In high school I was a good athlete. I played football and rugby. Then in grade 12 something happened that forced me into some soul searching – my coaches wanted me to be a team captain.

I was supposed to want to be team captain. After all, who doesn’t want to be a team captain? Well, I felt it would get in way of being a great player. As I rose through the levels of competition in rugby, I was thrilled to be selected to regional teams, the Ontario team and then the Canadian youth team. I no longer had to be the captain.

None of this made any sense to me, but I certainly could not mention my concerns to anyone. I once tried to talk to a coach who fluffed it off as nonsense.

When I started working I began reading the Harvard Business Review. In 1988 I read an article which finally made sense of my lack of interest in being a team captain. It was called, In Praise of Followers by Robert Kelley.

At first I thought it was a poor idea. Then I read of the main idea; followership is not about the standard cliché of being sheep (I later lived in New Zealand and had lots of opportunities to see sheep.) He talked of followership as having attributes such as:

• Followers pick their leaders carefully and conciously make decisions to follow leaders who are able to create the conditions needed for followers to work effectively.
• Followers think for themselves, they carry out assignments with energy and assertiveness.

Then it all made sense.

In any organization, there is someone called the boss with a title such as CEO, Executive Director or Managing Director.

Under them, everyone else is both a follower and a leader. While we study leadership, we basically ignore the role of being a follower.

This insight seemed so obvious. It made me wonder about the implications for all organizations.

Much later I developed my expertise in innovation. I noticed a pattern with the people who are very good at conceiving ideas.

Often they were called loners, mavericks and outsiders. This led me to wonder about leadership in terms of what and who our current leadership models are design for; it is the leadership of people. Yet at the very core of innovation is the leadership of ideas.

How people manage people to get results is very important. Equally important is how we manage our ideas to get results.

True leaders must develop an expertise for managing people and for managing ideas. The best organizations will harness the experience and expertise of people to create value for their organization. To do this takes an equal expertise to focus on the ideas that lead to new products and services, and new strategies.

Some say this is creativity. Some say this is innovation. I prefer to avoid debates on the terminology and focus on the products of the creativity; the ideas people create to solve problems.

Some people will have a greater aptitude for managing people and some will have a greater aptitude for managing ideas. I believe it is crucial to nurture both.

There is a vast industry designed to practice the art of leading people. Yet, what about to practice the art of leading ideas? I see little evidence that we have yet to build an equal body of knowledge to lead ideas.

This brings me back to the concept of followership.

Some of the best idea people I have studied have little interest in managing people. They are often thought of as thinkers. In interviews with innovators, I ask them to tell me what they are told in Job Performance Reviews. The most common responses are (in approximate order):

• You always find the flaws, always critical.
• You think too much.
• You go off on tangents.
• You’re not a team player. You’re a loner.

The typical story for the first criticism is about working on a team project.

Nearing its completion, they noticed a problem that no one else seems to see. They express their concerns believing that if this flaw was resolved, it would lead to a stronger result. Thinking that they would be rewarded for their insight, they are instead labeled as negative. Soon the problem disappears as they stop engaging as a team member and allow flaws to proceed rather than risk criticism.

This reflects a lack of proper understanding of differences in the way people think and the expertise that these differences create.

Some people are born followers as they have little interest in managing people. Others love managing people yet do they also have the insight and skills to manage ideas? Perhaps.

It seems to me that the concept of followership can apply to both the management of people and the management of ideas. This will be the theme for a number of articles on this section of Canada One.

The goal is to provide new insights to make our organizations more innovative at a time when every measure of innovation in Canada is relatively poor. It is time for some new models and tools for managing both recognizing, as the academic researcher, Fernandes wrote, “Innovation is definitely not self-starting or self-perpetuating. People make it happen through their imagination, will power, and perseverance ….your only real path for innovation is through people.”