Followership
Followership
What is followership?
- The attitude and capability members bring to organizational performance
- Two core axes: “critical thinking” and “active participation”
- Not the opposite of leadership, but its counterpart
Once you start handling followership properly, the first thing that changes is the silence in the meeting room. It takes less time for someone to say “I don’t think that’s right” when a leader sets the wrong direction, and less time for a frontline owner to spot a warning sign and report it. An organization’s execution depends not on the quality of the leader’s instructions but on how quickly the people who receive them raise questions, and how accurately they carry them out.
Crossing Kelley’s two axes yields five types: the exemplary follower (high on both thinking and participation), the conformist or “yes-man” (follows without thinking), the pragmatist (does exactly what is asked and no more), the passive follower (does nothing), and the alienated follower (sharp critic, but doesn’t participate). In assessments at Korean companies, the pragmatist type appears most often, but an organization becomes risky when alienated followers increase. Types depend on the leader and the situation, not on innate personality. It is common for the same person to be rated exemplary under Team Leader A and passive under Team Leader B.
It is also worth drawing clear boundaries with neighboring concepts. Psychological safety is an environmental condition the organization creates, and empowerment is a matter of authority. Followership is an individual capability exercised even without authority. If you build the environment but skip capability training, you only add complaint channels; if you demand capability alone, the only lesson people learn is that “standing out costs you.”
In practice, the most common failure point is the brief. A followership program that starts with the request “Please fix the attitude of our young employees” almost always ends up producing conformists. Conversely, if you stress only critical thinking, every meeting is full of objections but no one volunteers, and you end up with a disengaged organization. To avoid both traps, design two things together: training people to attach evidence and an alternative to every objection, and a rule that once a decision is made, everyone carries it out even if they disagree.
Inwoo LeeExpert in leadership, communication, and performance management
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”The concept was established in 1988 by Robert Kelley’s Harvard Business Review article “In Praise of Followers” and his book The Power of Followership.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, an auto-parts maker with 430 employees and KRW 140 billion (≈ US$104,743,400) in annual revenue, was hit by three early-defect incidents on new products in a row over two years. A post-incident review showed that line supervisors had known about the problems since the design review stage, but no one escalated them. Management launched a six-month program combining followership and leadership training.
- When Park, an HR manager, ran the Kelley type assessment across all 411 employees, the results were pragmatist 58%, conformist 24%, exemplary only 9%. The head of production accepted the results, saying, “They do well when told, but no one speaks up first.”
- In the first workshop, we put the third defect case on the table and collected anonymous answers to “Why didn’t you speak up back then?” More than half of all responses said: “Speaking up changes nothing, and if I stop the line, I take the blame.”
- We trained the skill of disagreeing separately. Teams ran a role-play of speaking up within three minutes, backed by one piece of evidence and one alternative six times, using real drawings and process data as practice material.
- During the same period, we added a program for 38 team leaders and banned “That’s already been decided” as a phrase in meetings. We also set a firm rule: every objection raised gets a reply to the person within 24 hours, either adopting it or explaining why it was rejected.
- Six months later, on-site improvement suggestions rose from 12 to 47 a month, and the early defect rate at new-product mass production fell from 2.3% to 0.9%. Agreement with “It is safe to speak up” rose from 41% to 68%.