We have spent decades studying leaders. We have dissected their personalities, mapped their styles, and produced an industry of development programmes designed to produce better ones. And yet, the persistent gap between leadership investment and organisational performance remains stubbornly in place.
Part of the explanation, I would argue, is that we have been studying half the equation. Leadership, as a process, does not belong to the person at the top of an organisational chart. It is produced in the space between leaders and the people around them. And in that space, the quality of followership is every bit as consequential as the quality of leadership.
South African organisations, navigating the convergence of Ubuntu philosophy, high-power-distance legacy structures, and rapidly evolving knowledge economies, are particularly well-positioned to make something of this insight. But only if we are prepared to take followership seriously as a subject of strategy, not just a byproduct of leadership development.
Why organisations ignore followership at their own risk
The traditional organisational narrative positions followers as the background against which leadership is performed. The leader acts and the follower responds. The leader decides and the follower implements. This narrative is comfortable because it is tidy. It also happens to be flawed.
Followership theory, consolidated significantly in the work of prominent leadership scholars, Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe and Carsten (2014), positions followership as an independent variable in organisational outcomes, not merely a dependent one. In plain terms, how people follow shapes what leadership actually becomes, not the other way around.
There is no leadership, in any meaningful sense, without the active participation of those who choose to follow, challenge, contribute, and hold leaders accountable. When followership is passive, leadership becomes brittle. When followership is proactive, leadership gains traction, depth, and ethical accountability.
The Ubuntu dimension: followership as shared humanity
In an African business context, the dichotomy between leader and follower begins to look quite different. Ubuntu does not deny differentiation or hierarchy. The proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu insists on mutual constitution: I am, in part, because you are. The leader’s effectiveness is, in part, a product of the follower’s investment, and the follower’s identity is bound up in the wellbeing of the collective.
This has a direct organisational implication. In a genuinely Ubuntu-informed workplace, followership is not a role one performs reluctantly while waiting for a promotion. It is a form of communal stewardship. Followers who are genuinely invested in Ubuntu values are not waiting to be told what to do. They are co-creating outcomes because they understand their own identity and effectiveness to be entangled with the organisation’s.
Muller et al. (2019, p. 1), cited in: The African Philosophy of Ubuntu and Family Businesses – Journal of Family Business Management states, “Ubuntu significantly influences organisational performance by increasing employee engagement.”
When followership fails, so does the organisation
Consider what passive followership actually costs an organisation. It costs the quality of decisions because no one challenges assumptions. It costs innovation because ideas that carry any risk are withheld. It costs ethical resilience, because followers who do not see themselves as co-producers of outcomes are more likely to comply with directives they privately believe are wrong.
Engagement is culturally constructed, not universally designed
Here lies the central insight that most engagement frameworks miss. Engagement is not a universal human response to a standard set of managerial inputs. It is constructed through culture, relationship, and the implicit contracts that define what it means to work in a particular organisation, in a particular society, at a particular moment.
In South Africa, this means that engagement models that are imported wholesale from American or European research traditions will capture some of the picture but miss significant parts of it. An employee operating from a strong Ubuntu orientation is not primarily motivated by individual recognition or personalised goal-setting, though these are not irrelevant. They are motivated by relational quality, collective meaning, and the sense that their contribution matters to a shared outcome. They want to be seen as a co-author of results, not merely a resource deployed in their service.
Understanding this requires that managers attend to the cultural architecture of engagement in their specific teams and contexts. It requires intellectual humility about the limits of borrowed frameworks. And it requires a genuine curiosity about what followership looks and feels like for the people in your organisation, which means asking them, listening to the answers, and building structures that honour what you hear.
The strategic case for followership development
Companies that invest deliberately in followership development are not undermining their leadership. They are strengthening it. A team of proactive co-producers does not diminish a leader’s authority. It sharpens it, challenges it productively, and ensures that it rests on something more durable than position or power.
Developing followership capability in your organisation means examining the implicit theories that govern how followers are perceived and treated. It means creating structures in which upward communication is genuinely valued, not merely tolerated. It means rewarding constructive challenge alongside compliance. And it means taking seriously the philosophical tradition that surrounds us: the Ubuntu insight that performance, identity, and accountability are fundamentally relational.
Organisations rise or fall not through the brilliance of their leaders alone, but through the quality of the relational field they create. Followership is half of that field. It is time we started treating it accordingly.
4Seeds Consulting partners with organisations to develop followership as a deliberate capability, not an afterthought to leadership strategy. We work with executive and management teams to reveal the cultural dynamics that shape how people follow, challenge, and invest in shared outcomes. Drawing on both international research and the rich philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, we help organisations build the relational conditions that make genuine co-creation possible. If this resonates with what you are seeing in your organisation, click here to to read more on our website.