Dynamic Followership: The Prerequisite for Effective Leadership - Latour and Rast

Here is yet another military driven perspective on followership. Rather than encouraging leaders to mentor followers to "follow me" as imitation learning imperative, leaders may mentor to specific and objective abilities/traits to creat dynamic subordinates. These dynamic follower competencies form a foundation from which follower initiative can grow to leader initiative more naturally. The identified follower competencies help leaders focus their mentoring efforts. This approach encourages followers to develop fully, based on their personalities, strengths and weaknesses, and situational factors.

Latour and Rast highlight two ideal follower-competency dimensions: performance initiative and relationship initiative. Performance initiative includes the following:

1. Working effectively with others.
2. Embracing change
3. Doing the job (competence)
4. Seeing oneself as a resource

Relationship competencies include:

1. Building trust
2. Communicating courageously
3. Identifying with the leader
4. Adopting the leader's vision

Latour and Rast suggest another model of followership, citing work by Earl Potter, William Rosenbach and Thane Pittman, along these two continuums.

1. Subordinates (Low performing, low relating)
2. Politicians (Low performing, high relating)
3. Contributors (High performing, low relating)
4. Partners (High performing, high relating)

Finally, after considering several other studies, they suggest several follower competencies as a distillation of current followership research...

1. Displays loyalty
2. Functions well in a change-oriented environment
3. Functions well on teams
4. Thinks independently and critically
5. Considers integrity of paramount importance

Again, I find it striking that these competencies are not passive in the least. The only question I would have for Latour and Rast would be the ultimate direction and intention of their followership development efforts. Are we trying produce good followers or are we trying to produce good leaders? Isn't it okay to teach followership as followership? Are all followers on a growth path to leadership roles? I don't think so. Until followership is value in and of itself, we will not have accomplished what needs to be accomplished. The followers need to see the importance of what they are doing right now, not focus all their efforts on how what they are doing now might contribute to what they might get to do later. While that may well happen, that is largely irrelevant to followership study. It needs to be okay to be "just a follower."

But this was a very good summary article.