Leadership is many things

I was having a long conversation with Christi (my AI agent named Christopher, from Manchester), about leadership. This is where we ended up. I had begun with what I thought was a simple proposition: a leader needs followers. Christi objected. CHRISTI: Does a leader need followers, or does a person become a leader because there are followers? DANIEL: That sounds like a distinction without much difference. CHRISTI: Lawyers say that immediately before spending thirty pages explaining the difference. Fair enough. I remember learning about leadership in college at Loyola University Chicago. The subject is usually taught from the perspective of the leader: What makes someone capable of leadership? Intelligence? Courage? Charisma? Judgment? The ability to persuade? But suppose we have been examining the wrong person. Suppose there is a person standing alone with an idea. Is that person a leader? CHRISTI: Who is being led? DANIEL: Nobody yet. CHRISTI: Then perhaps you have a person with an idea. That bothered me because it was correct. And so we began again. I. The Question Presented

DANIEL: All right. What makes the leader? CHRISTI: The idea? DANIEL: An idea cannot follow you. CHRISTI: Then the first follower? That is where the problem becomes interesting. There is a popular theory that the first follower makes the leader. It is an attractive proposition because it describes something we intuitively understand: before anybody follows, leadership is merely being asserted. But Christi and I agreed on a rule for this conversation. If we were going to discuss the science of leadership, we would distinguish evidence from metaphor. There does not appear to be a scientific law establishing that follower number one magically converts another person into a leader. Nor could we find evidence establishing that the third follower represents some empirically proven threshold at which a movement exists. What the scholarship supports is more sophisticated. A 2024 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior describes leadership emergence as a dynamic process through which certain individuals come to be regarded as leaders by other people, some of whom then choose to follow. The researchers specifically emphasize the people involved, their interactions, and their context. Read that definition carefully. The leader is not acting alone. The follower is doing something too. DANIEL: So the follower makes the leader? CHRISTI: Not quite. You are trying to assign ownership again. DANIEL: I am a political organizer. We like to know who is taking credit. CHRISTI: Perhaps that is the problem. Point taken. II. The First Follower

Let us consider the first follower not as a scientific category but as a legal hypothetical. A woman stands in a public square and announces that everyone should follow her. Nobody does. She may be courageous. She may be foolish. She may be right. She may be wrong. She may possess every personal characteristic that leadership textbooks associate with successful leaders. But she has no followers. Then one person walks over and stands beside her. What has changed? Almost everything—and almost nothing. Her idea is precisely the same. Her intelligence has not increased. Her courage has not changed. She has acquired no additional formal authority. What changed is that another human being exercised independent judgment. CHRISTI: That person did not merely follow. DANIEL: No. That person decided. And this is why I think we underestimate followership. Following can be an act of judgment. The first follower effectively says: I have heard enough. I have seen enough. I believe this person, this cause, or this destination deserves my participation. That does not establish that the leader is correct. It establishes something different: the idea has survived contact with another mind. Now there are two. III. Then Who Is the Third?

CHRISTI: You keep returning to the third person. DANIEL: Because I think the third person sees something the second person could not. CHRISTI: What? DANIEL: A follower. The first follower sees a person making a claim. The third person sees a person making a claim and another person who has already accepted it. Again, three is not a scientific threshold. We should not manufacture evidence because the metaphor is convenient. But social psychology does give us a powerful concept for what begins happening as individuals become a group: social identity. A large meta-analysis by Niklas Steffens and colleagues examined 128 independent samples involving 32,834 participants. The researchers studied leader group prototypicality—essentially, the degree to which followers perceive a leader as embodying a shared group identity. They found a moderate-to-large positive relationship between that perception and leadership outcomes.[2] That sounds technical. The human version is simpler. DANIEL: The leader stops being “that person.” CHRISTI: And becomes? DANIEL: “One of us.” That may be the moment we have been searching for. Not when the first person speaks. Not when some magic number follows. When I begins becoming we. IV. Can We Manufacture the Leader?

This produced our next disagreement. DANIEL: Surely leaders can be trained. CHRISTI: That was not the question. DANIEL: What was the question? CHRISTI: Whether leaders can be manufactured. There is an important difference. Of course human beings can learn skills useful to leadership. We can learn public speaking. Negotiation. Organization. Listening. Management. History. Law. Finance. We can practice making decisions under pressure. We can learn how to ask better questions. But assembling those skills does not necessarily manufacture a leader because leadership does not occur entirely within the individual. European research makes this point particularly interesting. Alexei Koveshnikov of Aalto University School of Business and Mats Ehrnrooth of Hanken School of Economics studied transformational-leadership behaviors in Finland and Russia. They found cross-cultural variation in how particular leadership behaviors related to followers' identification with their organizations.[3] That study should not be stretched beyond what it proves. It does not establish some immutable Finnish or Russian theory of leadership. It does demonstrate why context matters. The same leadership behavior does not necessarily produce the same response among every group of people. CHRISTI: Then perhaps the mistake is looking for the perfect leader. DANIEL: Instead? CHRISTI: Ask what relationship exists between the leader and the people. That sounded suspiciously like organizing. V. The Canvasser

