Followership: What We Can Do to Protect Ourselves from Pseudo-Leaders

There are exceptional leaders, but also mediocre ones. Unfortunately, the latter are more common. Leaders exist because followers have universal needs they cannot solve individually, such as the sense of identity, understanding complexity, or protection. These collective needs create fertile ground for opportunists who, through mere affectation and persuasive rhetoric, can seize control despite lacking genuine leadership abilities.

This article examines how to empower followers to better address their own needs, thereby reducing their dependence on leadership. Such empowerment enables followers to distinguish between exceptional leaders worth collaborating with and mediocre ones who should be replaced.

Imagine living in a tribe in the middle of nowhere around 10,000 BC. You spend your days foraging for food, repairing your shelter, and socialising with your fellow tribe members. Everyone is equal, and you all work together.

Suddenly, an 8.5 magnitude earthquake strikes, splitting the ground open with a massive crack. Nothing in your hunter-gatherer experience has prepared you for this terrifying event. How do you make sense of it? How will you live from now on?

One of your mates speaks up and declares, "That is Nature's Spirit fury punishing us for our bad behaviour." And just like that, you have your first spiritual leader, emerging from nothing. The crisis created an opportunity for leadership, and someone stepped forward with a simple explanation that addressed the tribe's need for understanding and meaning.

Leadership has evolved significantly over time, resulting in the diverse range of types and styles we see today, from transformational leadership to situational, emotional, participative, authoritative, and many others. However, the fundamental social needs that leadership addresses have remained remarkably consistent.

Why We Follow Leaders

1. Navigate Complexity Through Delegation

Followers strategically delegate analysis and decision-making to more capable representatives, allowing them to benefit from specialised knowledge and expertise without needing to develop it themselves.

2. Reduce Decision Fatigue

By accepting certain hierarchical structures and delegating specific choices, followers conserve valuable cognitive resources.

3. Reinforce Identity and Belonging

Followership provides powerful psychological benefits through shared values, beliefs and purpose. By aligning with leaders and groups, followers satisfy fundamental human needs for community, meaning and social identity.

4. Access Otherwise Unobtainable Benefits

Followership enables participation in collective achievements beyond individual capacity. Through coordinated action, followers can access resources, opportunities, and accomplishments that would be impossible to obtain independently, creating mutual benefit through cooperation.

5. Gain Protection and Security

Followership provides essential safeguards against various threats. This protection operates through strength in numbers, shared resources during hardship, and the defensive capabilities of organised groups.

When social groups gather, leadership naturally emerges to provide direction. Indeed, the more significant the challenges a group confronts, the greater its collective need for clarity, security and a sense of belonging. This creates an opportunity for many leaders to emerge.

However, not all leaders are good ones. Some are pseudo-leaders who easily exploit situations to their advantage. Unfortunately, we see plenty of examples in the political sphere today. After just two months in office, two businessmen-turned-politicians have reignited the global nuclear arms race that had been dormant for three decades—truly a remarkable achievement!

The Dark Secret of Leadership

The very idea of personal leadership obscures what actually makes leadership possible: the extensive support systems behind any leader. The concept of the singular, heroic leader is largely a myth. As the scale of the social group increases, the institutional infrastructure needed grows exponentially. This scaffolding—whether formal organisational structures, informal networks, cultural systems, or technical frameworks—is what truly absorbs and manages the group's needs and complexity.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Jacinda Ardern received worldwide acclaim for her decisive leadership. She was celebrated for her clear communication, empathy, and the effectiveness of New Zealand's "go hard, go early" strategy that successfully contained the virus. The popular narrative focused on Ardern as the singular, compassionate leader who guided her nation through crisis.

However, this narrative obscures the massive institutional scaffolding that made her leadership possible: decades of public health planning, scientific advisors, civil service infrastructure, emergency financial mechanisms, rapid legislative capabilities, coordinated media networks, security forces, community organisations, indigenous healthcare frameworks, and digital systems enabling remote work. This institutional scaffolding enabled the New Zealand ex-prime minister to effectively lead the country through the pandemic crisis.

Leaders are the interface social groups use to navigate the institutional support system for solving their needs.

However, throughout history, we've seen that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Individuals who control these support systems don't always prioritise providing their social group with the clarity, resources, or security they demand. Instead, they often exploit the group's need for identity and their willingness to delegate decisions, pursuing their own agenda and interests rather than serving the collective good. The very scaffolding designed to address social needs becomes redirected to serve the few rather than the many, as those with access to institutional power reinterpret collective demands through the lens of personal advantage.

For example, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are using the government blah, blah, blah, blah.

What We Can Do to Protect Ourselves from Pseudo-Leaders

1. Improve Systemic Understanding of Complexity

To counter knowledge fragmentation when delegating, followers must develop systemic awareness by mapping power networks, tracking resource flows, and connecting seemingly unrelated issues. This integrated understanding reveals hidden incentives and informal structures, transforming delegation from blind trust to informed partnership while maintaining the contextual awareness needed to detect exploitation.

2. Develop Collective Decision-Making

To counter decision fatigue when facing complex problems, we can create collaborative spaces where group members collectively analyse information, challenge assumptions, anticipate consequences, and triangulate decisions. This shared cognitive approach distributes the mental burden, preventing exploitation through overwhelming complexity whilst ensuring critical thinking remains active even when individual energy wanes.

3. Maintain Identity Independence and Plural Belonging

To counter exploitation of identity and belonging, we can make values and beliefs explicit, clearly distinguishing them from leaders' personalities. By regularly analysing group behaviour to verify alignment with stated values, we maintain integrity. Additionally, we can share our value frameworks with collaborative partners, enabling interactions based on mutual understanding rather than personality-driven allegiance, thus creating resilient connections that transcend individual leaders.

4. Increase Collective Bargaining

To counter restricted access to collective resources, we create forums for aligning purposes and establishing explicit expectations, rules, and agreements that enhance coordination. This structured approach fosters group cohesion, amplifying our collective voice and strengthening our bargaining power, ensuring that followers maintain equitable access to shared benefits regardless of individual leader preferences.

5. Create Distributed Security

To enhance protection and security, we leverage existing social structures to build robust network capital. By deliberately strengthening connections within our community, we enable swift mobilisation of knowledge and resources to support any member in need. This networked approach not only reduces vulnerability to harm but significantly improves the collective resilience of the group against external threats.

Conclusion

The fundamental social needs that drive us to follow leaders haven't changed, but our approach to followership can evolve. By understanding the institutional scaffolding behind leadership and implementing the five protective strategies outlined above, we can satisfy our collective needs while protecting ourselves from pseudo-leaders who exploit rather than serve. True followership isn't about blind allegiance but informed participation, transforming our relationship with leadership from dependency to partnership, ensuring that those we follow truly deserve the trust we place in them.