The best leaders are great followers

In summary, in an era of complexity, specialization, and rapid change, the most effective leaders are those who exhibit the same attributes as exemplary followers. They excel at listening, learning, and adapting rather than commanding from the top. Leadership and followership are co-created, fluid roles, not heroic acts of command. Organizations can develop stronger leaders by cultivating five followership capabilities: active listening, prioritizing purpose over personal credit, reliable execution, critical dissent, and coachability.

Given the great speed of change and complexity in the world, the need for leaders to listen and learn is enormous. However, the widely shared, erroneous beliefs about what good leadership look like — that it entails excelling at commanding and inspiring others — get in the way of practicing and developing great leadership in today’s organizations. As the authors explore in this article, that obstacle can be overcome. Organizations can cultivate the followership attributes that make outstanding leaders.

Followership: the missing half of leadership

The fact of the matter is leadership and followership are a co-created, fluid, role-switching process rather than a fixed one-way hierarchy. When leadership is understood this way, becoming a better leader is not about asserting authority more skillfully but rather about mastering the capacity to follow well, even from a position of power. At its core, effective followership requires the capacity to learn, listen, collaborate, challenge, and adjust in service of something larger than oneself. When a group of individuals set aside selfish or individualistic agendas to become part of collective unit — to achieve something none could do alone — impressive results become possible.

What gets in the way

Unfortunately, followership skills are the very capacities most leaders struggle with. When leaders fail, it is rarely because they can’t command; after all, once you are given the power to tell others what to do, others will typically follow, even when they do not like it. Mutiny is rare. Instead, leaders fail because they can’t accept that the fundamental skill underpinning leadership is to make others want to follow them, which requires modeling good follower behavior as a leader: exhibiting humility, curiosity, receptivity to feedback and dissent, and loyalty to purpose rather than to your own ego.

Why followership skills matter more than ever

The conditions we face in today’s world are poised to punish leaders who believe, or feel they must act as if they believe, that they have all the answers. Because of the intricate nature and spread of specialized knowledge, no single individual (not even the CEO) can fully comprehend an entire situation. In addition, the growing power of AI is making traditional expertise less exclusive: it is allowing beginners to generate expert-level work. All this means leaders must now lean more on emotional intelligence; they must have the ability to create genuine connections and understand others’ feelings. They must bring people together, connect ideas, continually learn, and blend diverse perspectives. They need to understand when to step back, when to support others, and when to rely on someone else’s specialized knowledge.

This is why the most effective leaders today tend to have a history of being exceptional followers: they learned how organizations actually work, what people need to succeed, and how to build trust through contribution rather than authority. So, displaying higher levels of emotional stability, sociability, kindness, curiosity, work ethic, integrity, and learning ability tends to result in both being a better follower and a better leader.

Here are five core followership capabilities that organizations should seek in leaders they hire from the outside and should strive to build in their leadership-development programs.

1. Active listening

Effective followers listen to understand, not to confirm. They take in information without filtering it through ego, fear, or hierarchy. They don’t get defensive when new information is out of sync with their beliefs or ideas — that is, they are more interested in understanding reality than in interpreting it in an ego-syntonic way. Leaders who adopt this stance avoid the biggest risk of leadership: insulation from what is happening in their organizations and the outside world. Listening is not an easy skill to acquire because it requires humility, patience, and the willingness to be wrong — precisely the range of behaviors leaders need from followers!

2. Prioritize purpose, not personal credit

The most valuable followers care more about what works best for the team or organization than who gets the applause. They don’t manipulate credit and blame to their own advantage, such as by taking credit for others’ achievements and blaming others for their own mistakes. Since leadership is fundamentally about persuading others to do things beyond their self-interest, in support of a larger collective, managers should emulate such followers. They should be focused on something bigger than themselves — something that requires others to make it happen.

3. Reliable execution

Followers make things happen. They transform high-level plans into outcomes and ideas into a concrete reality. Leaders who possess this capability stay grounded: they understand what is feasible, how work gets done, and what constraints teams face. Unless leaders know what it takes to turn plans and ideas into reality, strategy risks becoming detached from execution and optimism can replace evidence. It can lead to the tragic scenario where executives are detached from their workforce and hold distorted perceptions of the culture and organization.

4. Critical dissent

Competent followers challenge constructively. They ask questions, flag risks, and speak up when something is off, providing invaluable insights and intel on the organization, and helping things get better. Leaders who welcome dissent instead of punishing it avoid the predictable pitfalls of unchallenged authority: groupthink, delusional confidence, and avoidable failure. A leader’s openness to pushback becomes a competitive advantage because it expands the organization’s intelligence beyond their own. So, just like great followers, competent leaders will follow when and as needed, and question when necessary. They will speak up to expose unfairness, inefficiencies, injustice, or problems before they become worse.

5. Coachability

Followers learn constantly. They seek feedback rather than defend against it and treat improvement as part of their identity. Coachability is the antidote to the complacency that often accompanies positional power. It keeps leaders self-critical, curious, and connected to their teams, and allows them to reinvent themselves and reimagine their future self to raise to new challenges and outperform their peers.

In short, the best leaders are not heroic commanders; they are exemplary followers: people who listen deeply, learn relentlessly, collaborate widely, question bravely, and adjust continually. And because they follow so well, others willingly follow them.

Adapted from: “The Best Leaders Are Great Followers”, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, the chief science officer at Russell Reynolds Associates, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, a cofounder of deepersignals.com and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, and Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, published on Harvard Business Review on 14 January 2026.