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9. Iota | Creating Chapter Leaders Through Followership
24 Plays5 months ago
You don't need a title to make an impact on your fraternity or sorority chapter. That can happen through followership--different from following. This episode breaks down how any chapter member can be an effective follower in service to their fraternity or sorority. From this episode, you can learn:
- The definition of followership.
- What it means to be an effective follower.
- Steps chapter members can take today to make a real difference.
Episode Resources:
- Episode Theta with Travis Martin (leadership and vision casting): https://zencastr.com/z/DFfaN9yF
- Episode Delta with Gregory Parks (chapter culture): https://zencastr.com/z/_fABcyu2
- For Our Edification's episode on followership: https://forouredification.podbean.com/e/followership/
- BONUS - I Wanna Work There! episode on cultivating culture: https://www.enrollify.org/episodes/ep-11-the-need-for-culture-cultivators
Ethocast is a "For Our Edification" limited series and is supported by Edify Ventures, LLC.
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Transcript
Introduction to Ethocast
00:00:00
Speaker
On this episode of Ethercast, I want to talk to you about followership. Doing that thing in your chapter with your leaders in a way that's going to make the chapter better. Let's talk about it. It's episode Iota of Ethercast.
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Ethocast, a podcast about sound leadership practices to boost life in college fraternities and sororities.
Eddie's Background and Leadership Purpose
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm Eddie Francis, presenter of Followership to Leadership and the Black Greek Success Program, presentations designed to help Greeks become more ethical. effective leaders. On Ethocast, I'll share lessons learned from my college days, my career journey, and leadership research. Ethocast is a four-hour edification limited series and presented by edify adventures. This is Ethocast, leadership to the letter.
00:00:55
Speaker
I probably told you this 300 million times but I am a proud alum of Tennessee State University where I got my master's degree in strategic leadership. I was fascinated by this program. The reason that I wanted to get into this program is I wanted to study organizational dynamics. I had been taking a look at leaders at the jobs where I worked for years and I just wondered what made them tick. And then I also wondered how is it that the work that they did really impacted the organization and how is it that the relationships with the people within that organization, I wanted to know how that also impacted the organization.
00:01:38
Speaker
So I get into Tennessee State and um doing my thing and I run across this thing called followership
Research on Narcissism and Followership
00:01:45
Speaker
in my studies. What is that? I became fascinated with that. And while I was there, I had my ah I had my sites set on studying narcissism in leadership, which is what I wound up doing my final project on, which is like a thesis, right? And so I am dead set on talking about narcissism and we have got to stop it and all of that good stuff. Yeah. I had to learn how research worked.
00:02:14
Speaker
Well, after learning about followership, that shifted my focus a little bit. And I want to understand how is it that narcissism impacted followership? I'm gonna spare you the suspense. It sucks. It really impacts followership in a pretty sucky, toxic, negative way. There, study completed. Okay, there really is more
Importance of Followership in Greek Life
00:02:40
Speaker
details to this. All right, so here's the deal. I actually did a case study for this final project of mine, and a case study was on Fire Fest. And so I i took a good look at how the people who were involved in planning Fire Fest were impacted by the narcissism
00:02:57
Speaker
of the person who was leading at the time. So that is neither here nor there at that point. The important part is that I was able to get this big understanding of followership and and basically how that worked in the context of an organization, especially when you had a leader with a certain personality type. I think that Greek life is primed for a robust conversation about followership so that members can understand how to put their ah membership and their involvement in your fraternities or sororities into a great context.
Leadership Roles in Fraternities and Sororities
00:03:41
Speaker
Cause if you can put it into context,
00:03:43
Speaker
then you can figure out how to be an effective brother, how to be an effective sister. Now we're gonna focus at the chapter level, right? Like we always do. Brotherhood and sisterhood, theoretically, it puts us all on the same snowy field, right? We know that there is this thing called hierarchy. We know it exists. But when you think about a fraternity or sorority, theoretically, we're pretty much supposed to be on the same plane. The leadership positions, um,
00:04:21
Speaker
I see the leadership positions and fraternities and sororities as something to guide the organization, to guide policy, to guide members and to guide us with a certain vision so that we can achieve the missions of our respective fraternities and sororities. So where does followership come in?
Understanding Followership
00:04:40
Speaker
Followership comes in because there is this mutual influencing that happens between the follower and the leader in an organization. And so we'll say that followership in a Greek chapter is a mutual influencing between the member and the leader or the president or the executive board members of that chapter. We're going to focus on president for now. So thinking about that, thinking about followership in context of Greek life.
