May 7, 2025. Leadership begins with Following.
Leadership gets celebrated everywhere. We have endless books, courses, and seminars teaching people how to lead effectively. Aspiring executives spend thousands on MBA programs to develop leadership skills. Tech founders are glorified as visionary leaders changing the world. Yet in this rush to develop leadership capabilities, we overlook something fundamental: understanding what it truly means to be a follower.
I've been thinking about this gap in our collective understanding as I observe leadership failures across industries. Many people step into leadership positions without ever developing a genuine understanding of the follower experience. They've spent their careers focused on ascending hierarchies rather than observing how those hierarchies function from below. They understand organizational charts but not the human reality those charts represent. This creates a dangerous disconnect between those making decisions and those living with the consequences of those decisions.
My journey building and eventually ending Seraphim taught me something crucial about this dynamic. When I was focused solely on my vision as a founder, I missed important signals about what was actually possible given the constraints I faced. I was thinking like a leader without fully understanding the systems I was operating within as a follower of larger market forces. Only when I developed a clearer understanding of how these systems functioned from the follower perspective could I make better strategic decisions about my own path forward.
The most effective leaders I've encountered share a common trait: they remember what it feels like to be a follower. They understand the experience of receiving unclear directions, of working with limited information, of navigating organizational politics without power. They recall the frustration of implementing decisions they had no part in making. This experiential knowledge shapes how they communicate, delegate, and create environments where others can contribute effectively.
Consider how this plays out in technology development. A founder who has never been responsible for implementing someone else's specifications often creates unrealistic expectations for their engineering team. They haven't experienced the gap between vision and execution from the follower perspective. Similarly, executives who haven't recently worked on the front lines often implement policies that make perfect sense in the boardroom but create dysfunction in daily operations. The disconnect isn't intellectual but experiential.
This dynamic becomes particularly concerning when leadership involves significant resources or impacts many lives. When billions of dollars and thousands of jobs depend on leadership decisions, the consequences of this disconnect magnify dramatically. Leaders who don't understand followership create unnecessary friction, waste resources, burn out talented people, and ultimately achieve less than they could with greater awareness. Their organizations might survive or even appear successful for a time, but they never reach their full potential.
True understanding of followership isn't just about empathy, though that matters. It's about recognizing the structural realities that shape follower experience. Good followers often have limited information about organizational strategy. They lack context for decisions that affect their work. They navigate complex social dynamics while attempting to meet expectations that might be unclearly defined. They balance multiple competing priorities without the authority to resolve conflicts between them. These constraints aren't just emotional challenges but practical limitations that shape what followers can actually accomplish.
Leaders who haven't internalized these realities often create implementation plans that look perfect on paper but fall apart in practice. They underestimate the time required for coordination across teams. They overlook the knowledge gaps that prevent effective execution. They fail to account for the social capital required to navigate informal organizational structures. Most critically, they miss the essential information that exists at the follower level but never reaches leadership through formal channels.
A junior software developer once explained to me how leadership at his company had mandated a complete system migration within three months. On paper, the timeline seemed reasonable. In reality, the codebase contained years of undocumented workarounds, dependencies that weren't reflected in any documentation, and integration points known only to specific team members. What leadership saw as resistance or incompetence was actually a realistic assessment of the work required. The leaders who made the decision had never personally migrated a complex legacy system and lacked the contextual understanding to set realistic expectations.
This pattern gets worse as organizations grow. In a startup with ten people, a founder might maintain enough direct contact with day-to-day operations to understand follower realities. At one hundred people, that connection weakens significantly. At one thousand, it often disappears entirely without deliberate effort to preserve it. Leaders become increasingly isolated, surrounded by others equally disconnected from ground-level realities. They make decisions based on spreadsheets and dashboards rather than firsthand knowledge of how work actually happens in their organizations.
The information that reaches leadership becomes progressively filtered as organizations scale. Frontline problems get summarized and sanitized as they move up the hierarchy. Issues that make middle managers look bad often disappear from reports entirely. By the time information reaches executive leadership, it's been stripped of crucial context and complexity. Leaders base decisions on this incomplete picture, then wonder why implementation fails to match their expectations. Without personal experience as a follower, they lack the interpretive framework to recognize what's missing from the information they receive.
Some leaders attempt to address this through practices like "management by walking around" or scheduled time with frontline employees. These approaches have value but often provide sanitized versions of reality. Employees rarely speak completely candidly to the CEO during a scheduled lunch. The brief visit to the call center creates a temporary change in dynamics that doesn't reflect normal operations. These glimpses may be better than nothing, but they fall short of genuine understanding of the follower experience.
More effective approaches involve structured time working in follower roles. Some companies implement programs where executives periodically spend days performing frontline functions without special treatment. Others create reverse mentoring relationships where junior employees advise senior leaders about ground-level realities. The most committed leaders find ways to receive unfiltered feedback about how their decisions affect daily operations, creating psychological safety for honest communication upward through the organization.
Even with these structured approaches, nothing replaces the personal experience of being a follower. The psychological reality of working without decision authority creates awareness that cannot be fully conveyed through observation or temporary role-playing. The necessity of implementing directives you disagree with, the experience of having limited visibility into strategic decisions that affect your work, the reality of being evaluated on outcomes you can influence but not control—these experiences create understanding that remains inaccessible to those who haven't lived them.
