Africa 2009 – Leader-follower relationship – A required conversation

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By MUTUMWA MAWERE

Published: July 27, 2009

What is and should be the quality of the relationship between leaders and followers in post-colonial Africa?  Who should lead?  What are the obligations of followers?

A society is no more than one form or human organization and what breaks or makes such an entity must necessarily be the quality of the relationship of leaders and followers, all the way up and down the societal chart.

It is and should not be sufficient to expect leaders who emerge from the class of followers to be super stars or icons.  The ordinary people lower down in the societal ladder or the “valley” have more direct experience with real human existence and struggles than people at the apex. There is no better purpose of government than to give people hope that they can scale the heights without let or hindrance.

The direction of societal change must and should be informed by the people to whom leaders owe their existence to and yet as we all know, ordinary people are often intimidated and tend to defer to leaders expecting such individuals to be better angels and less selfish and more intelligent than them.

We have often expected the responsibility for the leader-follower relationship to be leader’s problem and yet the leader is after all only human and can only see and hear what the people who have access to him/her allow him/her.

A leader cannot be at two places at the same time, for instance, and yet we expect our leaders to know and be responsible for anything that goes wrong in a society while we the followers often refuse to take responsibility beyond the confines of their selfish interests.

Africa is a society that defers to leaders for direction and where followers surrender their power to leaders with no attempt to create an institutional framework to secure their interests.  We are simply in love with leadership and yet uncomfortable with followership while forgetting that the two are inseparable.  We rarely honor followership.

We often regard ourselves as helpless and weak and yet we have the power working together to create the kind of leaders that we deserve.

In the post-colonial framework, we rarely train ourselves to be strong followers who are not only capable of brilliantly supporting their leaders but can also when called upon, be leaders in our own right.

We have the power to stand up to our creation, leaders, when their actions or policies are detrimental and need rethinking.

We have the eyes to see what the leader may not see and yet we choose to blind ourselves into thinking that change can only come if the leader sees the need for it.

As a result, the typical orientation of those around most of our leaders often becomes personal survival instead of societal optimization.  When a leader is looking for human capacity strengthening he has no choice but to rely on those around him/her.

Optimum societal performance requires that both leaders and followers place the society’s welfare at least on par with protecting their own personal interests.

In most African societies as is typical in all human societies, individuals are so concerned with their own little worlds and yet expect leaders to act differently.  At the personal level, the preoccupation is to avoid embarrassment or personal threat.

Typically, I have observed that we tend to shy away from the conversations that need to occur to fundamentally improve the condition of our continent.

We often retreat into blaming other people or leaders for things we can do something about.

Where courageous followers are missing in action, thinly disguised authoritarian relationships emerge where the leader dictates, follower complies or else and the impact on motivation to remain part of the social contract is devastating leading good minds to migrate.

The transformation of Africa’s brain trust into a “Brain Drain” is a natural consequence in environments where individual needs for physical security and social acceptance outweigh pride in societal achievement or patriotism.

Rather, instead of risking the conversations that are needed to address leadership’s own contribution to societal decay, we often surrender into “playing the game” and conformity regardless of the cost to the continent that we purport to love.

Rarely are environments created in which honest communication is the norm and is rewarded in a transparent manner.

We all know that human nature seems to conspire against honesty and most of the time few speak truth to power.

If they do so, they get black listed if not banished.  In cases where they are rebuffed but need state jobs, they end up complaining to each other and to their close circle of friends and family but no longer to the person who needs to hear the message and do something about i.e. the leader.

Many state actors in failed or failing states find themselves in this position.  How much does this type of behavior cost Africa’s advance?

It is not unusual that people who find themselves trapped in a situation where a leader is not using his or her power well and do not know what to do but at the same time do not want to risk their careers by seeking to change the status quo.

At the heart of the transformation agenda of Africa must lay transformation of us, the followers.

This is both where have the most power to change and the most resistance to confront the need for it.

We have to begin a process with an honest and critical examination of how we have learned to cope with authority relationships that undermine and militate against our collective interests.

We often tend to be cynical, subservient, rebellious, functional, but always we want to play it safe.

These patterns of African follower behavior invariably exert a price on the relationship between leader and follower.

The need for mature relationships between self-confident, mutually respectful, emotionally and intellectually honest peers and subordinates, each operating from a shared prescribed role of common good cannot be overstated.

Africa will only be as good as we want it to be.  We all have a responsibility to make things happen.  We have no choice but to ensure that our self-interests are aligned to societal interests.

Some of us hold back their full contribution including willingness to take risks.

While the focus has been on the drought of leadership in Africa, we have to pause and reflect on our own individual and collective behaviors and inaction has tended to produce outcomes that we do not want to see.

We all expect the neighbor, friend, and colleague to take the first step to act and yet we want to benefit from our own inaction.

Leaders like followers need to learn to communicate effectively.  Do we have the skills to confront a leader without making him/her defensive?  How do we convey what we say privately about the leader to him in his/her interest to hear?  If not, how do we develop the skills to encourage our leaders to see what we see in our daily lives?  How do we earn our leaders’ trust so that we have a platform from which to speak?

Our leaders are lonely people. They invariably becomes prisoners of power and may not see and know what we know but in many instances we choose to keep what we see and know to people who do not have the power to change what we do not want to see.

The clearer we become about our end of the relationship as followers with a leader, the more effectively we can approach the leadership issue.  Leaders will not change because they want to but will only change if the followers know what they, informed by self-interest, want to see.