Leadership Legitimacy and Followership

Leadership Legitimacy and Followership

S. Chris Edmonds is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. He’s the founder and CEO of The Purposeful Culture Group, which he launched in 1990. Chris helps senior leaders build and sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Amazon bestsellers Good Comes First (2021) with Mark Babbitt, The Culture Engine (2014), and Leading at a Higher Level (2008) with Ken Blanchard.

If leaders want team members to hold them in high regard, to have them see the leader as serving the greater good, and to align to the leader’s and the team’s strategies and goals, leaders must earn it – by creating a purposeful, positive, productive work culture.

But what makes a leader worth following? What do the best leaders do to inspire people to follow them?

Our best bosses didn’t just demand things from us. They earned our trust and respect – and we willingly followed them. We engaged fully with our skills and passion to align with that leader, serve others, and move our team forward.

Our worst bosses may have demanded things from us – and likely we only followed them begrudgingly:

We didn’t trust them.
We didn’t proactively solve problems.
We waited to be told what to do.

Effective leaders inspire followership by investing in their “leadership legitimacy.

But we must start with organizational legitimacy. This refers to how highly an organization is regarded by those in that organization’s sphere. Two questions are key:

Is the company trusted and respected?
To what degree do people in that sphere honor and embrace requests and demands from that organization?

Organizational legitimacy is built over time:

By demonstrating service to its customers and to its employees.
By keeping its commitments.
By engaging to build a better community.

If the department is not seen as serving the greater good, its organizational legitimacy is eroded, which inhibits the organization’s effectiveness.

CHRIS EDMONDS

Here’s an example. A municipal police department wants to create organizational legitimacy. The goals include:

That citizens believe the department is serving the greater good,
That citizens support the department’s policies and officers, and
That citizens even serve as informal ambassadors for the good that the department is doing.

If the department is not seen as serving the greater good, its organizational legitimacy is eroded, which inhibits the organization’s effectiveness.

The same is true with larger organizations. If they are not seen as serving the greater good, treating employees and customers fairly, etc., their organizational legitimacy shrinks. Examples of this include Volkswagen and Uber.

Leadership legitimacy then follows organization legitimacy, and generates benefits for organizations and leaders.

Why is leadership legitimacy so important? Strong leadership legitimacy results in: