Good Leaders Know How to Folllow
Have you ever been part of a cross-functional project that became more complicated than it needed to be because leaders from different departments battled over control and authority?
It happens a lot and even strong leaders can lose sight of the larger mission when they lead with their ego.
Situations like this is why the capacity to follow others is such an underrated leadership skill. I'm not just talking about knowing how to effectively follow or support others but also the willingness to do so.
There is an endless amount of advice on the how; behaviors that one can leverage to effectively support others. Things like strong communication, accountability, taking initiative, staying flexible, etc.
That's the easy part. The more challenging work is often the willingness to put your ego aside to make space for other's to lead. Especially if you're well tenured in your leadership role.
The details of who, when and how you follow are all highly contextual. A great leader can be comfortable following other leaders in a variety of settings. Whether it be their boss, community leaders, board chairs or even subject matter experts on their team.
For today, we'll dive deeper into the benefits that leaders can realize by following others. Let's get started…
Listen more
Listening is one of those behaviors that leaders could almost always benefit from doing more of. Unfortunately, we often let our authority pull us away from listening and more towards telling/directing.
Following someone else's lead encourages you to listen more to understand their vision, direction and needs. This is an opportunity to practice your listening skills so that you deploy them more frequently when you are the one actively leading a team or effort.
A great way to practice this is by seeking to understand rather than respond or inform. Specifically, seek to understand what they want from you in this scenario. A simple question like "How can I best support you on this?" will show that you're not making assumptions and are following their lead.
Confident humility
Great leadership embraces the ideas of fluidity and shared responsibility. This is not insecurity, rather a degree of confidence in your ability as a leader to acknowledge the value of others.
Gracefully accepting feedback can be challenging for many leaders but it's a really powerful way of demonstrating humility. We all want teams who are super coachable and responsive to feedback so we need to demonstrate those same behaviors ourselves.
Learning from others
One of the best benefits of knowing when and how to follow other leaders is that it gives you the opportunity to see different leadership styles and approaches.
If you pay attention, you'll start to notice the small ways in which others lead differently than you. From there, you can start to decide whether there things you want to incorporate in your own style. Or, you may see things that you decidedly want to avoid in your own leadership. Either way, this peer-to-peer learning gives you the opportunity to be more well-rounded in your skillset.
Building Trust
Listening more, showing humility and development a mindset of continuous learning all go a long way towards building trust with others. With that said, it's important to be intentional with your trust building behaviors as it can be easy to slide backwards into old habits.
I've seen a number of leaders who have deferred to another leader at the start of a major project only to quickly revert to asserting their own authority as the effort progresses. Sometimes this is intentional but more often than not, it's simply a matter of a tenured leader falling back on comfortable habits.
The trust you build by making space for others to lead can quickly evaporate if you don't follow-through on that commitment.
This Week's Action Items:
Identify where you have an opportunity to be more intentional with how you are supporting other leaders.
Ask questions to understand what the leader in this scenario wants and/or needs from you.
Seek and gracefully accept feedback from this leader as you work together.
Observe behaviors that you want to incorporate or avoid in your own leadership.
Follow-through on your commitment to be more intentional around being both a great leader and great follower.
