One hundred per cent of se- nior executives, except for one out of the 300, thought that follower- ship affects work output. Another 99 per cent thought followership improves work unit performance, and 96 per cent said that it's more than doing what one is told, and that they disagree that everyone knows how to follow," he said. "(Agho) came to the conclu- sion that followership should be viewed as a necessary condition for an organization's success." In fact, other studies have shown enormous, tangible im- pacts for organizations with strong followership, said Marc. "Imagine if you went to the CEO of an organization that you're working with and said, 'I can increase sales, quality of work, revenue per employee, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction — virtually every metric associat- ed with the business from top line to bottom line and everything in between — by 17 to 43 per cent. But that's exactly what MacKenzie and Podsakoff found in a series of studies they did," he said. So why have CEOs and senior leaders not done anything about it? "e reason is, the 'f ' word. And fol- lowership often is the f word of business. We think, for ex- ample, that followership is a less impor- tant role — but that's nonsense. e roles are equal; we all have leadership and followership roles. Nothing gets done if we're not doing our followership role properly," said Marc. "It's not less im- portant, it's equally important , and you can see from an organization- al perspe ctive that it's equally important." Misconceptions ere are a num- ber of common misconceptions about follower- ship that contrib- ute to its negative connotations, said Marc. One is the mis- conception follower- ship is something of a stepping stone and it ex- ists to prepare you to lead. "These are distinct but complementary skills," he said. "ey're different roles with dif- ferent skills and different attri- butes. Sure, some of the things are shared between the two… so there is some overlap, but the skills themselves are distinct." Another misconception is fol- lowership means sucking up, brown-nosing or being "political," said Marc. "Working in an organization is a social, communal event. Follower- ship is a way of making the social environment that we have work. It's providing the complementary skills and abilities and roles to the person who's taking on that leader- ship role at that moment in time." Yet another mistaken belief is once you are a leader, you no lon- ger follow — which is obviously not true, he said. Another problem is people tend to think following is a pas- sive role that is easy to do. "Being good at followership takes 100 per cent of your atten- tion and concentration. It is a hard role," said Marc. Positive outcomes Along with beneficial business outcomes, there are considerable positive personal outcomes that come with strong followership skills, he said. "You get more latitude to act, you are more satisfied with your career, you get faster career pro- gression, you have better perfor- mance and better performance appraisals." Good followership can have particular positive outcomes for senior-level executives — espe- cially since the percentage of per- formance appraisals that rate on followership seems to go up the higher a person rises in the orga- nization, said Marc. "Executives derail at approxi- mately a rate of 50 per cent in (the first) two years, which is a monstrously high number. e Bank of America estimated that executive derailment was cost- ing them about $2.2 million every time it happened. So every time you hire a senior executive, you have about a 50-50 crapshoot of chucking $2 million," he said. As a solution, the bank focused on developing followership skills in senior executives. "What they did was develop probably the most extensive on- boarding program we've ever heard about. It was an 18-month program that included every- thing from mentoring to special information sessions to coaching, HR coaching and coaching from peers... they had this plan for your first 18 months, and then they gave you a test," he said. Afterward, there was an implic- it and an explicit test. e explicit test was to book meetings with peers, direct reports and stake- CLARIFY > pg. 12

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