I am Scott Heise, a Graduate Student in Communication Studies at Kansas State University with an undergraduate degree in Political Communications with a minor in Leadership Studies.
I am a non-traditional student who entered college at the age of 52 following a 32-year career in the US Army. I spent the last five years of my Army career as a guest lecturer/Instructor at the University of Wisconson-LaCrosse, where I taught military science (ROTC). During my ROTC experience, I “realized” that our students would have to rely on the willing participation and commitment of their peers if they were going to have a successful experience. It is one thing when you have the authority to order someone to perform a task and it is an entirely different circumstance when you must influence them because you have no authority over them. Additionally, our students had to be willing to commit to their teammates’ success to the same degree.
This may seem like a simple idea to internalize, but even when Cadets understood the idea of committing themselves to helping achieve their peers’ tasks, they did not know how to react when their peer was less than enthusiastic about supporting them. My challenge was to figure out how to impress upon them the idea of selfless commitment to another’s objective, even when there is nothing to be gained personally, and even when the person they are supporting failed to support them (when they were in charge). I employed the term followership to describe how I expected the Cadets to internalize their role in the Army – that their team’s success was far more important than any individual success and that to ensure the team’s success, each person needed to commit to providing their best effort to whomever was in charge in the moment.
As I began to research the idea of followership, I realized there was not much literature addressing the idea of followership from a follower’s perspective. There are volumes written advocating for the adoption of one leadership theory over another, and how leaders can get more out of followers, but none that expressed the follower’s motives for committing their best effort. This seemed like such a basic idea that I determined to learn more about it and how it could apply within other contexts like community service and interpersonal relationships.
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