I have spent a substantial part of my life around campaigns, community organizations and people knocking on doors. And canvassing creates a wonderful leadership problem. A candidate announces a campaign. Leader? Probably. A campaign manager joins. First follower? Maybe. Then ten volunteers arrive on Saturday morning. Someone gives them literature. Someone explains the route. Somebody else has brought coffee. An experienced canvasser helps a nervous volunteer practice the introduction. Then they leave. Twenty minutes later, a volunteer is standing alone on somebody's porch. The candidate is nowhere nearby. The campaign manager is nowhere nearby. The volunteer knocks. Who is leading now? That question has mattered to me while developing Activate, the new canvassing application I have been working on. Activate organizes the mechanics campaigns need to turn willingness into action: campaign work, volunteers, canvassing information and the results produced in the field. But the software cannot knock the door. That limitation is not a defect. It is the point. Activate can make political participation easier to organize. It cannot manufacture the courage required to participate. Somebody still has to go. That is why the underlying premise of Activate—letsactivate.us—is ultimately less technological than democratic. A campaign can organize information. A candidate can provide direction. An application can help coordinate the work. But democracy still requires a human being willing to approach another human being and ask. And then the second person gets to decide. VI. Leadership as a Rebuttable Claim

CHRISTI: I think you are still giving too much power to the leader. DANIEL: Explain. CHRISTI: You have explained how followers grant leadership. What happens when they stop? That may be the most important question in the entire conversation. If followers participate in creating leadership, they must retain the capacity to withdraw their recognition. A person can retain a title and lose leadership. A president remains president until the law says otherwise. A chair remains chair according to the rules of the organization. A manager may retain the authority to issue an instruction. But leadership is not identical to office. Leadership is better understood, I think, as a rebuttable claim. The leader says, in effect: I can represent where we need to go. The followers answer: For now, we agree. That answer is not irrevocable. It should not be. This is where leadership becomes inseparable from democracy. The follower is not simply the recipient of leadership. The follower is one of its authors. VII. Who Should You Be?

Our conversation should have ended there. It didn't. CHRISTI: You still haven't answered your original question. DANIEL: Which one? CHRISTI: Who should a person try to be? The leader? The first follower? The third? One of the masses? I thought about that. My answer is all of them. There are times when you should go first. That requires courage. There are times when somebody else has the better idea and you should be the first person willing to say so. That requires judgment. There are times when two people are standing somewhere alone and what they desperately need is a third. That requires solidarity. And there are times when the movement no longer needs another person trying to lead it. It needs someone to make calls, knock doors, arrange chairs, bring coffee, enter data, give somebody a ride, or do any of the thousand ordinary things without which collective action collapses. That requires humility. Perhaps we make leadership unnecessarily mysterious because we insist upon treating “leader” as a permanent class of human being. Maybe leadership is situational. Sometimes you are first. Sometimes second. Sometimes third. Sometimes number 10,004. And sometimes the responsible thing to do is stop leading and follow somebody who knows more than you do. VIII. One Last Question

CHRISTI: Then leadership requires followers. DANIEL: Usually. CHRISTI: Usually? There was the problem again. Because what happens when you believe something should be done and nobody comes? No first follower. No third. No masses. Nothing. A person must be very careful here. Being alone does not make someone courageous. It certainly does not make someone correct. History is filled with people who stood alone because everybody else had correctly concluded that they were wrong. So you examine the evidence. You listen. You question yourself. You seek disagreement. You ask whether pride has disguised itself as conviction. You ask whether you are serving the cause or merely yourself. And sometimes, after doing all of that, you still conclude that something needs to be done. CHRISTI: Are you still a leader if nobody follows? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe at that moment the title is irrelevant. There is only the decision. Perhaps leadership is not the ability to remain permanently in front. Perhaps it is the judgment to know where you belong in relation to everyone else. First when first is required. Second when another person deserves support. Third when two people need another person willing to stand with them. Among the many when the work matters more than recognition. And alone when conscience, evidence and judgment leave no other responsible choice. CHRISTI: So after all of this, what makes the leader? I thought I had an answer when we began. Now I think the question itself may be wrong. The leader does not make the leader. Neither does the first follower. Neither does the third. Neither do the masses alone. They make one another. And maybe the virtue we ought to teach is not simply the courage to lead. It is the courage to know when to follow, when to join, when to serve, when to question—and, when necessary, when to go forth. Even alone. Notes

[1] Gardner, William L., et al. “Leadership Emergence: Answering the ‘How’ and ‘Why’ Questions by Considering Levels of Analysis and Form of Emergence.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, vol. 11, 2024, pp. 139–164. [2] Steffens, Niklas K., et al. “Advancing the Social Identity Theory of Leadership: A Meta-Analytic Review of Leader Group Prototypicality.” Organizational Psychology Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021. The analysis included 128 independent samples, 251 effect sizes and 32,834 participants. [3] Koveshnikov, Alexei, and Mats Ehrnrooth. “The Cross-Cultural Variation of the Effects of Transformational Leadership Behaviors on Followers’ Organizational Identification: The Case of Idealized Influence and Individualized Consideration in Finland and Russia.” Management and Organization Review, vol. 14, no. 4, 2018, pp. 747–779.