The importance of followership–part one

 One of our democratic presidents said that leading a country was no child play, meaning that it was not for the fainthearted. An organisation or a nation can stand or fall depending on how it is led. This is how central leadership is to the running of the affairs of a family, a village, an organisation or indeed a nation. We all know that good performance is, and not without a good reason, associated with good leadership, while poor performance is usually the result of bad leadership.

Literature is awash with leadership theories and case studies. It is quite easy to distinguish a good leader from a bad one, or to know which practices are the preserve of good leaders. Leadership is a well-established discipline in management studies.

W h a t i s n o t w e l l understood i s followership. And yet f o l l o w e r s h i p a n d leadership are like two blades of the same pair of scissors. One blade on its own cannot cut through anything. When an organisation or a nation malfunctions, it is natural to heap all blame on its leadership but this article is advancing a different paradigm that looks at followership.

A democratic system provides for a way of dealing with bad leadership. Leaders are elected into position for a term. In our case, the term is five years. Whether it is too long or too short is not a matter for discussion now. What needs to be stated is that a bad leader can be cast out in an election. Five years of bad leadership may feel like eternity but the opportunity eventually arrives to get rid of it.

Followership, on the other hand, cannot be dealt with like that. If you have bad followership, there is not a means by which you can get rid of it. And, if truth be told, our followership in Malawi, which most of my readers and I are an integral part of, is very bad indeed. We have been plagued by bad leadership as well as bad followership. Little wonder that nothing seems to be moving.

Among the qualities of good followership is courage, the ability to speak up when things go wrong. We seem to score highly on this one. Spurred on by our cherished freedom of expression, we leave no stone unturned as we give vent to our frustrations. We are generally very good criticisers. The only problem is that we often criticise just for the sake of criticising. We do not bother to inject any amount of objectivity in our criticism. The kind of criticism we engage in is less than helpful. It is the type that politicians pedal. They criticize not because they want to help but because they want to expose the weaknesses of their opponents, to make themselves look better.

Good followership will refrain from this kind of criticism. It will, instead, engage in criticism to bring change rather than to shame the person or the people being criticized. Perhaps we do not realise it, but in the majority of cases, our criticism ultimately shames ourselves. People are quick to point out, for example, that despite being independent for 59 years, Malawi is probably the poorest country in the world outside a war zone. This is a statement that says a lot about the type of leadership that we have had, but also the type of followership. As followers, private citizens, we have not done what we should have done to lift the country from the dungeon of poverty. We have expected government to provide whatever we need.

I have always been fascinated by one Napoleon Dzombe, a s i m p l e Malawian who started with nothing but is now into a number of mega projects that will help many fellow Malawians. If anybody will tell me that they have nothing and, therefore, cannot do anything tangible, I will show them Napoleon Dzombe who was a typical villager with nothing but is now pushing multiple mega projects. If anybody will tell me that they cannot do anything because they live in Malawi where the macroeconomic conditions are so poor that businesses cannot survive, I will show them Napoleon Dzombe who has operated in Malawi all along yet has made significant strides in a number of business ventures.

I p u t i t t o m y readers today that our backwardness is as much because we have not had the caliber of leaders like Paul Kagame or Chairman Mao as because we have not had many followers of the caliber of Napoleon Dzombe.

As r e s p o n s i b l e followers we should go beyond just pointing out mistakes but should within our abilities to see what we can do as private citizens to foster development