00:05:14
Speaker
Let's give a definition. What exactly is followership? Followership is different from following. Following is a reaction to whatever the leader is doing. Pretty simple. It could be conscious, it could be unconscious, but it is reactionary. Followership is more thought out. The behavior of the followers is based on the relationship with the leaders in followership. And people are cognizant of those behaviors. The key to this is understanding that there is a mutual influencing relationship happening between the follower and the leader.
00:05:59
Speaker
Now, for a little background, leadership normally has been studied from the standpoint of a person who holds what we call executive authority.
Robert Kelly's Follower Types
00:06:10
Speaker
Executive authority means that you have someone who has the power to implement policy, change policy, influence personnel decisions, make personnel decisions. No matter how large or how small the organization is, the organization could be a sprawling global organization. The people with executive authority are the ones who have influence that has felt throughout the entire organization because of their decision making power, right? And so.
00:06:44
Speaker
Researchers looked at that. They looked at the executive authority authority part of leadership when they studied it. But then later on, researchers started to turn their attention to followers and they started to turn their attention to followers because of the impact that followers tend to have on leaders. but There was this researcher by the name of Robert Kelly, K-E-L-L-E-Y. And Robert Kelly said, without followers, leadership is meaningless and leaders don't exist. This is why when people hear me talk about leadership, I normally simply say leadership is about people. It is that simple.
00:07:31
Speaker
people. There was another followership, uh, scholar by the name of Ira Cheyla and Cheyla said that effective followers are courageous. Now, why is that? Why exactly would courage be aligned with effectiveness? We'll get into that in just a little bit, but Let's talk about what it means to be effective. The views expressed on Ethocast do not necessarily reflect the views of the hosts, guests, or any entities with which this podcast's participants are affiliated. Questions, comments, email eddie at eddiefrances.com.
00:08:11
Speaker
So Kelly created a model in this model, identify five types of followers in an organization. Now we're going to focus on effective followers, but I'm going to actually save that one for last. So I want you to think about this really quickly. When he designed this model, he designed it looking at two different things. He looked at the level of involvement, and he also looked at the level of critical thinking with the level being either high or low for each one. Now, let's start with one type of follower that is a pretty simple, straightforward description, and that is a passive follower.
00:08:54
Speaker
The passive follower is someone who is low on critical thinking and they are low on involvement. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that this is someone who is ah unintelligent. What it means is that this is person may not even be making an effort. So if you think about someone in a chapter, and you're doing your chapter meeting and there's someone sitting in the back and you start thinking to yourself, okay, this person doesn't want to be involved. Another chapter meeting rolls around. They're doing the same thing. They're just sitting in the back. They're not really saying anything. They're not doing anything. After a while you start to wonder, does this person even want to be in this room? Does this person want to be in a chapter? Does this person want to be in this fraternity or sorority?
00:09:34
Speaker
And so the passive follower can be a pretty difficult person to get through to because they are not communicating. All right. So another type of follower is the conformance. Now the conformance of someone who is high in involvement, but they might be low in critical thinking. And again, this is not to say that this person is unintelligent. This is probably a little bit more about effort. And so what is the conformist doing? A conformist is basically saying, yes, I'll do it. Yes, I'll do it. Yes, I'll do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Now I know, I know what you're probably thinking based on what I just said there. Oh, so this is a yes person. Well, it could be a yes person, but it could also be someone on the other end of the spectrum who is caring so much about the chapter that they are going to do whatever it takes.
00:10:23
Speaker
Now the other type of follower is a really interesting type of follower and that is the alienated follower. Honestly, I have found myself in this position a few times because the alienated follower is someone who is low in involvement, but high in critical thinking. This is probably the person sitting in a chapter meeting who is somewhat of a peanut gallery. They're sitting back there. They might be sitting back there with the rest of the brothers. They might be sitting with the rest of the sisters. And this might be the person who is cracking the jokes under their breath, or they're cracking the jokes among one another who knows what's going and on. And you just want to say, you know what? If you have something to contribute, could you please contribute it?
