Why followers follow leaders

What most analyses seem to ignore, though, is that followers have their own identity. Indeed, in 30 years of experience as a psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant, I have found that followers are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead.

The rational ones are conscious and therefore well-known. More influential, much of the time, are the irrational motivations that lie outside the realm of our awareness and, therefore, beyond our ability to control them. For the most part, these motivations arise from the powerful images and emotions in our unconscious that we project onto our relationships with leaders. After practicing psychoanalysis for a number of years, Freud was puzzled to find that his patients—who were, in a sense, his followers—kept falling in love with him.

Although most of his patients were women, the same thing happened with his male patients. Instead, he concluded, people were relating to him as if he were some important person from their past—usually a parent.

In undergoing therapy—or in falling in love, for that matter—people were transferring experiences and emotions from past relationships onto the present. Freud thought the phenomenon was universal. Indeed, for Freud, patients were ready to end therapy when they understood and mastered their transference. But even today, identifying and dissolving transferences are the principal goals of psychoanalysis.

But as important as it is, the concept remains little understood outside clinical psychoanalysis. This is unfortunate, because transference is not just the missing link in theories of leadership—it also explains a lot about the everyday behavior of organizations.

A number of studies have shown, for example, that positive transferences are closely linked to productivity.

Suppose an employee believes that her boss will care about her in a parental way. To ensure that this happens, she will make superhuman efforts to please her leader. As long as she perceives that these transferred expectations are being met, she will continue to work hard, to the obvious benefit of the organization as a whole.

The trouble is, not all transferences are positive. A worker might see his boss as someone he has to fight. Consider Sylvia Hartman 1 , a marketing manager in an East Coast market research and advertising company.

Hartman was a creative but volatile employee who worked for Sam Phillips, a divisional vice president. Phillips took Hartman under his wing, and she soon came to value him as a mentor and friend. When a job that would have been a major promotion for Hartman opened up, she fully expected to get it.

Instead, Phillips chose Harry Johnson, a move that devastated Hartman. She believed that she was vastly more intelligent than Johnson and had assumed that would be the primary basis for the promotion decision. However, Phillips said that he found Johnson to be more dependable and to have better people skills. When Hartman heard this explanation—and that Johnson would become her manager—she exploded in a destructive rage.

She responded to her new boss by utterly ignoring his e-mails and phone calls, and she refused point blank to be supervised by him. Seeing the rift between his two players, Phillips thought about firing Hartman.

In doing psychoanalysis with Hartman, I found out that her rage was deeply rooted in her childhood. Being passed over by Phillips evoked deep resentment in Hartman; it reopened a wound that had never healed. Unless she recognized her projections and worked them through, Hartman would be in danger of losing her job. But companies that might once have put up with this kind of leader-follower relationship cannot afford that luxury today.

In the following pages, I will explore the most common types of transference, showing how they can play out in the workplace and how they are evolving as the dynamics of family life change. At its best, transference is the emotional glue that binds people to a leader. Employees in the grip of positive transference see their leader as better than she really is—smarter, nicer, more charismatic. They tend to give that person the benefit of the doubt and take on more risk at her request than they otherwise would.

At the extreme, such followers will create a myth that bears no relation to fact. A classic study of this dynamic is the movie Being There. In the film, Peter Sellers plays Chance the gardener, a simple man with little knowledge of the world beyond gardening. When his wealthy employer dies, Chance finds himself by happenstance socializing in the circles of the rich and famous. He behaves as he always has done, sharing his facile thoughts without considering their effect on those around him.

But his new acquaintances start reading profound metaphors about politics and economics into his throwaway comments about gardening. By the end of the film, Chance is being touted as a U. But even leaders who are reasonably self-aware can become victims of illusion. The transference dynamic is most likely to get out of control during periods of organizational stress.

In such situations, followers tend to be more dominated by irrational feelings—in particular, the need for praise and protection from all-powerful parents.

At the same time, the leader is preoccupied with handling the crisis at hand and, as a consequence, is probably less alert to the likelihood that his followers are just acting out childhood fears. While he was focusing on strategy, his followers felt frustrated that he was not dealing with their anxiety and reassuring them.

Another example of how transference is triggered by doubt and stress is the way people feel better just going to see a doctor, even before the doctor has done anything for them. This type of transference makes it extremely hard for scientists to evaluate certain medications, such as mood-altering drugs. People who volunteer for a study in hopes of finding a cure to their ailment may be especially receptive to placebos. As well as being quite subtle in its workings, transference comes in many guises.

It is blind to both age and gender, so stereotyping is very dangerous. Psychoanalysis has clearly shown that someone can have a paternal transference with a woman in authority and a maternal transference with a man. Organizations are adjusting to the times, moving from hierarchies that worked well with parent-focused employees to more-horizontal setups that suit people who relate better to near equals.

When managers at Boeing sought a leader for a software team that required a lot of interactivity among members, for instance, they joked about finding someone who was the fifth child in a family of ten siblings, someone who was used to mediating among brothers and sisters.

In other words, the job called for a different kind of leadership than the traditional hierarchical boss would provide. Sibling leaders have to facilitate problem solving and build consensus. Another complicating factor is that people can have multiple transferential relationships in an organization.

It seems very likely to me that at General Electric over the past two decades, many employees not only had such relationships with their immediate bosses but also transferred childhood feelings onto Jack Welch, even though they had never met him. In cases of multiple transferences, both the immediate boss and the CEO might be seen as father figures. But when this happens, the employee usually experiences the transferences differently. Typically he will relate to his immediate boss from the perspective of a child who is four, five, or even older.

