Leading and Following During a Crisis
Leadership and Followership go hand-in-hand.
Good leadership is hard to define, but like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about pornography, we know it when we see it. Followership may be even more difficult to define, owing to the fact that followers “hear” messages from leaders in many different ways.
Followers are not a blank slate upon which leaders write the rules, roles, and codes of the organization. Nor are they individuals-as-organizations, fully-formed systems that can take a leader’s plan and turn it from ideas into revenue.
Followers usually exist in the middle — looking to leaders as examples of valuable ways to think and act, while looking to themselves to learn how to convert rules into principles, roles into careers, and codes into best practices.
Most followers are adults who are evolving from a “maintain relationships” set of values to a “maintain systems” set of values.
Good leaders understand that followers are challenged by this move even when conditions are stable.
Wise leaders understand that followers are in-over-their heads by this move when life conditions are not stable — such as now.
In these moments, the wise leader knows that s/he must get a little uncomfortable, to take a firm stand — even publicly — in order to maintain the integrity of their firm’s culture and reputation.
Yet most leaders have learned to thrive in ambiguity, to operate with a multitude of often contradictory perspectives. Orienting fully to one side of ambiguous life conditions (e.g., politics) is almost always the wrong path to take for leaders, as taking a stand collapses the creativity needed to lead well.
But the opposite mistake can also happen — to not take a stand because the leader prefers their own style when the organization needs something less ambiguous from them.
If you are a successful leader, then you are currently benefitting from the firm stances you (and other leaders) have taken in the past. Now is not the time to shy away from those firm stances on behalf of protecting your market share.
Followers are increasingly frustrated with the lack of leadership — why else would these global protests have no unifying leader? The hidden protest beneath the rhetoric seems to be: “WE HAVE NO REPRESENTATION…(AND WE ARE TIRED OF THIS).” It is frustration without representation. They are filling the vacuum created by neglectful leaders.
It matters not what your firm stance is — what I am advocating for is not the advancing of one side of this polarity over another. Polarities do not go away, they are a part of the fabric of this universe. Leaders manage polarities, they do not solve them.
Choose to support the police — they are unfairly cast as villians; choose the protesters — they are unfairly cast as violent. We will never discover a “same page” to get on if leaders do not take a firm stance.
Here is my firm stance: the objective statistics do not support the sweeping claims of systemic police racism, but the stories of those being unfairly policed are more important at this time. In the polarity of “Statistics AND Stories,” stories matter more when life stressors are running over 100% of a population’s capacity to handle them.
Nobody wants to be seen as being less complex than they actually are, especially leaders; but when the house next door to your house is on fire, you become a firefighter whether you like it or not.
