I recently came across a presentation I delivered to the Student Conference of AHRI (the Australian Human Resources Institute) in 1998.

The topic was ‘Building a sustainable career’, with a particular focus for those who were at the beginning of their professions and not in formal leadership roles. Looking back at it now, I can’t help feeling that many of the points I made are still relevant today. Further, they’re not only appropriate to those at the start of their career, but to anyone at any point in their working life – even the later years. I’ll summarise what I said in the hope that it might provide you with some food for thought.

My central point was that we do both ourselves and the organisations we work for a disservice when we allow ourselves to simply ‘go with the flow’, with external circumstances dictating where our career takes us. The better alternative to this is to be a ‘courageous follower’ – a proactive participant in the shaping of your own path.

I suggested that there are five dimensions of the ‘courageous follower’:

  1. The courage to assume responsibility. Courageous followers don’t expect their organisation to provide for their security or growth, nor to give them permission to act. They don’t wait for their performance review to assess ‘how they are going’, but rather do this continuously. They also lead by example (I gave the example of always being respectful to both themselves and others by arriving at meetings on time – still a common problem!) and are prepared to speak up about something that is concerning or challenging them when the circumstances are right.
  2. The courage to serve. If the previous point emphasises a degree of independence and self-reliance, the point here is that this is also done in the context of serving the organisation. While you work for an organisation, there is an obligation to act in its name, to demonstrate commitment to its purpose, and to do what you can to encourage effective and genuine communication processes and build collaborative relationships across functional boundaries.
  3. The courage to challenge. Perhaps the most obvious example of this point is a willingness to challenge ‘group think’ – to recognise when cohesiveness is becoming a weakness. It also means challenging inappropriate or abusive behaviours and calling them out, both when directed at yourself or directed at others. And it means challenging your own thinking, checking in with yourself to recognise any personal agendas.
  4. The courage to participate in transformation. Organisations constantly change, whether that change is driven by external or internal forces, or both. The courageous follower understands this. They also understand their own reactions to change and how others may respond as well. They do what they can to contribute to a supportive environment and to promote realistic expectations (no single change will ‘fix’ everything!)
  5. The courage to leave. Merging and separating are two of the most basic acts of life. We need to recognise when our own growth, or that of the organisation we work for, points to a deviation from each other. We need to have sufficient clarity of our own values to recognise when they may be diverging from those of the organisation, and courageous enough to act as a result. We need to be brave (and, I would now say, emotionally healthy) enough to understand that organisations need a degree of ‘coming and going’ of the people in them in order to remain relevant for the time.

If I were to give this same presentation today, I would probably still make most of these points, perhaps changing some of the language to reflect that of our current work. I might change the ‘courageous follower’ to the ‘emotionally healthy follower’. I would likely make the point that a formal leadership role is not a prerequisite for being a leader.

If nothing else, re-reading this presentation over 20 years on gives me a degree of satisfaction that if I hadn’t taken my own advice, I likely wouldn’t be doing the work of the Global Leadership Foundation today that I treasure so much.

Gayle

Image credit: Arthur Poulin on Unsplash