00:11:06
Speaker
And they go, no, I tried and and nobody wants to hear what I had to say. So here I sit. And this person is a pain in the butt. Okay. i I know myself, I can be a pain in the butt, but the question you have to ask yourself is why is it that this person has so much to say, but they don't feel the need to get involved in what's going on? who or what alienated this person. Hmm. And then another type of follower, a fourth type is the pragmatist. The pragmatist is a mix of just about all of them because the pragmatist is the one who recognizes a situation, another situation, another situation, and they're going to flex with each situation. Now, for some people, you may think of the pragmatist as someone who just goes whichever way the wind blows.
00:11:59
Speaker
But that may not necessarily be what they're doing. They could also be the type of person who is simply being adaptable to whatever the situation is because they want to stay involved in the chapter, whatever it takes. And then finally, we have the effective follower. Now, if you do an internet search on Kelly's five follower types, you're going to also see the term exemplary used. The effective follower is high in critical thinking and the effective follower is also high in involvement. So let's dive deeper into what it means to be an effective follower. I always say that leadership is a process. Followership is also a process, I believe. And that's because as you exist as a follower,
00:12:52
Speaker
If you are effective, what you're doing is you are evaluating your place within the group at all times. So you're trying to figure out how you can contribute, how you fit in, right? And that is follower. ship That that involvement that recognition of behaviors and also that recognition of your relationship with the leaders as we talked about a little earlier. So what the effective follower does is they don't just carry out the leaders vision.
00:13:25
Speaker
they help cultivate the leader's vision in some way. So in the last episode, episode theta, we talked to um Travis Martin and he talked about vision casting. Effective followers can play a part in that vision casting. And they realize in doing that that they bear some responsibility as well. They don't just leave it on the leader. They try to figure out effective followers what it is that they have to do to play a role in the success of the group.
00:14:02
Speaker
So when Kelly talked about effective followers, he he said that effective followers are number one, they're they're good team players. They are collaborative. Here's one that you may or may not like. An effective follower, as far as Kelly is concerned, and I would agree with this, does not try to play the hero. and they don't see themselves as a hero. Effective the followers in that case are looking to the greater purpose. And I'm going to paraphrase Kelly's thought here that effective followers also help create psychologically safe environments for everyone to operate. They also tried to do that, which is ethical. They tried to do that, which is moral.
00:14:50
Speaker
Now, the way I see it, leaders are people who can help create the culture of a group. Your chapter president can very much help create the culture of the chapter or the chapter president can set a vision for what the culture of the chapter is going to be. We talked about culture in episode Delta with Gregory Parks, but what followers do is followers help cultivate that culture in some way. The way followers can do that or at least effective followers can do that is by using what's called expertise authority. So you heard me mention executive authority, someone who has the power to set policy to make personnel decisions.
00:15:42
Speaker
Here's what expertise authority is, taking ownership of that job, knowing that job, what that person does inside and out and taking ownership in such a way that whenever a bad decision is being made, then the person with expertise authority steps up and can explain why that decision is bad based on the area that they know, or at least not necessarily, you know, talk about why it's bad. They give feedback to give more context about why a different decision should be made. So
00:16:24
Speaker
In expertise authority, what you have is you have something that is helpful in supporting leaders with their vision, but at the same time recognizing and raising concerns about
Lessons from the Challenger Disaster
00:16:38
Speaker
decision making. and ah they are gonna do it in a way that they're gonna call attention to how that decision making may not serve the organization or the people of the organization in an ethical way. So the unfortunate example of this is the Space Shuttle Challenger.
00:16:59
Speaker
to um to You may or may not know this story, but the senior engineers who were responsible for the space shuttle knew the morning of the launch was a bad morning to do it. The temperature was not right. There was a piece called an O-ring and the senior engineers said, listen, do not launch that shuttle in the morning because the temperature is gonna be too low. And it's gonna cause these O-rings to malfunction in some way. However, people with executive authority,
00:17:41
Speaker
managers, um other folks who were surrounding the managers at the engineering firm, and then also folks from NASA and folks from the White House, they were putting pressure on the engineering firm to greenlight the launch. The managers said, we're gonna greenlight this thing. In fact, one manager was quoted as saying, listen, take off your engineer hat and put on your manager hat. Basically saying we got to do this launch because America is waiting for it and we don't want to embarrass the White House. This thing has got to happen. And unfortunately we know what happened. So that is an example of a time that executive authority should have acquiesced
00:18:29
Speaker
to expertise authority. And an effective follower is confident in their expertise authority. You see, they they see all of these dynamics. They see the relationships going on, effective followers. And what they do is they recognize this is kind of a dance. They kind of recognize that, okay, you're gonna step this way, effective leader. I'm gonna step that way. But I'm not gonna step that way to throw you off. I'm gonna step that way to just kind of guide you. And then ah what I'm also going to do is I'm going to make a step in a certain way to try to bring you this way. Hey, you step that way. I love that step. I'm going to step that way with you. Don't you like this step? Come on, do this step with me. Now, um if you haven't noticed, ah this podcast, Ethocast is a limited series podcast.
