A recent exchange about whether exemplary followership can become a pathway to leadership led me to revisit something I have observed repeatedly through years of leading civic and nonprofit organizations.
I have seen colleagues begin as highly engaged participants, demonstrate exemplary followership, earn the respect and trust of others, and eventually emerge as leaders themselves. Some became team leaders, chapter leaders, or board members. Their development affirmed something I have increasingly come to believe: followership can be an important pathway through which leadership emerges.
But as I reflected more deeply, I realized that this description was incomplete.
When exemplary followers became leaders, they did not simply stop being followers. Nor did their emergence as leaders mean replacing the leadership already in place. Instead, they assumed greater responsibility within an interconnected organizational structure. They became leaders and remained followers.
That realization raises a larger question about how we understand the relationship between leadership and followership.
Leadership and Followership as Dual Identities
We often speak about followers becoming leaders as though leadership were the next stage in a linear progression:
Follower → Leader
My organizational experience suggests something more dynamic.
A chapter leader may lead the people within a chapter while following the broader direction of the national organization. A team leader may exercise considerable autonomy within a functional area while remaining accountable to organizational leadership. A board member may exercise governance responsibility while simultaneously participating in collective decisions and remaining committed to a shared organizational purpose.
I experience this duality myself. I may lead chapter leaders and organizational teams while also operating within broader institutional relationships, governance structures, and collective purposes.
Leadership and followership, therefore, are not necessarily mutually exclusive identities. We can lead in one relationship while following in another.
We may even move between leading and following within the same relationship depending upon expertise, circumstances, and what the organization needs at a particular moment.
This changes the meaning of leadership development. Developing an exemplary follower into a leader does not necessarily mean transforming a follower into a non-follower. Rather, it may mean expanding an individual's capacity to lead and follow responsibly across different levels of an organization.
But what allows people to move between these roles without leadership becoming a struggle over status or authority?
I believe one critical answer is trust.
Relational Trust Makes Movement Possible
This insight brought me directly back to my presentation at the 2026 Global Followership Conference, where I explored how inclusive leadership activates followership in civic engagement contexts.
Four interconnected mechanisms emerged from my work: relational trust, mentorship, identity inclusion, and values-based leadership.
Of these, relational trust has become particularly significant in my continuing reflection.
Trust changes the nature of influence.
When trust exists, leaders do not have to interpret another person's initiative as a challenge to their authority. Followers can question ideas constructively without automatically being regarded as disloyal. Leaders can recognize emerging leadership capacity in others and give them opportunities to lead. Chapter leaders can exercise autonomy while remaining connected to the larger organization.
And someone who leads in one situation can follow another person's expertise in another situation without perceiving that movement as a loss of status.
Trust therefore does more than strengthen relationships.
Trust makes movement between leading and following possible.
When People Are Free Not to Follow
My experience in nonprofit and civic organizations has made this relationship particularly visible.
In conventional employment relationships, organizational participation necessarily contains a transactional dimension. Employees contribute their knowledge, skills, time, and performance in exchange for compensation and other benefits. Formal authority, job responsibilities, performance expectations, and career opportunities also influence organizational behavior.
That does not mean employees merely comply with orders. Exemplary followership can certainly flourish in private-sector organizations, and trust, belonging, purpose, and commitment can be critical to organizational performance.
But the nonprofit and civic context allows us to observe followership under different conditions.
Volunteers generally do not depend upon the organization for their salaries. They often have no employment contract requiring continued participation. A leader may have a formal title but relatively little coercive power over those being led.
People can reduce their participation.
They can disagree.
They can leave.
And yet many choose to stay.
That raises what I now consider one of the most important questions in understanding followership:
Why do people choose to follow when they are free not to?
Trust as Relational Currency
In my experience, the answer cannot be reduced to organizational hierarchy.
People continue to participate because they believe in something. They trust the people with whom they work. They identify with a shared purpose. They feel that their contribution matters. They experience belonging. They receive recognition. And, over time, they develop relationships that make collective action meaningful.
When monetary exchange is largely absent, trust becomes a form of relational currency.
This does not mean nonprofit relationships are completely non-transactional or that private-sector relationships are purely transactional. Human relationships are more complicated than that.
Rather, the difference helps reveal the mechanisms sustaining followership.
Where compensation, contractual obligation, and positional authority are weaker mechanisms for securing participation, relational trust and shared purpose become more visible and potentially more consequential.
Perhaps one of the clearest places to understand followership, therefore, is where people have the greatest freedom not to follow.
From Compliance to Voluntary Followership
This distinction also causes me to think differently about compliance and followership.
Compliance can be produced through authority. Someone can perform an assigned task because a supervisor instructed them to do so, because it is part of a job description, or because organizational consequences follow from refusing.
But exemplary followership requires something more than compliance.
It involves agency.
It involves judgment.
It may involve constructive challenge.
