Leadership and followship

Leadership is of no necessity when there is no one following.
Most often people complain about the absence of leadership without also recognizing the absence of followship.
Just as how it is important to train our leaders to lead effectively we must begin to consider guiding the followers on how to be responsible and effective followers.
In this twenty first century there is much emphasis on leadership training and we are being coached in understanding the essential qualities and characteristics of a good leader.

I have attended a few training sessions myself and have purchased books, DVDs and so on about leading and leading effectively. My aim is to lead to the best of my ability and beyond. However I have seen many failures in leadership and quite often the people who are being led tend to divorce themselves from the failures of their leaders.

I have seen failures in our political, religious, corporate, community and family leaders that have affected whether are not we want to be led further. Not many corrective measures have been taken in the evaluation process to address present and future leadership issues.

Take for example the ‘trust’ issue which has been hanging over our heads for many decades. We have seen dishonest leaders who are known to have mismanage and misappropriate huge sums of the public funds yet they walk scotch free while we imprison an ordinary man for five years for stealing two mangoes. We have seen leaders lacking in integrity, fairness, justice and wisdom and many of us have not been able to live above the betrayal in some instance.

I believe I can categorically state that we as a people, in this side of the world, simply just don’t trust our leaders. We have been hurt, lied to, cheated and exploited. The demon of trust still haunts us today as a nation, as a region and as a people. This demon which prevents our leaders from leading effectively also prevents our followers from following responsibly.

Leadership is a partnership. The willingness and ability to lead must be coupled with the consent to be led. If I were to ask you whether you are a leader or a follower, what would your response be?

Unfortunately, too often there are many leaders and just not enough followers. I have always believed that good leaders are also good followers and the best followers are the ones who understand the important role they play in this whole business of leadership.

Much resource is being expended on developing our leaders and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to lead for the fundamental reason that our people are finding it more difficult to follow. Why not therefore, divert some of the resources toward developing better followers?
Why not teach our people how to serve and serve without servitude?
After all, those who are exemplary followers are soon promoted to leadership.

In order to have effective leadership and responsible followship a very key ingredient must be present, that of oneness of purpose, unity and collaboration. It is neither good nor bad to lead or follow but it is always good to serve.

Serving is hard work, no wonder we are having such diffiuclty following, but even more frightening is the fact that leading requires an even greater level of serving.

If we are going to become better leaders without being losers then we must also become better followers. Forgiveness and starting a fresh is now required. The change for a better tomorrow, as echoed many times before, must begin with me. God bless you and let us commit to being better followers.