A Good Leader Is One Who Follows the Followers

A line that is often credited to Mahatma Gandhi says that there go my people and that he must find out where they are going so that he can lead them. No reliable evidence shows that Gandhi said it. A version of the sentiment is credited to Alexandre Ledru Rollin, a politician of the French revolution of 1848. The story is a small joke on the topic, since a line about following was itself followed from one famous name to another without anyone checking where it began. It also hints at something that the essay will argue, that leadership and followership are harder to separate than they seem.

The idea that a good leader begins as a servant has a modern form. In 1970 the American management thinker Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay called The Servant as Leader, arguing that the great leader is seen as servant first, and that the test of leadership is whether those served grow healthier, wiser and freer. Older traditions held similar views. The Arthashastra says that in the happiness of his subjects lies the happiness of the king, and that what pleases the king himself is not good for him but what pleases his subjects is. A ruler who has to find his own happiness in the happiness of others has, in a sense, put himself behind them.

Gandhi's own practice illustrates the idea better than the quotation does. In 1930 he chose the salt tax as the target of a mass campaign, a choice that surprised many of his own colleagues who had expected a loftier demand. Salt, however, was something that every household used and that every household resented paying for, and the choice showed that he had listened to what ordinary people already felt. When he walked to Dandi, thousands of villagers, many of them women, made salt in their own homes and became leaders of the campaign in their localities. He had followed the grievance and the followers then led.

A business example from India points the same way, and it shows that the principle works outside politics. In 1946 the dairy farmers of Kaira district in Gujarat were forced to sell their milk to a single private contractor at prices that left them poor. They approached Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who advised them not to protest but to form their own cooperative. The cooperative that became Amul grew into one of the largest dairy brands in the country under the management of Verghese Kurien, who had joined it in its early years. The leaders of the enterprise did not invent its purpose. They discovered it in the complaints of the farmers and built an institution around it.

The same principle appears in the best modern organisations. Toyota's production system encourages managers to go and see the factory floor for themselves, because the people closest to the work know where it fails. The doctors and engineers who run a hospital or a bridge project learn quickly that a decision made without the knowledge of the nurse or the foreman is likely to fail in a way that was visible to them from the start. In such settings the follower has information that the leader needs, and the leader who ignores it is not strong but blind. Humility about what one does not see from the top is therefore not a sentimental virtue but a condition of competence.

A leader who only follows has become a mirror, and a mirror cannot show anyone the way.

The danger in the topic is obvious. A leader who only follows has become a mirror, and a mirror cannot show anyone the way. Populist politicians who track every shift in public mood and adjust their positions to match are following the followers in the narrowest sense, and the result is a leadership that is always popular and rarely useful. Followers may want what harms them, and a crowd can be wrong about its own interest, particularly when it is frightened or angry and has been told that someone else is to blame. History has many leaders who rose by reflecting a fear and many societies that paid for the reflection.

Gandhi himself provides the clearest case against the literal reading. In February 1922 a crowd at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh set fire to a police station and killed more than twenty policemen. Gandhi called off the Non Cooperation Movement at the height of its momentum, over the objections of many of his followers and several of his colleagues, because he believed the movement had violated its own principle of nonviolence. He led against the wishes of those he led, and he was criticised bitterly for it. By the standard of the topic he failed to follow. By the standard of leadership he held the line.

The apparent contradiction dissolves when following is read more carefully. A good leader follows what the followers need, what they have suffered and what they are capable of, and not necessarily what they demand at a given moment. A physician follows the patient's health and not the patient's request for a prescription. This reading also asks for institutions through which followers can be heard. The Panchayati Raj amendments of 1992 gave village assemblies a formal place in governance, and they are an attempt to build the habit of following into the structure of the state so that it does not depend on the character of individual leaders.

A final puzzle remains. If the leader follows the followers and the followers follow the leader, it is not obvious who is leading. Researchers who studied starling flocks in 2008 found that each bird adjusts its flight to about seven neighbours and not to a leader, yet the flock turns as one and avoids predators with astonishing precision. Perhaps human leadership is similar and the sense of a person at the front is a story told afterwards. It remains unclear whether leadership is a quality of an individual or a property of a group, and the line that is credited to Gandhi, which no one can trace, may be a small example of how it works.