It involves taking responsibility not simply because someone issued an instruction, but because the individual has developed a sense of ownership toward the collective purpose.
In the civic organizations I have led, I have watched this transformation occur.
I did not initially approach colleagues as a mentor deliberately trying to manufacture future leaders. We worked together as colleagues around shared goals. I sought to influence through relationships, respect, example, and common purpose rather than simply through formal authority.
Over time, trust developed.
Some colleagues began taking greater initiative. They assumed responsibility without waiting for every instruction. They influenced others. They demonstrated commitment during uncertainty. They became people upon whom others could depend.
Those were exemplary followership behaviors.
And when I recognized those behaviors, I gave some of these colleagues greater responsibility and appointed or elevated them into team leadership, chapter leadership, or board roles.
Their leadership therefore emerged partly through the practice and recognition of exemplary followership.
Leadership Emerges, but Followership Remains
What happened afterward is equally important.
Their promotion did not eliminate followership.
The new chapter leader still participated in the larger organizational structure. The team leader still coordinated with other leaders. The board member still worked within collective governance and remained accountable to the organization's purpose.
At the same time, I had to trust them enough to lead.
If I appointed someone as a chapter leader but continued trying to control every decision, I would not really be developing leadership. I would simply be extending my own authority through another person.
Distributed leadership requires something different.
It requires the senior leader to trust emerging leaders with genuine responsibility. It requires emerging leaders to exercise autonomy while maintaining accountability. And it requires both parties to understand that following organizational direction and exercising leadership initiative are not inherently contradictory.
This is where relational trust connects followership development to organizational capacity.
From Exemplary Followers to Organizational Capacity
Another question raised in this discussion was whether developing followership actually moves an organization to a higher level of performance.
My experience suggests that it can.
The organizational value of exemplary followership is not merely that some followers eventually receive leadership titles.
Its deeper value is that the organization develops more people capable of exercising judgment, taking initiative, accepting responsibility, constructively challenging ideas, influencing others, and stepping into leadership when circumstances require it.
Leadership capacity becomes distributed rather than concentrated.
A national leader no longer has to personally direct every chapter. Chapter leaders develop their own teams. Team leaders cultivate additional contributors. Board members bring different expertise and perspectives. Individuals move between leading and following according to context and responsibility.
The organization becomes less dependent upon one individual.
That is not a weakening of leadership.
It may be evidence that leadership has become stronger.
The Four Mechanisms Revisited
This reflection has also helped me see more clearly how the four mechanisms I discussed at the Global Followership Conference interact.
Relational trust creates the interpersonal foundation for influence and psychological safety.
Mentorship helps people recognize and develop their capacity to contribute and eventually lead.
Identity inclusion creates belonging and communicates that people's voices and experiences matter.
Values-based leadership connects individual participation to something larger than personal advancement: a shared purpose.
Together, these mechanisms help explain why voluntary participants may move from engagement to exemplary followership and, in some cases, into leadership.
But leadership is not necessarily the endpoint.
The deeper outcome may be an organizational culture in which people develop the capacity to lead when leadership is needed and follow when someone else is better positioned to lead.
Followership Is Not Below Leadership
This brings me to perhaps the most significant change in my own thinking.
If we conceptualize leadership as superior to followership, becoming a leader appears to mean moving upward and leaving followership behind.
But if leadership and followership are complementary processes within a larger system, the relationship looks very different.
Following does not necessarily indicate lesser capacity.
Leading does not necessarily indicate greater human value.
The critical question becomes whether individuals can contribute appropriately to collective purpose from either position.
An exemplary follower may challenge a leader.
A strong leader may follow someone's expertise.
A chapter leader may follow organizational direction while leading dozens of others.
A national leader may sometimes need to follow the knowledge of a chapter leader who understands a local community better.
Seen this way, the ability to move between leading and following may itself be a form of organizational maturity.
And trust is what allows that movement to occur without threatening identity, authority, or belonging.
A Proposition Worth Exploring
My experience in voluntary civic organizations has therefore left me with a proposition I want to continue exploring:
As dependence on positional authority and monetary exchange decreases, relational trust and shared purpose may become increasingly consequential in sustaining voluntary followership.
And a second proposition follows from it:
Developing exemplary followers into leaders does not necessarily replace their follower identity. Instead, leadership and followership can coexist as dual identities within different levels and relationships of the same organizational system.
Together, these ideas change how I think about leadership development.
Perhaps our goal should not simply be to develop more leaders.
Perhaps we should develop people capable of understanding when to lead, when to follow, how to move responsibly between the two, and how to create enough trust for others to do the same.
After years of working with volunteers, emerging leaders, chapter leaders, and organizational colleagues, I keep returning to one deceptively simple question:
What makes someone choose to follow when they have the freedom not to?
My experience increasingly points me toward the same answer:
Trust, strengthened by belonging and sustained by shared purpose.
And perhaps that is where exemplary followership begins.
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