00:19:16
Speaker
um And it is for the For Our Edification podcast or part of the For Our Edification podcast. Episode 33 of For Our Edification was an interview that I did with someone by the name of Sharna Fabiano. And Sharna is an expert in the leader-follower relationship. So if you get an opportunity, check that out. And the reason I bring Sharna up is Sharna is a dancer. And we had a really cool conversation about looking at the leader-follower relationship as a dance. She does it way better than I do, by the way. She's the expert.
00:19:47
Speaker
But back to effective followers having expertise authority. This is why Taylor, Ira Taylor, this is why he describes effective followers as people having courage because they know that in order to speak up in those tight moments, they have got to have a little, they got to have a little gumption about them. They, they know that there's a good chance that they're going to get shut down. They know that there's a good chance they're going to get ignored. And they also know that there's a chance, depending on the leader, there's a chance that they might even get disciplined or they may even get sent away from the job. So let's talk about you and let's talk about where you can go from here.
00:20:36
Speaker
So for you, the first thing I would do as far as what you can do right here, right now, to be an effective follower and to practice followership is to recognize that followership is a path to leadership.
Followership Leading to Leadership
00:20:51
Speaker
That's why I call the program that I do on college campuses, followership to leadership. Realize that being aware of your followership, it can help the chapter in a lot of different ways. I mean, number one, you can help hold leadership accountable. and And when I say hold leadership accountable, I'm going to use the words of a guy named Allen Stein Jr. here. Accountability is something that you do for someone. And I'm going to use my words here. Do not weaponize accountability. So yes, hold your leaders accountable in a brotherly or a sisterly way. Also, followership creates bench strength. In other words,
00:21:30
Speaker
with followership you are developing leaders as you go and it helps you look into the future for who your future leaders are. It promotes a culture of leadership throughout the chapter. Followership helps identify potential quality members as you are looking to bring in new members to your chapter and then followership enhances the way you communicate and relate to other people on campus. So how can you Practice effective followership.
Key Actions for Effective Followership
00:22:00
Speaker
I'm gonna give you three big things that you can do. Number one, take initiative. Don't wait. Just take initiative to come up with the great ideas and volunteer. Raise your hand to carry those ideas out in your chapter. Number two, communicate with leaders and each other in a productive way. A way that's gonna always push the chapter forward. And number three,
00:22:24
Speaker
practice self-awareness and practice self accountability. Because if you know yourself and when you hold yourself accountable, then you can be a much stronger follower and or a much stronger member of your chapter. Now, there are other ways that you can practice being an effective follower. And I talk about these in my programs, Followership to Leadership and for my D9 Greeks, the Black Greek Success Program.
Challenges and Growth in Followership
00:22:52
Speaker
So let me close this thing out. A couple of quick thoughts. Number one, followership, let's be real, it can be just as challenging as leadership. It does take work. It is a process. But followership is also a learning process. You don't just walk in and do everything right the first time. You're gonna make some mistakes.
00:23:16
Speaker
That's why one of the things that I said, it it is about effective followership is that ineffective follower is going to help create a psychologically safe environment for people to fail forward. And that's going to happen. But then the biggest thing is this Greek life. Greek life is like being in a gumbo. You're going to have all these different personalities, all these different views, all these different ways of doing things. But what followership can help you do is it can help you recognize those ingredients and figure out how to get those ingredients to work together.
00:23:54
Speaker
You got any questions? Make sure you hit me up, eddie at eddiefrances.com. I'm happy to jump on the line with you and talk to you about a few things and I would love to bring followership or leadership to your campus. Thanks for joining me on this episode of Ethocast.
Conclusion and Invitation for Engagement
00:24:11
Speaker
Ethocast is a four-hour edification limited series. If you like what you heard, like and follow this podcast for more leadership insights for your fraternity or sorority chapter. To find out how you can bring followership to leadership or the Black Greek success program to your campus or a campus near you, email today, eddy at eddyfrances.com. Until next time, spread brotherly and sisterly love wherever you go.