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Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast.
Today. I want to go back to a discussion that I saw on social media about leadership and followership. And there is this, I would say, some kind of paranoia on all schools, universities, and even in our families about leadership. You know, we grow a kid to be leaders. We train the student to be a leader. Everybody aims to be a leader, leader, and leader. And then I start asking the followers because for you to exercise leadership, someone needs to follow you. And this is a discipline that for me is as important as leadership, or even more important is the act of accepting influence from others. And honestly, none of you listening to me like to describe yourselves as a follower. We always like to describe ourselves, I led this, I am a leader in that, I am the boss, you know, I make decisions that others follow. And this is how society measures, for example, if we go to social media, this is an absolutely perfect example of this. Everybody's paranoid about how many followers do you have? And the concept of followers is not the concept of, for example, stimulating and helping the followers, but it's far more it's how much influence you exercise on others. And these all that bring value. And this is not true.
In 2018, I did a study during my time at Brightline that is called the People Manifesto, and I'm very proud of it, and one of the four statements, and we create these statements in a very bold way, we say that leadership is overrated and why we aim to say that leadership is overrated because everybody only thinks about leadership. We do not prepare people to followership. And followership is the foundation. So if you think that all the spectrum of the work we are doing in a project or in a company is like a Building the followership is like the foundation. Remember, leaders, come and go. Followers, they tend to stay far more than the leaders. So if you imagine your company leaders go, leaders arrive, leaders change their roles. But usually, the follower is they stay. And what I would say, great characteristics of this kind of followers. For example, if you want to stimulate and verify if you are a good follower or if you are working with a team that really understands followership, first the follower tells always the truth. So this is a systematic characteristic of a good follower. So no matter how much pain it cause, you always tell the truth. Second, you are always supportive. Even when decisions are not very popular. You always you never blame those who are leading you because this is exactly what is not expected of a good follower. You give your boss and the leader the benefit of your knowledge. Most of the time the followers, they exist because they have very specific competence that brings to the group a really different perspective of things.
So you need to give and benefit the group with your knowledge.
The fourth one is you take initiative. It doesn't mean that because you are a follower that you don't take initiative, you take initiative, and you solve problems that are unsolved. You are also self-aware. You know where you are not strong, you know where you need improvement, and you know where your bias are. And last but not least, you always keep the leader informed.
And I know that the final words I want to share with you on that are that when I talk about that, we always perceive all these characteristics of in some way something weaker because we have this perception that a leader is someone that people follow and a follower is someone weaker. No, the follower is the foundation of everything you do. If you don't have the followers, you don't produce the product, you don't deliver the product. You don't have the insights you need to have to produce. A successful product, a successful software, a successful service because the followers are the ones that will do the work. The follower are the ones that will do the heavy lifting.
Think always about that. I hope you enjoy this podcast and see you next week with another 5 minutes podcast.
