The Zen and Science of How Being a Good Follower Translates to Being a Good Leader

Follow the Leader, Part 2

Years ago, after I graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and came to live at Chozen-ji, I came across an article by Peters and Haslam with the definition of leadership that I shared in last week's post, published in The Harvard Business Review: 

"Leadership is a process that emerges from a relationship between leaders and followers who are bound together by their understanding that they are members of the same social group."

Haslam and Peters' work calls into question the conventional wisdom that successful leaders are those who are self-focused and think of leadership as an individual exercise. Usually, aspiring leaders are counseled to develop “their” leadership style. How do they, as individual leaders, perform? To succeed, they are told to distance themselves from the pack and demonstrate their exceptionalism in contrast to their peers.

But after a study with 218 Australian Royal Marines, Peters and Haslam found that the marines most trusted to lead by their peers and commanders were, first and foremost, good followers. They did not see themselves as natural leaders with the concomitant traits of dominance and confidence. They didn’t seek to distinguish themselves from the pack. What’s more, they often identified more as followers than as leaders. Most importantly, what did distinguish them was they focused on simply getting the work done.

When I found this research, it resonated with the training I was getting into at Chozen-ji. I had been attracted to Chozen-ji’s mission to be a place for training leaders. What I found was that the majority of the training was learning how to follow. This included obeying instructions and orders, but also more. In Dojo parlance, it meant learning to pay attention: Pay attention to and follow the many forms that define formal training, from how to enter the Dojo with my palms pressed together to how to hold a sword in Kendo (Japanese fencing). Pay attention to the Dojo's surprisingly strict hierarchy. Pay attention, also, to the many cultural nuances I encountered in Hawaii: a mishmash of Western, Native Hawaiian, and Asian values, mores, and foods.

Eventually, I learned that paying attention and learning to follow were gateways to a higher skill set in Zen—that of "being in accord" with one's surroundings. Over time, I developed a sensitivity to the subtle and implicit. To whether cups of tea needed to be refilled, and if refilling them wouldn't disrupt the flow of conversation in the room. To the arrival of a visitor, signaled by the quiet, distant crunch of gravel as they rolled into the parking lot, and to others' appetites and moods. 

I became adept at recognizing what needed to get done and doing it without notice or acknowledgement. And, in this way, I transformed from a person who regarded myself as a natural leader and sought out opportunities to stand out, to someone more like the follower-leaders Peters and Haslam described: more concerned with getting things done than getting my way.

The program we were wrapping up that night at Chozen-ji when I was leading everyone in martial arts for hours on end (and which I wrote about in my previous post) was called Zen and Politics: The Way of Public Leadership. In it were the chief of staff for a Hawaii State Senator, the state Insurance Commissioner, the organizer of Hawaii's coalition for broadband internet advocacy, and others—a future member of the Hawaii State Legislature, someone who would go on to innovate a new way to house the houseless, and more.

It still impresses me deeply that such a group of formidable leaders in their own rights would choose to follow me at all. Knowing that they were aching and exhausted as the time wore on, I had found myself asking a question that usually does not enter my mind: Why should they follow me? 

What I walked away with that night was the realization that it was never about me. We were all in it together. With that undergirding everything, it was easy to imagine following anyone in the group, not just me, who might find themselves at the front of the room. Together, with our shared, physical experience of leadership and followership, it felt like we could move as one, an unshakeable comfort, camaraderie, and courage between us.