Followers Revealed - Gene Dixon

Gene Dixon, of East Carolina University Engineering, Inc., has written many articles on followership. They have principally been published in engineering journals and reflect an engineer's sensibilities, but offer lots of good insights and study nonetheless.

I was able to obtain copies of two Dixon's articles, one from 2003 and one from March of this year. The first article summarizes followership background issues and singles out Ira Chaleff's work as a testable model. He developed The Followership Profile (TFP), a self-assessment survey using the five courageous follower behaviors identified by Chaleff. After all the mathspeak, Dixon's conclusions are these:

1. Follower behaviors are measurable. I would question any conclusion like this as long as what is being measured is self-reported. I would also like to see his survey instrument before trusting this conclusion.
2. Courageous followers exist within organizations.
3. Followership is discernable at all levels of the organization. It isn't just the peons at the bottom of the heap who exhibit follower behaviors.
4. Attributions of followership are influence by organizational level. Interesting here is that the best understanding of followership exists not among the followers, but among the executives.
5. Followership Increases with level of hierarchy. Organizational leaders are good followers.

Dixon offers a new organizational construct at the close of this article. Rejecting an org chart where everyone is a leader and rejecting a traditional hierarchical leader and followers chart, Dixon suggests a chart where everyone is both. To be honest, I don't know how meaningful that is. We are all everything all at once? Nope; not me, sometimes I serve in leader roles and sometimes I serve in follower roles. Once again, we're back to Joseph Rost's argument. If we mess with the language long enough, nobody understands what in the world we're talking about.

While I would question some conclusions (and perhaps don't completely understand all of them), it is interesting to hear someone argue mathematically that executives are better followers than most people we would traditionally label as follower roles. Perhaps it would do us good as followers to regularly ask ourselves how our leaders ended up leadership. Perhaps we might find our leaders have something to teach us after all!

In any event, all questions and disagreements aside, I'm glad to see someone attempting to do serious followership study. If I were a smarter person, I would probably appreciate it even more.