Are you creating leaders or followers?

If asked this question, I’m sure the vast majority of leaders would say their role, and their aspiration, is to grow new leaders within their teams and across the organisation. But developing leaders is not necessarily what our behaviours achieve. Let’s take a look at what I mean:

If we believed that the role of the leader is not to develop leaders but to develop followers, then we would do everything we could to make those around us follow. We would put our energy and drive into leading from the front, everything would come through us, we would protect the team and shoulder all responsibility, we would use our passion to motivate them. Does this sound familiar?

At this point you may be asking, what’s wrong with that – it's all very motivational, even a bit inspirational! But if we look a bit closer, the person we are really focused on here is “me”. We are centred on being the provider of drive and motivation.

And why not? This type of leadership can produce short term lifts in performance - it can focus minds and can help drive home a particular result. But it also produces dependency - people following the leader and therefore dependent on the actions of the leader. They are learning to put faith in the leader and not in themselves.

If we rely on this type leadership all the time then in the longer term people stop thinking for themselves - because the leader does that. People don’t start monitoring their own actions - because the leader does that. They don’t start motivating themselves - because the leader does that. They don’t ask questions - because that’s not their role. They certainly won’t try to solve problems or make decisions - because the leader does that.

The leader is doing it all and they are in danger of burning out. Even worse, we do these things knowing we are doing them and knowing it’s exhausting us but we don’t feel able to stop. We get ourselves into a situation where we are driving everything because we don’t think the team is capable and so we can’t seem to find the time to change things.

Ironically, even though we’ve unwittingly played our part in creating this dependent relationship, we become frustrated with the dependents: ‘Why can’t they do it without me?’ ‘Why do I have to do the thinking for everyone all the time?’. Convinced there is no alternative, but secretly beating ourselves up for not doing more to grow our team, we do even more of the thinking and a destructive spiral starts to take shape.

If creating followers is destructive, then our role as a leader must be to help create leaders - people who are able to lead and motivate themselves and others. We must dedicate our time towards enabling others to be strong, to make decisions, and channel their energies effectively and be the best they can be.

Now ask yourself: ‘What type of leader am I?’ Am I leading from the front, pulling everyone with me? Or am I enabling others to lead: getting behind the team, not in their way, and giving them the chance to be incredible? And, finally, the killer question: ‘What do I need to change in my behaviour to be a creator of leaders?’