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While follower or employee empowerment is a 21st-century knowledge age buzzword, old industrial age paradigms of the leader-follower dynamic persist. In many parts of today’s globalized society, people are still caught up in what has been described as the romance of leadership, where all the successes or failures of an organization are attributed to the leader. This placing of the leader on a pedestal neglects the very real contributions that followers make to organizational outcomes.

The persistence of this understanding of the leader-follower dynamic traces its roots back to the first industrial revolution in 18th-century England. The harnessing of steam power fuelled a transition from an agricultural society and individual artisans to an early form of factory labour. In the factory system, laborers performed a set of repetitive tasks under the watchful eye of a supervisor who had overall responsibility for output and quality control. While these early factories largely involved large numbers of individual contributors or small teams as compared to the assembly lines of the second industrial revolution, the first revolution set in motion a senior-subordinate dynamic where the supervisor was given credit for the output and quality of the workmanship. While some might argue that the European artisan guild system was similar, the apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master sequence provided an equal opportunity for advancement to master, whereas the factory system offered little opportunity for career progression to a leader position.

A central characteristic of the knowledge age economy is that workers tend to be hired more for their brain power than their physical power (manual dexterity). This has real implications for the leader-follower dynamic as leaders move from their traditional oversight function to coordination and the follower role shifts from automaton to an empowered subject matter expert.

This supervisor-subordinate (leader-follower) relationship was further codified by Fredrick Taylor’s early 20th-century studies on time and efficiency and the exposure of millions of men to the top-down command and control structure of the military, particularly during World Wars One and Two.

Command and control proved to be an ideal form of efficient production with workers performing machinelike tasks that typically required little more than muscle memory. Ford’s automobile assembly line, introduced in 1913, is a case in point with workers performing the same repetitive task over and over during an 8-hour shift. While serving as a hallmark of the industrial age, and still in use today, command and control systems in organizations are giving way to the networked systems of the knowledge age which require a different leader-follower dynamic.

Followership in the Knowledge Age

Many scholars mark the 1990s as the beginning of the knowledge age where global economies shifted from an industrial base to a knowledge base. A central characteristic of the knowledge age economy is that workers tend to be hired more for their brain power than their physical power (manual dexterity). This has real implications for the leader-follower dynamic as leaders move from their traditional oversight function to coordination and the follower role shifts from automaton to an empowered subject matter expert. This is not to suggest that throughout the ages there have not been leader-coordinators or followers possessing unique knowledge and skill. Rather the demands of the age, including increased reliance on information technology and a globalized environment, have produced a greater need for coordinating rather than supervising the efforts of followers who are or should be empowered decision-makers.

Both empowerment given by the leader and follower self-empowerment enhance productivity and mission effectiveness.

At the dawn of this new age, scholars such as Robert Kelley and Ira Chaleff began to offer a new narrative of the follower role. While acknowledging that some could continue to follow the leader in a passive sheeplike manner, Kelley and Chaleff argued that followers have a vital role to play in organizational success. Further, Chaleff holds that followers have a duty to help their leader stay on track. To this end, he advocates for followers partnering with the leader to achieve organizational goals. But in doing so, the follower must balance being supportive with a willingness to respectfully challenge their leader when the leader’s actions or behaviours detract from mission achievement.

Empowerment and Followership

Both scholars and authors in the practitioner space have long advocated for employee empowerment as a means of improving productivity and enhancing mission achievement. Empowerment may be given by the leader to leverage follower knowledge, skills, and abilities, or assumed by the follower who envisions him or herself as an owner of the mission. Both empowerment given by the leader and follower self-empowerment enhance productivity and mission effectiveness as seen in the cases below.

Followership Through Leader/Organization Empowerment – The NUMMI Case

New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated (NUMMI) was a joint venture between US car manufacturer General Motors (GM) and Japan’s Toyota Motor Corporation that operated at the former GM Fremont California plant from 1984 to 2010. While, as noted above, scholars often mark the beginning of the knowledge age as somewhere in the 1990s it had a much earlier start in some sectors in Japan, most notably in the automobile industry.

Japan’s automobile industry was heavily influenced by the post-WWII teachings of W. Edwards Deming, an American quality control expert. Demings’ concept of total quality control (also called total quality management) stresses that the skills and competencies of all employees must be honoured and followers have an obligation to speak up to management in pursuit of best practices and behaviours that lead to mission success. For example, at Toyota, an employee in pursuit of the organization’s mission of producing a quality product may stop the entire assembly line at any time, without management permission.

One of the unique benefits of incorporating followership into the culture change initiative was its focus on the follower initiating a partnering relationship with the leader and giving the follower a voice in helping the leader make wise decisions.

In empowering its employees, Toyota leveraged the Japanese concept of nemawashi; a term that engages all involved in a particular process in solving problems and consensus building; i.e. working together to identify and implement solutions. These empowerment measures led to improved productivity, efficiency, and a high level of product quality; something American automobile manufacturers desired to implement in their production facilities.

