Leadership Insight: Why Would We Follow You?

Last updated: August 19, 2026

"There can be no leadership if no one follows."

That line comes from a 2015 academic paper, and it's a more radical claim than it first sounds. The authors, Platow, Haslam, Reicher, and Steffens, argue that leadership isn't a trait a person has. It's a psychological process that followers grant, or withhold.

This story is so familiar that I am sure you have heard it, experienced it, or are living it. Following success in a previous project, department, or company, a manager or executive is promoted into a new leadership position, and fails.

The premise for the promotion is that if someone is successful at leading one team, they will be successful leading any team. That assumption rests on a common misconception about what leadership actually is and how it works.

You Can't Be a Leader Without Doing Leadership

I had a coaching client who was a brilliant marketer. She was creative and led her team to deliver excellent work for her company. She felt she deserved a promotion and the title of CMO. When it finally came, everything changed. The expanded team resented her, complained that she was absent, and the quality of work from her department suffered.

This CMO had confused being a leader with doing leadership, and she is not alone. Leadership books, posts, and memes focus heavily on the attributes of a leader, such as confidence, charisma, trustworthiness, and fairness.

The 2015 paper's key insight is that the linchpin of all leadership is social influence. The qualities we admire in leaders are the outcomes of shared psychological group membership, not something intrinsic to the individual.

I was chatting with a colleague, Christopher M. Barlow, PhD, about the importance of self-leadership in high-performing teams. Christopher is fond of saying, to his MBA classes:

"There is no such thing as a person having leadership."

Instead, people have a process of followership: giving their trust to certain people on certain issues. When someone invokes that followership response, we call the interaction leadership.

My coaching client thought the CMO title would give her leadership. In getting the title, she stopped doing the activities that had triggered followership in the first place. Her self-awareness of this let her return to focusing on doing leadership rather than simply being a leader.

Influencing People to Follow You

A key tenet of self-leadership is:

"You can't lead others unless you first lead yourself."

You wouldn't trust a fitness trainer who was out of shape or a tour guide who was always lost. So before leading others, audit your own self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning.

With your own self-leadership in mind, you can assess the followership triggers within your team, and they vary greatly, sometimes contradicting each other.

Do your team members prefer you confident or humble, direct or nuanced, in-person or remote, friendly or authoritative? These preferences are further complicated by context: is the situation stable or volatile?

The solution is to treat leadership as a conversation, one-to-one or one-to-many. By engaging your followers in conversation, you learn what they need from you as a leader, they understand your competencies, and you become part of the team. I've articulated twelve of these leadership conversations in The New Leadership Playbook.

Trust Is the Essential Ingredient

Trust is the essential ingredient in the leader-follower relationship. Conversation, and understanding your followers' individual triggers, is what accelerates the creation of trust.

There's one more piece worth naming: vulnerability. In any relationship, there are things known to ourselves but not known to others, our facade. Trust forms when that facade lowers and things move into an open space, known to self and known to others. In a psychologically safe environment, a leader who shares their own challenges, fears, and failures invites their team to do the same.

This isn't just a social dynamic, there's a neuroscience basis for it. Research on self-awareness has found that understanding your own internal state and reading someone else's share overlapping brain circuitry. A leader who is genuinely self-aware isn't just easier to read, they're actually more legible, which is likely part of why followership tends to form around leaders who know themselves rather than those performing a role.

I go deeper into what makes vulnerability constructive rather than just oversharing in Ditch the Leadership Clichés. The short version: shared vulnerability builds trust only when the leader is also holding a clear vision of where they're leading the team.

Leadership is not simply about being, it's about doing. Because leadership is a social and psychological process, the behaviors that matter are the ones that do it for us, and the ones that actively construct the meaning of us.

Now, can you answer the question:

"Why would we follow you?"

I share more of these insights in my work as a leadership speaker, in a keynote called Driving Accelerated Results through Self-leadership. Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why follow when you can lead?
Because the two aren't actually in competition. A title gives you the authority to lead; it doesn't give you followers. The only way to earn people's willingness to follow is to keep doing the behaviors, conversation, trust-building, presence, that make people choose to follow you, title or not.

What is followership, and why does it matter more than leadership traits?
Followership is the process of a person giving their trust to someone on a specific issue. Academic research (Platow, Haslam, Reicher & Steffens, 2015) argues that leadership is the outcome of that process, not a fixed trait someone possesses. A title doesn't create followership; the behaviors that earn trust do.

Can you have leadership without followers?
No. The core finding of followership research is that leadership is a shared psychological process between a person and the group choosing to trust them, not an intrinsic quality of the individual. Without followers actively granting that trust, there is no leadership, only a title.

Why do newly promoted managers often fail?
Usually because they confuse being a leader with doing leadership. Success in a previous role earned them the promotion, but a title doesn't automatically trigger followership in a new team. They stop doing the specific behaviors, conversation, trust-building, presence, that earned trust the first time, and assume the title will do the work instead.

How do you build the trust that makes people want to follow you?
Treat leadership as an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time announcement. Learn what each person on your team actually needs from you, since followership triggers vary by person and by context, and be willing to share real vulnerability once psychological safety exists, since a leader with no visible facade is easier to trust than one who appears flawless.