The difference between followership and leadership is clearly defined in Leadership for the 21st Century. You cannot have leadership if you do not have followership. You must listen carefully as both a leader and a follower. Leaders and followers have important traits that are needed to be effective. There are a few differences that stick out.

Followership is learning from your leaders to become a leader yourself. It is the basic principle of leadership. When you follow you have to be honest about everything you do. If you do not have integrity then your leadership will lack because of it. If you don’t listen as a follower then you are less likely to be chosen for a leadership position. You need to work on being mature as a follower so that you can more efficiently make the decisions that are required as a leader. As a follower you should be attentive to what is going on around you. You need to watch your peers and leaders because you will be able to teach everyone with the best effectiveness that you can. You are supposed to learn from your leaders. If you see them doing something that you do not like, and then when you become a leader you can change it. Once you get the basic idea of followership then you can begin your journey into leadership.

Leadership is the ability to guide or direct the actions of others so as to gain their willing cooperation in doing a job, sometimes a job they neither want to do nor how to do. Everything that is needed to be a follower is also needed to be an effective leader. Every leader, whether they are an element leader or the region commander, has to follow someone to get their job done. Just because you are a leader does not mean you know everything, even leaders learn from their followers. To be a leader you must adapt to your followers and mentor to them with flexibility. Different followers need to be taught in different ways. As a leader you must act accordingly because you have tremendous influence over your followers. A part of leadership is going back to check over your followers to ensure their needs are fulfilled. As a leader someone is always watching you.

If you look deeply into both followership and leadership you will see that they are really not that different, but more the same. You cannot lead if you do not know how to properly follow someone. You have to listen to what your leaders say, but you also must listen to what your followers say for feedback. As a follower you learn the basic traits that are needed to be a leader. Once you have that down pat then you can step into your leadership role and begin teaching your followers. While you are teaching your followers you are also learning and making yourself a better leader. That is the difference between followership and leadership.