An underappreciated hallmark of the best leaders today is they have mastered the underrated skills of great followers. Satya Nadella rebuilt Microsoft not through top-down decrees but by listening deeply to engineers, customers, and critics. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors for more than a decade, is famous for her habit of deferring to the deep technical judgment of manufacturing teams and safety engineers. And Tim Cook spent years as the quietly empathetic operational lieutenant who followed data, processes, and expert input with near-religious discipline, qualities that later enabled him to create one of the most valuable companies in history. Given the great speed of change and complexity in the world, the need for leaders to listen and learn is enormous. However, the widely shared, erroneous beliefs about what good leadership look like—that it entails excelling at commanding and inspiring others—get in the way of practicing and developing great leadership in today’s organizations. As we explore in this article, that obstacle can be overcome. Organizations can cultivate the followership attributes that make outstanding leaders. Followership: The Missing Half of Leadership Although discussions of leadership are far-ranging, they tend toward portraying leadership as a kind of heroic act. We are told history’s great leaders are those who mastered the art of command. Leaders are portrayed as visionary mavericks, charismatic disruptors, or moral change agents somehow blessed with a magical touch for singlehandedly creating a better future. And most research still treats followers as passive recipients of leadership. The fact of the matter is leadership and followership are a co-created, fluid, role-switching process rather than a fixed one-way hierarchy. When leadership is understood this way, becoming a better leader is not about asserting authority more skillfully but rather about mastering the capacity to follow well, even from a position of power. At its core, effective followership requires the capacity to learn, listen, collaborate, challenge, and adjust in service of something larger than oneself. When a group of individuals set aside selfish or individualistic agendas to become part of collective unit—to achieve something none could do alone—impressive results become possible. Not incidentally, many scholars have defined leadership in this way: as the capacity to persuade a group of people to become a high-performing team. What Gets in the Way Unfortunately, followership skills are the very capacities most leaders struggle with. To begin, research shows that many leaders are too focused on seeming smart or displaying competence to engage in effective listening and learning. As Socrates is reported to have said, “Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers,” which stops them from growing intellectually, and worse, from recognizing their answers were wrong! When leaders fail, it is rarely because they can’t command; after all, once you are given the power to tell others what to do, others will typically follow, even when they do not like it. Mutiny is rare. Instead, leaders fail because they can’t accept that the fundamental skill underpinning leadership is to make others want to follow them, which requires modeling good follower behavior as a leader: exhibiting humility, curiosity, receptivity to feedback and dissent, and loyalty to purpose rather than to your own ego. Why Followership Skills Matter More Than Ever The conditions we face in today’s world are poised to punish leaders who believe, or feel they must act as if they believe, that they have all the answers. Because of the intricate nature and spread of specialized knowledge, no single individual (not even the CEO) can fully comprehend an entire situation. In addition, the growing power of AI is making traditional expertise less exclusive: It is allowing beginners to generate expert-level work. All this means leaders must now lean more on emotional intelligence; they must have the ability to create genuine connections and understand others’ feelings. They must bring people together, connect ideas, continually learn, and blend diverse perspectives. They need to understand when to step back, when to support others, and when to rely on someone else’s specialized knowledge. This is why the most effective leaders today tend to have a history of being exceptional followers: They learned how organizations actually work, what people need to succeed, and how to build trust through contribution rather than authority. Consistent with this argument, meta-analyses show that the personality and behaviors that predispose people to being good or competent followers are nearly identical to those that predispose people to be good or competent leaders (higher levels of leadership performance, quantified in terms of team-level impact). So, displaying higher levels of emotional stability, sociability, kindness, curiosity, work ethic, integrity, and learning ability tends to result in both being a better follower and a better leader. Accordingly, selecting external candidates and promoting internal candidates who fit the profile of good followers will increase the probability that they also lead effectively. Here are five core followership capabilities that organizations should seek in leaders they hire from the outside and should strive to build in their leadership-development programs. 1. Active Listening Effective followers listen to understand, not to confirm. They take in information without filtering it through ego, fear, or hierarchy. They don’t get defensive when new information is out of sync with their beliefs or ideas—that is, they are more interested in understanding reality than in interpreting it in an ego-syntonic way. Leaders who adopt this stance avoid the biggest risk of leadership: insulation from what is happening in their organizations and the outside world. When you truly listen, you reduce blind spots, pick up weak signals earlier, and create psychological safety around you. Listening is not an easy skill to acquire because it requires humility, patience, and the willingness to be wrong—precisely the range of behaviors leaders need from followers! 2. Prioritize Purpose, Not Personal Credit The most valuable followers care more about what works best for the team or organization than who gets the applause. They don’t manipulate credit and blame to their own advantage, such as by taking credit for others’ achievements and blaming others for their own mistakes. Since leadership is fundamentally about persuading others to do things beyond their self-interest, in support of a larger collective, managers should emulate such followers. They should be focused on something bigger than themselves—something that requires others to make it happen. Leaders who emulate these followers tend to build cultures that prioritize collective performance rather than individual theatrics or the “performative” aspects of job performance, such as “pretending to work” instead of actually working, or advertising their “input” as opposed to producing tangible “output.” When ego is secondary, teams collaborate more freely, and people feel part of something bigger than themselves. 3. Reliable Execution Followers make things happen. They transform high-level plans into outcomes and ideas into a concrete reality. Leaders who possess this capability stay grounded: They understand what is feasible, how work gets done, and what constraints teams face. As we have recently argued, this is a compelling argument for protecting entry-level jobs in the face of AI: To ensure that junior employees continue to develop the firsthand knowledge of how things get done and the followership skills essential to becoming strong leaders. Unless leaders know what it takes to turn plans and ideas into reality, strategy risks becoming detached from execution and optimism can replace evidence. It can lead to the tragic scenario where executives are detached from their workforce and hold distorted perceptions of the culture and organization. 4. Critical Dissent Competent followers challenge constructively. They ask questions, flag risks, and speak up when something is off, providing invaluable insights and intel on the organization, and helping things get better. Leaders who welcome dissent instead of punishing it avoid the predictable pitfalls of unchallenged authority: groupthink, delusional confidence, and avoidable failure. A leader’s openness to pushback becomes a competitive advantage because it expands the organization’s intelligence beyond their own. So, just like great followers, competent leaders will follow when and as needed, and question when necessary. They will speak up to expose unfairness, inefficiencies, injustice, or problems before they become worse. Indeed, conflict-avoidant people—whether leaders or followers—generate a great deal of conflict in the long term. 5. Coachability Followers learn constantly. They seek feedback rather than defend against it and treat improvement as part of their identity. As one of us (Tomas) illustrates in a recent book, coachable followers avoid becoming a more exaggerated version of themselves and are not limited by their past or present self. Instead, they learn to create or curate a broader, novel, more expanded, and flexible version of themselves. This, in turn, enables them to navigate novel challenges. They evolve with the world instead of becoming obsolete in it. Coachability is the antidote to the complacency that often accompanies positional power. It keeps leaders self-critical, curious, and connected to their teams, and allows them to reinvent themselves and reimagine their future self to raise to new challenges and outperform their peers. . . . In short, the best leaders are not heroic commanders; they are exemplary followers: people who listen deeply, learn relentlessly, collaborate widely, question bravely, and adjust continually. And because they follow so well, others willingly follow them.