But he will regard the CEO as a baby would see an earlier father figure, who is distant, protective, and all knowing. Perhaps the biggest risk in transference comes from the fact that it is always a two-way street.

Just as a follower projects his past experiences onto his leader, the leader responds by projecting her past experiences back onto the follower. Or the analysis might end in a love affair rather than a cure. Countertransference is at least as big a problem for business leaders as for psychoanalysts.

In his novel Disclosure , Michael Crichton describes how a ruthless and dishonest woman is promoted above a more-qualified man because she reminds the CEO of a favorite daughter who was killed in an auto accident. The CEO does not see her as she is but responds to her as though she were his beloved daughter. On the one hand, transference is a facilitator of followership and therefore a source of strength for leaders; on the other hand, it is a real threat to leaders because it destroys objectivity.

The future of the company may depend upon his ability to do so. The type of transference that Freud observed for the first time was paternal transference, in which patients experienced unconditional love for the analyst as a wise, understanding, protective father.

In such relationships with Freud, patients slavishly gave up their own views and embraced his as unquestionably correct. Paternal transference has been so prevalent in traditional corporations that it has been considered normal behavior. In organizational surveys, people invariably describe their immediate boss in positive terms, even when they express distrust in top management. Indeed, the hierarchical structure of traditional organizations has reinforced paternal transference.

At every level in a hierarchy, individuals have a boss who doles out assignments and rewards. This creates in followers a willingness to obey orders—as well as an overvaluation of the boss and a strengthening of infantile wishes to be loved and protected.

Some people looked to their bosses as mentors, the kind of dads who introduced their sons to games and sports; others saw their bosses as demanding fathers whose approval was rarely if ever given. Perhaps the ideal paternal boss was the pipe-smoking, one-minute manager, the daddy figure who dispensed small doses of encouragement, approval, or constructive criticism, as needed. At Athlete Assessments, we often speak about the importance of a quality coach-athlete relationship , and how this can be used to improve athlete performance.

For more information on this important topic, you might value reading another related article: Behavioral Predictability for Building Trust. From a productivity perspective, the book shows that trust also increases the speed and efficiency in getting things done. They use the comparison between two people working together on something who do not know each other, compared to two people who have already established a basic level of trust.

In contrast, the second pair can get things done in a fraction of the time as their trust allows them to skip the formalities and get straight to the most important aspects of their work together. Respondents also used words such as honesty, integrity and respect as distinct contributions from the leaders in their lives. All of these words are outcomes of strong relationships built on trust. On the contrary, the topic of trust dominated the discussions of struggling teams… Relationships flat-out trumps competence in building trust.

Followers want their leaders to show genuine compassion for them, at least in the same way they would care about a friend or family member. In sport, we see the significant impact of people who show genuine care for those they work with and coach too.

Coach Wooden is always a phenomenal example of this in how he talked about athletics being a vehicle for the development of young men, their character, education and contribution to society. It is a role of true significance and meaning, never should it be about money.

It is fundamentally about building relationships with young people. We know this quality to be reflective of the degree to which an employee or athlete is engaged in their job, role and team organization.

For similar sporting examples, you might be interested to read the article Do Your Athletes Care? Followers want a leader who provides a solid foundation, being someone they can always count on in times of need. Follows need to know that their leaders have core values that are stable to provide an environment where they know what is expected. Those surveyed also mentioned words such as security, strength, support, and peace.

Our need for stability and security plays into nearly every decision we make. At a very basic level, employees need a paycheck, and they need to feel secure about having a job. If managers and leaders no not meet these basic needs, they are sure to face resistance.

The article mentioned earlier, Behavioral Predictability for Building Trust is a great reference for this point too. In that article, the focus is on helping coaches create more positive relationships with their athletes through behavioral predictability — behaving in a consistent manner.

When coaches behave in a predictable manner, athletes feel as though they have a better understanding of their coach. This helps the athlete to know where they stand and how to most effectively work with their coach. The same can be said about building a high-performance team.

Knowing how each individual team member is likely to behave in varying situations is something we have found most high-performance coaches to be extremely interested in. Behavioral predictability is a major factor in the concept of trust which loops back to the earlier section.

Trust is largely about being able to predict a known outcome. From a coaching perspective, it is crucial that coaches provide an environment in which their athletes feel physically and emotionally safe. Safety is a low level motivational driver. Once you remove the perception of safety, an athlete will struggle to produce a high level of performance. Emotional safety means being in an environment where you are able to act, think and feel without fear.

Emotional safety is a measure of how the athletes are spoken to, treated fairly and with respect, feel cared about, praised and their self-esteem is supported and developed or not.

It is demonstrated by ensuring that the emotional wellbeing of every member within and around the team is an underlying priority. Mostly, they need the assurance that their leader has confidence in their ability to perform and produce the desired outcomes.

If any of these factors are missing, leaders will have a tough time attracting followers. At the end of the day, it is the entwining of the relationship of the leader with the followers that makes their organization or portion of the organization succeed. Occasionally, the leader is the person who is in charge, the founder of the business, the CEO, the president, or department head. Leadership qualities combined with positional power magnify the ability of an individual to attract and retain the all-important followers.

In fact, business owners can count on a certain amount of respect and followership based on their ownership and title. Longevity, too, plays a role in attracting and retaining followers. But, never forget, no matter what your position is in the organization, even if your current job is a valued contributor, you can become a leader that other employees want to follow.

In fact, in organizations, one of the reasons employees are promoted to positions such as team leader, supervisor, or department manager, is that they have demonstrated over time that people will follow them. Much is written about what makes successful leaders. This series will focus on the characteristics, traits, and actions that many leaders believe are key.

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