Although many books, articles and oral presentations focus and chronicle leadership and its many operational constructs, few renditions identify and delineate how leadership can be fostered and cultivated from the inside out. In other words: How does leadership actually work? And, how do followers play a role in the systematic success of influential leadership. After all, to lead we must have followers.
After many years of playing, coaching, and studying how football operationally builds people, I aspired to know how and why humans act/behave in such divergent manners regarding leadership. As a college player and an NFL free agent signee and business leader, I was exposed to many different styles and types of leadership. This exposure led me to question how leadership is built or cultivated in several different contexts. Thus, I set out to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in industrial/organizational practices so I could demarcate how leadership really plays out in the real world of sport and organizations. What I found was both fascinating and illuminating. Leadership as we know it has been depicted from an operational perspective, e.g., what and how leadership is taught and imparted; however, how often has a writer, or speaker chronicled how leadership is cultivated or fostered from a performance psychology perspective?
First, leadership encompasses several styles: Charismatic; Transformational; Transactional; Reverent and many others. Each style of leadership is essentially dependent on the individual’s personality style who is delivering the message or content. In other words, individuals with engaging personalities and powerful communication skills tend to be charismatic leaders. But how often do we stop and try to match our follower’s personality or psychology with the leader’s personality composition? As a comparison, astute public speakers will perform an audience analysis to identify the demographics of the audience they will be speaking to in keynote addresses. As such, shouldn’t we know who we are leading from a demographic psychological perspective?
Today’s Industrial/Organizational Psychology is employing Performance Psychology to illuminate how leadership and followership work in unison to foster roll acceptance, adherence, and compliance to then cultivate increased performance, satisfaction and group and team cohesiveness. Finally, have you ever wondered how some teams with marginal personnel or extensive injuries seem to perform at consistently high levels and win regardless of their circumstances? These teams generally have high levels of role acceptance, adherence and compliance that foster intrinsic motivation and essentially team cohesion. The catalyst or impetus for this system of psychology, is matching the appropriate leadership with follower-ship.
