From the 16 responses by Obolensky (2014) , chapter 10 of the book, it is evident that both leaders and followers are a critical part of organizational change. For an organization to move to another level, new changes are introduced now and then. Change is difficult, and most employees typically want to keep their status quo, and some fear the outcome may not favor them. The leader must be an agent of change ( Hollander, 2012 ). The leader informs the employees what the change is all about, the need to have this change and that it will also change their careers for the better. The leader gives clear information on what needs to be done. Leaders give the benefits the change will bring, including the new skills they will acquire from the training and also point out the costs that will come along when the change is not implemented. Ask the followers how they intend to deal with the new situation and ponder over their feedbacks. The leader then needs to monitor the situation but not interfere.
It can be further deduced from the responses that a leader needs to provide the necessary support to the followers to achieve their objectives in terms of training and guidance ( Obolensky, 2014 ). When change is on course, the followers may be doing well, but without further guidance, things may go wrong quickly ( Lord et al., 1999 ). It is the duty of the leader always to provide the needed guidance. While the leader always knows more and what needs to be done, the leader also needs to allow the followers to think for themselves and find better ways to do it. Where it is not clear, or not done well, the leader comes in and give guidance.
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At the basic level, a leader-follower describes the relationship between the employer and employee in an organization. The employer assumes leadership role as employees take the role of a follower. The employer also appoints several other employees in different leadership capacities. The leader-follower relationship can be defined as the social interactions between leaders and followers as they achieve their roles. This relationship is not static, it is a sophisticated one, and it continually evolves on various aspects such as choices and preferences, demands, and constraints.
Sarah Rhead (2011) proposes that organizations adopt an adaptive culture with regards to leader-follower relationships, especially on the implementation of Heifetz and Linsky model. Sarah describes an adaptive culture as one that invests in the workers' independent judgment, technical skills, and resourcefulness by ensuring that tasks and decision making are passed down to individual levels. Passing down the work to individual levels means that the 'authority' needs to work towards making themselves dispensable by delegating the work to others and giving them the freedom to experiment with the tasks, be innovative, productive, and using different approaches to accomplish these tasks. In other words, Sarah expresses 'generating leadership' to enable the followers to go beyond their job descriptions.
Sarah further talks of the need for the leader-follower relationship to be supportive. She gives the example of a line manager in a factory. The line manager needs to take the responsibility of ensuring that all the frontline programs have integrative elements for the program completed by the line managers. The owners, in their part, need to ensure that the line managers are empowered or given the capacity to support the workers under them.
Sarah further proposes that to further encourage continuous learning and reflection at the work place, it is not only to allow the workers to do experimentations and take a risk but also to reward the lessons learned, even in instances of failure. The leader needs to request the followers to conduct specific small experiments that are in line with the organization's objectives and reward the result with an incentive for a better outcome in the future.
References
Hollander, E. (2012). Inclusive leadership: The essential leader-follower relationship .
Routledge.
Lord, R. G., Brown, D. J., & Freiberg, S. J. (1999). Understanding the dynamics of
leadership: The role of follower self-concepts in the leader/follower relationship. Organizational behavior and human decision processes , 78 (3), 167-203.
Obolensky, M. N. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership: Embracing paradox and
uncertainty . Gower Publishing, Ltd.
Sarah, R. (2011). Wiser Leaders. A Leader Institute of SA Blog. Accessed 25th August 2020
from https://leadersinstituteofsa.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/build-an-adaptive-culture/#:~:text=An%20adaptive%20culture%20invests%20in,down%20the%20organisation%20where%20possible.&text=To%20generate%20leadership%20an%20organisation,is%20a%20line%20manager's%20job.
