I've been thinking about leadership, about leaders who inspire and have inspired me, and it occurred to me that I have been willing to follow such leaders during my long work career. I have not been willing to follow leaders who do not inspire me. For me there is a clear-cut line between real leaders and fake leaders, and what separates them is their ability to motivate others, to inspire others with their ideas and thoughts. Fake leaders are those who are leaders in name only; they are only interested in the title, prestige, and money attached to the position. They have no idea of how to lead others or how to motivate them. Unfortunately, there are too many of the fake leaders and not enough of the real leaders.
I've been thinking about this since I found out that all three of my managers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have passed, the first in 2013 and the other two during the past six months. They were my managers, but they were real leaders, all three of them. One was an innovative pathologist who led the pathology department, the second was an idea-rich medical doctor/researcher, and the third was an attention-to-detail basic researcher who pulled it all together. They were an excellent team that managed to present their ideas to their team of employees, who worked hard to translate those ideas into reality. The results were good publications, successful grant applications, money to hire people and to buy consumables for the lab, travel to conferences to present our data, and money to buy state-of-the-art flow cytometers that our lab used at that time.
There really is nothing new under the sun. I've googled the terms 'leadership and followship' and discovered that I'm not the first one to coin the term 'followship'. As I've pointed out above, followship is a good thing if those one follows are real leaders who inspire their employees. Followship is not a good thing if it is characterized by passivity, conformity, lack of good ideas, lack of motivation, and a pervading sense of mediocrity. Negative followship implies that the leaders employees follow are not real leaders. Unfortunately, there is too much negative followship afoot, also in society at large. Rather than think for themselves, many people prefer to simply accept what they read online or in the media generally, without weighing the consequences or debating the wisdom and truth in what they read or watch on television. They would rather be passive and conformist, and those traits can be manipulated and abused by unethical leaders.
When I had the chance to lead a small project research group over ten years ago, I managed to do a good job, according to the feedback I've gotten from those who worked for me and with me. One young woman even said to me that she hoped she would be like me when it was her chance to lead others. Others have said that they have learned a lot from my leadership style. I've been told that I am a good people manager, but I know too that many of my scientific ideas were good and that the research projects that we were involved in were interesting and timely. Ground-breaking, no. But relevant, yes--work that may have advanced some of the knowledge in the field. I can live with that, now that my career is nearing its natural end. I would rather know that when it was my turn to lead, I stepped up to the plate and did a good job of leading and inspiring others. That's all that matters to me at this point.
