Leaders and followers

Category: Coaching Notes

Coaching notes With American business facing a leadership crisis and top corporate executives being replaced at a rate of one per day, Aubrey Daniels and James Daniels introduce readers to a bold and proven new way to measure and pursue leadership in their new book Measure of a Leader.

More often than not, leaders who are held up as role models are charismatic people. However, great leaders manage people so they respond to the cause, not the leader’s personality. The most successful leaders transcend personality to develop a follower’s loyalty to the organisation’s goals. Leadership is about affecting behaviour, so when we talk about leading people, Aubrey and James Daniels claim that we should really talk about leading people’s behaviour.

Based on over 30 years of pioneering work with the world's leading organisations, the Daniels explain how anyone can increase their leadership impact by becoming a critical observer of human behaviour. By demonstrating how to recognise and measure the effect of their actions on followers, the authors provide readers with valuable, scientifically-proven methods for increasing their leadership impact, including how to:

Build leadership skills that leave a legacy

Inspire others to go above and beyond the call of duty

Create profitable habits and optimise performance at every level of an organisation

The Daniels have developed twelve measures, indicators that provide the best possible forecast of a leader’s impact on the growth of the business, on the customers and the marketplace, and on his or her legacy. The measures are presented in four key categories:

Momentum: Followers responding positively to the leader’s direction

Commitment: Followers focused on the leader’s goals

Initiative: Followers working together

Reciprocity: Followers collectively working with the leader

The role of the leader is to establish the conditions under which their followers will choose to execute the mission, vision and values of the organisation. The best leaders work hard to encourage productive relationships between followers; they have trusting relationships with their followers that allow for behaviours like admitting a mistake or discussing personal concerns without fear of retribution. Effective leaders can be identified by their relationship with their followers: -

The best leaders inspire their followers to go beyond whatever is minimally required to get a job done through dedication to the leader’s goals and vision.

The leader’s followers are willing to make sacrifices for the leader’s objectives, for the cause.

Successful leaders have followers who believe the leader’s goals are important enough that they support those goals by encouraging – and correcting – others so the entire group’s behaviour supports the leader’s priorities.

A leader must create an environment of trust and mutual respect for what each person contributes to the organisation.

Predictors of leadership

How do followers respond to the direction set by the leader?

This question assesses how a leader introduces and leads change in an organisation. It’s instructive to know how quickly a leader’s ideas gather momentum

How focused are followers on the goals of the leader?

This question addresses the issue of whether of not and how well the followers actually perform the tasks necessary to achieve the goals set by the leader.

How do followers relate to each other?

How do followers react to the leader?

The last two questions measure the leader’s cultural impact on the organisation by focusing on how well followers relate to the leader, the leader’s goals and to each other.