In an effort to replicate Toyota’s success both in quality and productivity, GM partnered with Toyota in 1984 to reopen its shuttered Freemont California factory. The Freemont plant had been plagued by high employee absenteeism, substance abuse, low-quality vehicle assembly, and uneven productivity. As noted in an interview with United Auto Workers (UAW) leader Bruce Lee, the Freemont plant was the worst in the nation resulting in its closure two years before the start of NUMMI.

The NUMMI venture began with a combined Toyota/GM management team, with Toyota executives in the CEO and COO positions. As the factory worked towards reopening, and for some time thereafter, groups of employees were sent to Japan to learn “the Toyota way”. The Toyota way includes an expectation that every employee from top brass to recent hires, should “be looking for ways to improve the production process all the time, to make the workers’ job easier and more efficient”. This meant that Toyota employees were empowered to critically critique processes, be they mechanical, physical or behavioural, and offer suggestions for improvement.

Taking back their lessons learned from Japan, UAW workers at the NUMMI plant staged a remarkable turnaround of the Freemont plant. Within a few years, NUMMI had become the best-performing automobile plant in the United States. Known for high-quality workmanship, efficiency, and productivity, largely as a result of empowering its employees NUMMI presented the American auto industry with a better manufacturing environment. While GM took many of the lessons learned from the joint experiment and applied them to other facilities around the country, unfortunately, NUMMI did not survive the meltdown of the US auto industry during the Great Recession.

The FDIC Case – Followership Through Self-Empowerment

In 2014 the author discussed the 2009 introduction of followership education at the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as part of its culture change initiative. As a component of a larger shift to a holistic approach to leadership development within the agency, instruction in followership was delivered as one of several initiatives designed to increase employee empowerment, mission ownership, and engagement with leaders. One of the unique benefits of incorporating followership into the culture change initiative was its focus on the follower initiating a partnering relationship with the leader and giving the follower a voice in helping the leader make wise decisions.

As a banking regulator, nearly half of the FDIC’s workforce are bank supervision and compliance examiners who work out of field offices spread across the United States. Teams of examiners are deployed to banks within each field office’s territory on a periodic schedule to examine the health of each assigned institution and its compliance with various government policies and regulations. Leadership of these teams rotates amongst the office’s commissioned examiners; meaning that an individual who was in charge of an examination at one institution may be the follower of someone she has previously led a few weeks or months later. This rotational scheme, coupled with each examiner’s age, experience, gender, etc., creates a myriad of leader-follower dynamics. At the FDIC, it is just as common for younger examiners to lead a team that has members with more experience as it is for a very experienced examiner to lead a team of newer employees. Thus, FDIC’s rotating leader-follower role in the examiner workforce provides a unique followership opportunity that promotes the partnering dynamic regardless of position.

While the FDIC promotes the concept of leaders empowering employees throughout the organization, instruction in followership across all levels of the agency provides employees, including leaders who follow other leaders, the skills necessary for self-empowerment. As one graduate of the Introduction to FDIC Leadership course noted, “It’s not enough for me to wait to be told to do something. I have to say what needs to be done to my manager”. This sentiment of feeling self-empowered to take ownership enables the follower to act in the best interests of the organization’s mission and when necessary, go beyond the limits of the empowerment provided by the leader. As Marc and Samantha Hurwitz have noted “people [who are] immersed in followership development … see it as empowering … and that agency is not the sole purview of those with formal leadership titles”.

FDIC’s engagement in followership education and training was a small part of the agency’s overall culture change initiative. Yet as seen in the quotes above the self-empowerment aspect of followership contributed to the overall effort; resulting in the FDIC moving from near last to being named the best place to work among mid-sized agencies in the Federal government. A position it held for several years.

Knowledge and Empowerment

In the knowledge age competitive advantage is achieved through agile and creative employees operating in a collaborative environment where both leaders and followers are engaged in and have ownership of the mission. For followers to fully engage they must be empowered.

As seen in the NUMMI case, Japanese auto manufacturers have long held a significant share of the market as every employee is an empowered knowledge worker focused on making constant improvements in support of the mission.. While management empowering employees can lead to powerful results, there may be limits placed on what followers are empowered to do. When, as seen at the FDIC, employees receive followership education and training, they are better able to partner with the leader because they are self-empowered and therefore unconstrained in their actions that support the mission. As another FDIC employee said following participation in followership training, “my entire life I was led to believe that being a follower meant to be a static character in an organization … now I know that it is far from static and actually one of the most dynamic roles in an organization”.

In the first three decades of the knowledge age, our understanding of work has moved from largely being the province of physical labor to mental agility, yet many workplaces still adhere to old leader-follower models. A management system of empowering followers to act in certain situations, such as seen in the NUMMI case, benefits the overall organizational mission. Yet developing individual skills in followership, as the FDIC did fifteen years ago, frees the knowledge-age follower to an unconstrained level of empowerment with the potential of achieving even higher levels of mission achievement.