THOUGHTS ON FOLLOWERSHIP

 

Background.  While serving on the periphery of a military seat of learning at Camberley, I was struck by the seemingly endless debate on Leadership with an associated ebb and flow of buzzwords.  Such thoughts led me to ask:  “What about the led and how do they feel about continuous doctrinal navel gazing?”  In turn this resulted in the production of a thesis on Followership that has remained widely unread[1].  Thus, an invitation to resuscitate the debate has proved irresistible although distilling a 10,000-word thesis into a short article means that many lovingly crafted words will fall by the wayside.

 

Introduction.  Theoretical unfettered debate on the qualities of Leadership has obvious attractions and has resulted in wide-ranging definitions.  BRNC Dartmouth, for example suggested fifteen qualities, including cheerfulness whereas Captain Mainwaring offered a more succinct tip: “Always know when to unbend” [2]   In recent times leaders have become more exposed to public scrutiny which, in turn, has led to a need to identify their limitations and, therefore, either to conceal them or to concentrate on their strengths.  Further, the debate has become wider and is, quite properly, less confined to the military; witness a psychologist’s summary[3] of the qualities of Leadership:

 

• Forcefulness
• The ability to lie, make excuses and deny successfully (supporting the “mechanism of denial” system attributed to Lt Gen Warren’s leadership style in the Boer War[4])
• Imagination
• Sobriety
• A capacity for dark moods

 

These may not find favour in military circles but help to demonstrate the disparity of views on leadership.  Perhaps it might be healthier to look at the end-product rather than the process of arriving there; a route arguably suggested by President Truman - “The ability to get other people to do what they do not want to do and like it” and implied in the Royal Navy’s leadership pamphlet entitled “Getting Things Done[5]”.

 

The foregoing is a manifestation of how easy it is to slip into a debate on leadership and the surface has hardly been scratched; for example one crucial leadership quality lying unexamined on the table is ‘effective time management’.  But, sadly maybe, the debate must move on to Followership,

 

Defining Followership.  It is encouraging to note that since the 1990s the debate has returned to talking of ‘leadership’ rather than ‘management’.  This development may have damaged my original definition of Followership: “The soldier’s perception of management and leadership”.  No credit is claimed for the term Followership; that is due to Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

 

History.  Bearing down on the Private soldier is a multi-layered chain of command stretching from L/Cpl to the MOD.  At each level of that command, the original snowflake of an order gathers volume and ultimately reaches the soldier as an avalanche that has the potential to be distorted through the Chinese whispers effect.  Peripheral modern influences offer further complications.  Multinational Command structures, Health & Safety and political correctness also add to the weight of the avalanche.  So life for the 21^st Century Private is perhaps even more daunting and complex than his forebears during, say, WW1.

 

The impact of an extended command structure has never pleased all:

 

“I cursed, and still do, the generals who caused us to suffer such torture, living in filth, eating filth, and then death or injury just to boost their ego.”[6] .

 

“…the campaign [Crimea] plumbed depths of incompetence never before attempted.”[7] (Attempting incompetence is a Wildean notion!)

 

“…[an Army too rigid and lacking in flexibility to be really adaptable to the conditions of modern quick-moving warfare…”[8]  

 

“Better that men should die and cities be overrun than the scared teachings should be found wanting.”[9]

 

“One of the controversies of the First World War was the extent to which the ordinary soldier lost faith in his generals….a conflict between policy adopted by the generals and the attitude of the men in the trenches.”[10]

 

It may be observed, in mitigation, that criticisms are often based on perception rather than on reality. A long chain of command, however, can turn a snowflake of unease into an avalanche of misperceptions.

