Author's Note
This essay is not intended to challenge followership scholarship. Rather, it reflects on an unexpected tension I encountered while applying emerging followership concepts within the real-world relationships I had spent more than two decades building before entering academia. It is a reflection from a practitioner-scholar-practitioner whose scholarship emerged from practice and now seeks to return to practice with deeper understanding.
I Led Before I Studied Leadership
I spent more than twenty years leading civic organizations before I ever entered a doctoral program in Organizational Leadership.
Looking back, I realize I had already developed a leadership philosophy long before I encountered academic theories of leadership or followership.
Rather than leading through authority, I tried to develop people through communication, as an authentic leader, servant leader, and inclusive leader (which I had no clue of these terminologies), by building a leadership platform to nurture potential leaders from followers (volunteers).
I encouraged volunteers to participate in local civic activities. I introduced them to community leaders and organizations. I shared what I had learned about civic engagement and helped them establish local chapters in their own communities. Whenever someone took even a small step—attending a meeting for the first time, organizing a local event, recruiting a volunteer, or speaking publicly, I celebrated that achievement with genuine excitement.
Those moments mattered.
They were often more important than major accomplishments because they represented the beginning of someone's leadership journey.
Throughout those years, I was also intentional about the language I used.
I rarely referred to people as "my volunteers," and certainly never as "my followers." Even when announcing organizational meetings, I often addressed participants as leaders. I wanted people to see themselves not merely as individuals completing assignments, but as people capable of influencing others and making meaningful contributions to their communities.
At the time, I did not know the academic language of inclusive leadership, empowerment, social identity, or psychological safety.
I simply knew from experience that people often become what someone genuinely believes they can become.
Scholarship Explained My Practice
When I entered my doctoral program in Organizational Leadership, I expected to learn new leadership theories.
Instead, I discovered something unexpected.
My doctoral education did not fundamentally change how I led.
It explained why many of the leadership practices I had developed over two decades had been effective.
As I studied inclusive leadership, empowerment, followership, social identity, and organizational behavior, I began recognizing concepts that described practices I had already been using intuitively through years of working alongside volunteers and community members.
For the first time, I could explain academically what I had previously understood only through experience.
My journey had become one of practitioner, scholar, and practitioner again.
Practice led me to scholarship.
Scholarship gave language to practice.
Now scholarship returns to practice with deeper understanding.
Then I Encountered an Unexpected Dilemma
Ironically, it was not leadership that created my greatest surprise.
It was followership.
As I prepared my presentation for the 2026 Global Followership Conference, I naturally wanted to share my excitement about this emerging field of study with colleagues in my own civic organizations.
Many of these colleagues had begun their journeys years earlier as volunteers. Through commitment, initiative, and service, they gradually assumed greater responsibilities and eventually became chapter leaders, executive committee members, nonprofit leaders, and respected community figures.
Today, they are no longer simply organizational members.
They are my colleagues.
My collaborators.
My friends.
Yet I found myself unexpectedly hesitant.
Not because I questioned the value of followership scholarship.
Quite the opposite.
I worried that simply talking about my research on followership might unintentionally suggest that I was reminding them of an earlier stage in their journey.
That was never my intention.
In my mind, their development from volunteer to leader represented one of the strongest examples of exemplary followership evolving into leadership.
But I also realized that many accomplished leaders no longer think of themselves through the lens of where they began.
For more than twenty years, I had intentionally communicated in ways that encouraged people to grow beyond organizational labels.
Now I found myself studying an academic field whose central term might unintentionally be heard as placing people back into a label they had already outgrown.
That became my scholar-practitioner's dilemma.
When Academic Meaning and Social Meaning Diverge
This experience also helped me better understand something I had shared during the closing discussion of the 2026 Global Followership Conference.
From my perspective, the challenge is not limited to language translation. It reflects a broader cultural understanding of leadership and status.
In many cultural contexts, including Chinese culture, leadership is commonly associated with success, achievement, authority, and upward mobility. By contrast, the word follower often carries unintended associations with lower status, dependence, or simply "not yet becoming a leader."
Followership scholars, of course, understand the concept very differently.
Modern followership research recognizes followers as active contributors, courageous partners, critical thinkers, and essential participants in organizational success.
Academically, followership is not inferior to leadership.
Socially, however, the word often carries meanings that scholarship never intended.
That distinction became much more real to me after the conference.
Perhaps the Challenge Is Identity
As I reflected on these experiences, I began asking a different question.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing followership scholarship is not theoretical.
Perhaps it is psychological.
Perhaps scholars have already redefined followership.
But society has not.
Many people readily identify themselves as leaders.
Far fewer comfortably identify themselves as followers, even though every leader continues to follow someone in different organizational relationships.
If language shapes identity, then the words we choose matter.
For more than twenty years, I intentionally used communication to help people discover their leadership potential. My goal was never to create followers who depended on me. It was to cultivate confident individuals who would eventually lead others, build organizations, and empower their own communities.
Ironically, my doctoral journey did not teach me to lead differently.
It helped me understand why those communication practices had been so effective.
Closing Reflection
Looking back, I realize my journey has never been simply that of a practitioner or a scholar.
It has been a journey of practitioner, scholar, and practitioner again.
Practice led me to scholarship.
Scholarship helped me understand practice.
Now scholarship returns to practice—not to replace experience, but to deepen it.
Perhaps that is why I became so sensitive to the study of followership.
Long before I learned the academic language of followership, I had already spent decades witnessing its transformative power.
I simply called it something else.
I called it helping people become leaders.
Perhaps the future of followership scholarship depends not only on refining our theories, but also on reshaping the social meaning of followership itself. If we can restore dignity to the role of following as a developmental and relational practice, we may discover that every great leader's journey begins there.