Follow the Leader

Focus on Followers

Many people think the best way to learn to lead is to study famous leaders – such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela – and to work to understand their methods and psychology, and to dissect their styles and approaches. But leaders come with a wide assortment of personal attributes, tendencies and operational modes. Faced with this variety, you can’t gain very much by trying to pin down one defining set of leadership characteristics. And trying to average out different leaders to find a model you can emulate just leads to confusion.

All leaders – no matter how much they differ – share one crucial characteristic: They all have followers. These followers are not incidental by-products of leadership; they are its bedrock. People choose which leaders to follow. Without followers, leaders aren’t leaders. In the leaders-followers nexus, followers matter most. What, for example, would Martin Luther King Jr. have been able to accomplish if he marched alone or delivered his speeches to empty plazas?

To learn what matters most about leadership, find out what motivates followers. Don’t ask, “What do great leaders do?” Instead...