 

Pressures on the Soldier.  When Lenin talked of “the corruption of the human mind” replacing weapons on the battlefield it seems he seems not to have stipulated the impact on his soldiers and their training for war.  Laying aside any possible requirement for corruption training there are already many pressures on the soldier, not all of which are attributable to the command chain.  Some pressures are in conflict or even mutually exclusive (for example boredom is unlikely to set in when a soldier is over-organised), but a summary is offered:

 

• Roles, and so qualities, needed in peace differ to those in war.  FM Slim eloquently described this conundrum when considering the “ordinary British soldier”[11]
• Mastering modern technology and information overload.  As Lewal said as far back as 1872 “Even if modern soldiers are machine-handling robots, they need to be trained to become proficient robots.”[12]
• Instant obedience versus the ability to think freely.  The mind of the soldier is a critical asset that needs to be nurtured and guarded.  Robotization is not an option: “…the soldier cannot be matured in a school that holds the vestiges of the belief that automatic action is the ideal thing in the soldier.”[13]
• Stress.  “…the more stressed the more physically incapable the less competent and the less competent the more stressed and so on until death (mercifully) intervenes.”[14].  Stress can be multiplied as it passes through each level of the chain of command; thus the bad mood of the Great & Famous (G&F) can be translated into a raging fury by the time it reaches the soldier. 
• The boss syndrome.  Aside from the constant changeover of leaders, which is inherently disruptive, the actual process of leadership may exert psychological pressures down the command chain.  As Vic Feather, former TUC General Secretary said: “What we want in industry in this country is not bosses but leaders.”  This pressure can be aggravated by the ‘check list’ or formulaic approach to leadership – management experimenting with or confirming recently taught or newly found allegedly requisite qualities.
• Authoritarianism is sometimes confused with positive and energetic leadership.  Real of perceived authoritarianism can threaten group cohesion (in simpler times referred to as ‘Teamwork’), self-perpetuating – the “my turn will come syndrome – and even lead to fragging.
• Where the cause is untenable or incredible, morale, and hence motivation to fight, is denuded.  Fundamental to these considerations is the need to be certain that there is a common understanding about what might be termed a cause, from which motivation will flow.  A soldier’s belief in a cause should not be assumed.  Recourse to those trusty props of, an arguably much eroded, regimental tradition, professional pride and discipline might provide short tem motivation but would be unlikely to fill the vacuum in a soldier’s soul under the protracted stress of operations.
• The sensation of timelessness, like a non-credible cause, can create a vacuum.  It is a fact of life that nobody, not even the G&F, can be precise about timings.  Leaders will, however, always have a clearer idea than the led.  Time disorientation is a well-established form of torture so by either concealing timings or failing to disseminate them when known, leaders are, at best, guilty of failing to alleviate an aspect of stress and, at worst, torturing the led.  Keeping the soldier informed about timings is an essential component of the wider subject of briefing.  Where the passage of information is unsatisfactory the soldier can become a victim of “Learned Helplessness” (ie, the feeling that he/she is powerless to predict or control events).
• Disrupted relations impact on team development be it a high turnover of personnel, especially the leaders or the infusion of ‘strangers’.  General Kessler, commented on this, in admittedly somewhat extreme terms:

 

“When a large number of reservists – that is, men who are strangers to each other, preoccupied with family and business concerns, indifferent to the goal of training the group are introduced into the unified and compact milieu [of the active regiment], the spirit of the group is changed.  It begins to waver and become hesitant.  Its moral force disintegrates.”[15] 

 

• Team Composition.  The soldier has little or no control over the composition of his/her team and it is an inescapable reality that successful teamwork is greatly influenced by human relationships.  The Royal Navy claim of ‘small ship happy ship’ surely presupposes a high degree of intra-team compatibility.  Leaders can influence such relationships through personal involvement

 

• Niggling issues that may be identified by those in authority asking of themselves: “would I like that?”.  For example “Would I like somebody to be friendly, cheerful and responsive one day, and authoritarian, dark and introspective on the next?” or “would I like to be standing to attention answering a raft of personal questions about my family and holiday plans?”

 

Conclusions.  There are really only two conclusions to be drawn.  First, it has proved impossible to compress 10,000 words into a 1500 word article.  Second, Followership is an area that might usefully be addressed by greater military minds than mine.