Beyond leaders and followers
Anyone who has read this column more than a time or two knows that I do not consider leadership to be about the actions of individual, charismatic and heroic leaders. First of all, "leader" and "leadership" do not mean the same thing. Individual leaders are people, but leadership is a process. Leadership is not about individual people, but a process between people. Leadership happens when people interact to influence one another to bring about change reflecting their common purpose.
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This concept of leadership requires breaking free from our traditional thinking about the meaning of "leader" and "follower." Leaders and followers are not different people or different kinds of people; they are different roles in the process of leadership. Many people think that leaders lead because they are somehow smarter, better informed, more charismatic, better motivated or otherwise a cut above their followers. In any given situation, that may be true. However, leadership is also collaborative, interactive and reciprocal. In any successful leadership situation, the same people often play both roles — effective leader and effective follower. The leaders who inspire me don't see their leadership role as a cut above and somehow more engaged than that of a follower. Instead, they see the two roles, leader and follower, as different but equal responsibilities.
Still, people want to know what that means for them. They want to know: "What do I have to do if I want to influence people?" After all, we all want to know how a person inspires other people to act. I have been thinking about this lately, in part because I see people trying so hard to bring about really meaningful changes in the wildland fire world but having marginal effect and getting very frustrated. I have been considering the advice I might give to help people meet their goals when it comes to inspiring other people to act on important initiatives. I recently tumbled onto two ideas that have really shaped my thinking.
First, people do not especially care that you think you have what they need. What matters is that people know what you believe, how your beliefs relate to their motives and interests, and why they should believe what you believe. This idea relates to an expression that a friend introduced me to years ago and has influenced me ever since: People do not care what you know until they know that you care.
When a person can demonstrate what they believe and why, other people can see why they should follow — or not. You may have the answer to firefighter safety, organizational learning, cost containment, firefighter compensation or some important agency policy, but people must see and feel your motivation. They need to understand how your motivation relates to their motivation, or you are likely to be a lone voice in the wilderness or the leader of a minor fringe movement.
Inspiring people to follow may require reversing the communication style and priorities to which many people in the fire service have become accustomed. Essentially, don't focus on what you want people to do and how. To inspire action, you must focus first — you need to concentrate on why you believe they should do something, and then talk about what and how. For an interesting presentation on this concept, I recommend Simon Sinek's TED Talk on how great leaders inspire action at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html.
The other idea shaping my view on leadership that inspires action came from a brief presentation on how to create a movement that Derek Sivers made to TED (See it at http://www.ted.com/ talks/lang/eng/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html). His presentation may be the best three minutes I've spent on leadership lately, and I'm using a narrated version of his video that I found on YouTube as an assignment for my university students.
Whether your interest is getting people onboard with doctrine, just culture, human performance improvement, high-reliability organizing, organizational learning, continuous improvement or just bringing all these concepts together, anyone wishing to start a mass movement in wildland fire must understand one critically important idea: Inspiring mass movement requires adopting an understanding that leadership is not all about the individual leader.
Yes, the leadership process requires people who will step up and take initiative, but it also requires people who allow themselves to follow and, in turn, lead others. In this process, the first few people to follow prove critical, as they show others how to follow. Counter to conventional wisdom, new followers in a movement follow people they see following, not the initial leader. For me, this raises a critically important point. To inspire action that creates a movement, a leader must cultivate the first few followers coming to the movement while remembering it is all about the followers and the movement, not about the leader.
Leaders who can inspire people to mass action know five things. First, they understand that leadership is a role, not a position, not a matter of personality and not the responsibility of a single actor. Second, they know that, at any given time, their role may shift between leader and follower. Third, they "get" that people act when they know why the leader is acting and why they should act. Fourth, they understand that, in the leadership equation, followers matter at least as much, and maybe more, than individual leaders. And finally, they know that early followers inspire others to act, and that fostering and nurturing early followers represents a leadership priority.
When I think about how a leader inspires people to take action on an important initiative, I am reminded of the thinking of Lao-Tzu, a Chinese philosopher of the sixth century B.C. who wrote, "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies for Fort Hays State University. Follow him on Twitter @guidegroup or via LinkedIn.
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