The limitations of pure top-down leadership become particularly apparent during crises. When unexpected challenges arise, organizations need distributed intelligence responding to rapidly changing conditions. Leaders who understand followership create systems where information flows quickly from the edges to the center, where initiative is encouraged at all levels, where frontline employees feel empowered to solve problems rather than waiting for instructions. Those who don't understand followership attempt to maintain centralized control precisely when it becomes most counterproductive.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw this dynamic play out across organizations. Some leaders recognized they lacked crucial information about rapidly changing conditions and empowered frontline workers to make adaptive decisions. Others tightened control, insisting on approval processes that couldn't keep pace with evolving circumstances. The difference wasn't just leadership philosophy but practical understanding of followership realities. Leaders who remembered what it felt like to need information and authority during uncertainty created systems that performed better under pressure.
This perspective connects directly to what I wrote previously about "good soldiers" versus "bad soldiers" in organizations. The best leaders understand both patterns and recognize that different situations require different approaches. Sometimes the organization needs careful adherence to established processes. Other times it needs creative deviation from standard procedures. Leaders who have experienced both roles can guide their teams appropriately based on context rather than defaulting to a single style regardless of circumstances.
Followership isn't passive compliance but active engagement within defined parameters. Good followers exercise judgment about when to follow directions exactly and when to adapt them based on ground-level realities. They make countless micro-decisions daily about resource allocation, priority management, and implementation approaches. They translate abstract directives into concrete actions, filling gaps in specifications with their own knowledge and experience. Leaders who haven't performed this translation themselves often fail to appreciate its complexity.
For those early in their careers with aspirations toward leadership, this suggests a different approach to professional development. Instead of focusing exclusively on developing leadership skills, invest time in becoming an excellent follower. Pay attention to how decisions cascade through organizations. Observe how information flows, both formally and informally. Notice which leadership approaches create engagement and which create compliance or resistance. This firsthand knowledge becomes invaluable capital when you eventually step into leadership positions.
For current leaders, this perspective invites regular reflection on connection to follower experience. When was the last time you implemented someone else's directive without having input into the decision? When did you last experience the constraints that shape daily work in your organization? How often do you receive genuinely unfiltered information about how your decisions affect operations? If the answers suggest disconnection from follower realities, consider how to rebuild that understanding before making your next major decision.
This isn't abstract theory but practical organizational reality. I've seen technically brilliant founders create unnecessary implementation challenges because they didn't understand what their directives would require from engineering teams. I've watched executives express frustration about "resistance to change" without recognizing the legitimate operational concerns their initiatives created. I've observed leaders blame execution failures on team capability when the real issue was their own lack of understanding about implementation realities.
The stakes of leadership failures extend far beyond quarterly results. When organizations led by people disconnected from follower realities make decisions about artificial intelligence development, environmental impact, or social consequences of technology, the potential harm scales accordingly. We can't afford leadership guided primarily by abstract models detached from human realities. We need leaders who understand systems from multiple perspectives, who recognize how their decisions transform as they move from concept to implementation.
I write this not just as observation but as commitment to my own development. Before attempting to lead significant resources or impact many lives, I need deeper understanding of what it means to be a follower within various systems. This isn't about delaying ambition but about building the foundation for more effective leadership when the opportunity arrives. The time invested in understanding followership creates the perspective needed for leadership that serves something larger than ego or ambition.
The most concerning leaders are those who've never truly learned to follow effectively. They lack the contextual understanding that shapes realistic expectations. They miss the information that exists at the edges of organizations. They create unnecessary friction through decisions disconnected from implementation realities. Most critically, they never develop the humility that comes from recognizing how much they don't know about daily operations despite their position at the top of hierarchical structures.
For technology companies particularly, this disconnection creates serious risks as we develop increasingly powerful tools. Leaders making decisions about artificial intelligence applications, data usage policies, or algorithm deployment need genuine understanding of how these technologies function in real-world contexts rather than theoretical models. This understanding doesn't come primarily from executive briefings but from direct experience with implementation challenges and frontline feedback.
As I continue my research and development work, I'm increasingly convinced that understanding followership represents a critical component of responsible innovation. Technology doesn't exist in abstraction but within human systems where implementation details matter enormously. The most thoughtful technical architecture fails when disconnected from the human realities where it operates. Building this connection requires leadership informed by follower experience rather than isolated from it.
The leader-follower relationship isn't a hierarchy but a partnership with differentiated responsibilities. The most effective organizations create structures where information flows freely in both directions, where followers feel ownership over implementation approaches, where leaders recognize the expertise that exists throughout the organization rather than assuming wisdom concentrates at the top. Creating these structures requires leaders who understand followership not as abstract concept but as lived experience.
Before attempting to lead, know what it means to follow. Before directing others, understand the reality of implementing directions. Before making decisions that affect many lives, experience what it feels like when your life is affected by decisions you didn't make. This knowledge doesn't diminish leadership capacity but enhances it, creating the foundation for leadership that effectively navigates complex human systems rather than fighting against their fundamental nature.