When Leaders and Followers Fight

The sunlight refracted through the vase as it spun through the air and for a moment it seemed to pause, pierced by a single brilliant shaft of light. He regretted throwing it even before it hit the wall. A flash of anger…an angry impulse…now an explosion of glass as the once beautiful vase found it could not prevail against the solid presence of the wall. He hated this job! His boss was constantly telling him what to do and then looking over his shoulder while he did it. After 3 months of working the longest hours of his career on this project, his boss had changed his mind. All that time wasted! Unbelievable!

Seventy yards down the hall an office is ringing with the auditory impact of an aggressively closed door. A boss sits consumed with anger at the employee that just left his office. Three months into a key project and he now has to hand it off to a different team member. Why can’t this bright young man do what he’s been asked to do? Why is it always a fight? It may be time to consider finding someone else for his role.

A frustrated employee and a fed up boss, with both parties believing the other is to blame. This is a scene that plays out with regularity in churches and companies around the country. Perhaps as you read this you have recently felt the exasperation of the boss or perhaps the anger of the employee or volunteer; perhaps time has allowed you to feel both. Whatever your experience, we have all wondered why leader and follower relationships breakdown with such consistency.

Confusion over Roles

In our culture we celebrate leadership and denigrate followership. Maxwell famously summed up the American view with these words, “It all rises and falls on leadership.” Followership, on the other hand is seen as weak, passive or mindless. This message builds into the very fabric of our psyche a passion to lead and resistance to following that establishes an unresolvable tension in the organizational environment. The message is clearly conveyed that the ultimate goal for every worker is more leadership and less followership. Ultimately this message builds failure into the equation because systemically it is impossible. In every organization there will always be a much larger percentage of perceived followers than leaders. Unless…. we change the way we think about leadership and followership in our organization.

Raymond Cox has suggested that leaders and followers, in order to coexist effectively, must have the inclination and ability to interchange their roles. In other words, effective leader-follower roles are not static but rather fluid and dynamic in nature. This means that a leader who intends to successfully lead must make a conscious choice to become a follower/learner at key points in the leadership process. Likewise, a follower on a successful team must be able and willing to lead as is necessary for the success of the team.

The truth is that this idea of fluid roles is an ideal that we don’t often witness. We’ve all had or heard of a boss who absolutely refused to engage a learning posture with his team. Additionally, most of us have probably been a follower who refused to speak up at a key time and thus offer leadership to a team that was heading the wrong direction. Why? At the core of this question lies a deeply buried heart issue that few of us want to address.

At the Heart of the Issue

Fundamentally, at a deep and visceral level, you and I are selfish. I know that’s rude of me to say, I’ve probably insulted you and you’re going to stop reading in a few sentences. However, before you stop reading take a moment to think about how much of your interaction in the last week with your boss and those you lead has been about self-preservation.  The truth is that, for many of us, a great deal of our time is spent either protecting or advancing our own agenda and needs. At the heart of most leader-follower dysfunction is a root of selfishness and it can’t be resolved until one (or preferably both) parties make one key decision.

Nearly 2000 years ago a teacher named Paul, instructed the leaders he was training to “submit to each other” as a pathway for effective organizational and interrelational harmony. [1] While providing a first awareness of what we today refer to as servant leadership, this ancient author offered a pathway to understanding and application of a leadership philosophy which may be the single most powerful solution to leader-follower friction. Others in our day have continued the discussion. Robert Greenleaf coined the phrase “servant leadership” in his essay “The Servant as Leader” when he said,

“The servant leader is servant first … It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then, conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions….”

Another writer reminds us that “servant leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and to those whom they serve.”

At the heart of servant leadership is a personal decision so seismic and profound that it can shift the entire texture of leader-follower relationships within an organization. Quite simply, it is the decision to lead and follow out of a desire to serve others for their benefit…..not our benefit. Here lies the key distinction, many of us are willing to serve others if we can see “what’s in it for me”, but it is a much greater challenge to serve others for their benefit alone. This decision creates the opportunity for activity that is unique to each part of the leader-follower relationship.

I wonder what might happen if some of us embraced the idea that serving and leading are not mutually exclusive. I wonder what might happen if some of us realized that choosing to serve others as a follower actually expands our influence and empowers us to become better leaders. I wonder what would happen if this idea flowed through all of our disciple making. I wonder if we have the courage to risk this transformation of how we work together. Perhaps only time will tell.

[1] Ephesians 5:21-6:9 Paul the Apostle writing to the leaders in Ephesus.

Dan Scarrow

District Superintendent
North Central District of The C&MA