Effective Leadership, Followership, and Negotiation Strategies

Posted on Aug 27, 2025 in Other subjects

What is Leadership?

Motto: “Be Easy to Follow”

Today’s leadership role involves coaching, charting the path, clearing obstacles, and helping people have exceptional experiences in the process.

Followership

Followership is the complement to leadership, and leadership is the complement to followership. They are separate roles but are inseparable.

Key Lessons in Followership

  • Leadership and followership work best together.
  • The most effective leadership occurs when the goal is desired by the follower(s).

Types of Followership Actions

  • Mimicry: Performing the same action. Sometimes a leader is “modeling the way” and expects you to do exactly what they are doing.
  • Complementarity: A supporting action, doing something different but directly bolstering what the leader is doing; e.g., one person holds a sign, the other secures it.
  • Initiative-taking: A unique action, figuring out a new way to support the leader’s goals; examples include creating a better process, saving time, saving money, or innovating.
  • Task Fulfillment: Getting your current job done or doing what you are told.

Thinking or teaching that one behavior (or quadrant) is always the best is a bias. In fact, the truest measure of skill is:

  1. Assessing a situation properly.
  2. Choosing the most suitable behavior for that unique situation. If you don’t know, ask!
  3. Executing the behavior brilliantly.

Brilliant followership is knowing what combination of the four behaviors – mimicry, complementarity, initiative-taking, and task fulfillment – to apply in a given situation.

Brilliant leadership is believing in the high potential of your team members and treating them like partners. More on this later!

Followership Advice

  • Make an explicit declaration of support.
  • Ask for frank, fruitful followership feedback.
  • Have more positive influence.
  • Be easy to lead (Personal Operating Manual).
  • Engage as if it’s your dream job.

Leadership & Collaboration

Personal Operating Manual

  1. Determine your situational context.
  2. Be specific (not generic).
  3. Be actionable.
  4. Make it about yourself.
  5. Give examples.
  6. Trim it to 5 to 7 things.

The 4C Model for Leadership Selection

Objective criteria for determining who should lead:

  • Community: Are you a group that entrusts you?
  • Creative Inspiration: Whose unique creative idea is it?
  • Capability: Ability (based on past experience).
  • Capacity: Has the potential, skill, or strength to do it.

Shared Leadership: Identifying the Leader

  • Point 1: You are only a leader when you are leading.
  • Point 2: You are only leading when someone else is following.

Framing and Leaning In

Leadership & Followership Defined

  • Leadership is about creating a framework for action.
    • Good leaders use frames to create optimal conditions for success.
  • Followership is about working within a frame.
    • Good followers take informed initiatives within the frame.

Core Leadership Role: “Be the Frame, Not the Canvas”

Framing is about building optimal conditions for success:

  1. Assess each situation from the ground up.
  2. Choose a frame that gives direction but allows for creativity.
  3. Create a frame that maximizes team capabilities.
  4. The frame is flexible: it can be modified to adapt to the situation.

Optimal Conditions for Success

  • Build optimal conditions by:
    • Assigning appropriate resources.
    • Being optimistic but reasonable.
    • Eliminating barriers & reducing ambiguity.
    • Supporting the use of good processes and systems.
  • Define success by:
    • Creating vision & purpose rather than telling someone what to do.
    • Communicating constraints and appropriate risks.
    • Defining objectives, not solutions.
    • Clarifying expectations.

Core Followership Role: “Be the Canvas, Not the Frame”

In your followership role, take informed initiatives:

  1. If the frame isn’t articulated in a way that you understand, clarify.
  2. Think outside the box, not outside the boss (frame).
  3. If the frame isn’t getting results, provide generative feedback – what are you putting in your POM?
  4. Take action rather than wait for direction.
  5. Don’t create a new frame!

Taking Informed Initiative

  • Be informed by:
    • Probing to understand the frame.
    • Clarifying the relative priority & time investment.
    • Working within the frame, not creating a new one.
  • Take initiative through:
    • Looking for all the ways to add value and contribute.
    • Looking for all the ways to power up ideas within the frame.
    • Supplying decision support.
    • Helping to weigh alternatives and bring forward new ones.

The Four Elements of Frames

  1. Chart the path (Why).
  2. Clear the path (How).
  3. Stay on the path.
  4. Make the journey awesome.

Micromanaging

  • Micromanaging can increase performance on executing tasks; however…
  • It is one of the top three reasons why employees resign.
  • It negatively impacts productivity, creativity, and wellness.
  • Performance decreases on tasks requiring cognitive skills.

Hands-Off Managing

  • Hands-off managing takes less time when no change is needed; however…
  • The hands-off approach leads to a lack of connection and alignment.
  • Team members may feel the manager is not committed to their success.
  • Experienced staff may think they want it, or say they want it, but it doesn’t work and leads to disengagement.

Press the Reset Button

  1. Offer an explicit declaration of support.
  2. Replace activities that subtract value with high-value lean-in activities.
  3. Seek feedback.

Deeply Shared Goals

Shared goals are the pursuit of goals with others:

  1. Shared with someone, i.e., leader, team, staff.
  2. Shared but not the same goals.
  3. Top priority goals.

Goals Review

  • Figure out all the ways the goals can be more shared.
  • Distinguish between individual and team goals.

Negotiation

Negotiating rationally means making the best decisions to maximize your interests.

Creating a Negotiation Plan

  1. Determine Interests.
  2. Determine Issues.
  3. Figure out your BATNA and Reservation Price; guess at the BATNA and RP of your counterparty.
  4. Write down supporting arguments.
  5. Execute the plan.

A position (e.g., a 10% bonus) is what you state as the outcome.

An interest (e.g., getting paid enough to buy a house) is what you want as the outcome.

It is a very common mistake to start bargaining by stating positions, not discussing interests.

An interest is the reason why someone wants something.

Types of Negotiation Issues

An Issue is a category that can be negotiated:

  • Distributive: Your gain is my loss and vice versa – a fixed amount of resources (fixed pie). E.g., starting date and salary.
  • Integrative: Importance of the same issue is different for each party (differentially valued) – expand the pie. E.g., bonus, vacation, moving expenses, insurance.
  • Perfectly Compatible: Both parties want the same thing – enjoy the pie together. E.g., job assignment and location.

Ordering Issues for Negotiation

  • Order your issues from most important to least important.
  • Order the issues of your counterparty from most important to least important.
  • Determine which issues are compatible, which are distributive (win-lose), and which are integrative (win-win).