“We persist in seeing the leader as cause, and the group as effect – but it is more accurate to say they co-create one another, moment by moment.”
– Margaret Rioch, “All We Like Sheep”
We often talk about leadership as something a person does – a matter of skill, personality, or experience. Most leadership development focuses on the individual: their style, their strengths, their blind spots. The assumption is that if you develop the leader, leadership will follow.
But leadership doesn’t happen in isolation. A leader’s impact isn’t just about what they do. It also depends on how others respond – how authority is received, how influence moves, and whether others are willing to engage with what leadership asks of them.
This reframes leadership as a relational function – something that sits between people, not within one person. It moves away from the heroic myth and towards something more democratic: a dynamic, shared process that is shaped by both leaders and followers in real time. It’s not about commanding or carrying the burden alone – it’s about how the whole system moves.
The myth of heroic leadership
Margaret Rioch argued that leadership is not a fixed trait, but something shaped by group dynamics. Groups often create leaders unconsciously, based on their own needs, anxieties, and defences.
In this view, leaders don’t simply take up authority on their own. They’re invited into leadership by the group – sometimes to carry what the group can’t face, or to contain what feels overwhelming.
This means followership is active, not passive. The group has agency in shaping the leadership it gets.
What this looks like in practice
Here’s a recent example from our work:
A much-loved MD leaves an organisation after many years. The decision comes from above – a push for fresh perspective – and the wider team is upset.
The new hire is smart, capable, and deeply committed. Despite this, he faces resistance and is seen as indecisive, naive, or disconnected from the organisation’s reality.
Some of this may be true, but what’s also true is that the team are withholding their followership: allowing themselves to be led by the new MD feels like betraying the old one, so they hold back.
The issue isn’t just the leader’s ability; it’s that the group hasn’t made space for leadership to land.
The trap of closed systems
This connects to a broader pattern we often see: the difference between within and between.
Most leadership work focuses on what happens within the leader, or within the team. But much of what matters sits between teams – in the relationships, boundaries, and dynamics that shape whether leadership can function.
We see this when:
- Leadership teams build strong internal bonds, but disconnect from peers.
- Functions optimise for their own clarity, but struggle to coordinate across the enterprise.
- Leaders are trained to deliver, but not to step back, receive, or adapt.
When teams become closed systems, leadership becomes positional and fragile. They protect their own identity, but lose the flexibility to share leadership when the work demands it.
Followership as a leadership skill
In well-functioning systems, followership isn’t about subordination. It’s a leadership skill in itself. For example:
- Backing decisions you didn’t make, because alignment matters.
- Deferring to someone better placed to lead on a particular issue.
- Holding space for disagreement without collapsing into confusion or conflict.
Followership is not about stepping down. It’s about stepping into a wider system view – one where progress depends not just on who leads, but on how others engage with leadership.
This softens the hierarchy and decentralises the load. It creates room for multiple forms of contribution – and makes leadership a shared, live negotiation rather than a fixed position.
What this means for development
This is why we don’t focus only on individual leaders or teams in isolation. Much of our work is about building shared understanding of the system itself: the roles, relationships, and dynamics that allow leadership to function.
That might mean surfacing unspoken expectations; helping teams see how they may be setting leaders up to fail; or building senior leaders’ capacity to follow, not just lead, when the system requires it.
In these moments, leadership and followership meet – and the system begins to move.
References
- Rioch, M. J. (1970). All We Like Sheep: The Distortion of the Psychological Picture by Its Neglect of the Group Dimension of Human Life. Psychiatry, 33(3), 258–273.
A seminal paper exploring how leadership emerges in group settings and the psychological function of followership. - Obholzer, A., & Roberts, V. Z. (Eds.). (1994). The Unconscious at Work: A Tavistock Approach to Making Sense of Organizational Life. London: Routledge.
Offers insights into systems-psychodynamic thinking, including group dynamics, authority, and the leadership–followership relationship. - Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock Publications.
The foundational text on group dynamics and the emotional states of groups, including paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. - Grint, K. (2010). Leadership: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Discusses leadership not as a fixed trait but as a social and relational process that is constructed in context. - Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2001). The Leadership Mystique. London: FT Prentice Hall.
Explores the interplay between personal psychology and leadership, including the hidden dynamics of power and authority.