I Will Follow Him
This morning, my partner and I were talking about leading, following, and respect. There are very few people in my life whom I actually follow. I’m not talking about situations where followership is dictated by someone’s authority, because they can give me a grade, a performance review, a raise, or a termination notice. I mean the people I follow without question, without pause, without running it through my own internal audit first.
We went through a list. My partner, thinking he had me, suggested my parents: people I love and respect enormously. Nope. Not even my mother and father have consistently had my followership past age fourteen.
So what is this followership I'm talking about? Because it's clearly not about respect. There are plenty of people I admire deeply whose opinions I seek out and consider carefully. But followership is something else. When I say I follow you, it is immediate. It is without question. It is without the pause for my own personal evaluation of whatever it is you're asking me to do.
Respect Gets You Compliance. Only Trust Gets You Followership.
Here's what most leaders get wrong: they think what they want is followers, but what they're actually describing is good employees. And there is nothing wrong with a good employee.
In a healthy organization, the exchange is clear. Leaders set the vision and strategy; employees deliver their individual contributions toward it. Job descriptions, goals, KPIs, performance reviews: all of it is architecture for that exchange. When something goes wrong, you examine where the strategy fell short, or where the contribution missed, or where training or resources were insufficient. It's a respectful, functional agreement with a limited shelf life. Both parties show up, do their jobs, and treat each other with dignity.
That is enough. That is actually very good.
But notice what it is: a transaction. A professional contract. Not followership.
Harvard's Barbara Kellerman, who has spent decades studying the dynamics between leaders and followers, identified five types of followers, from "isolates" who are completely disengaged, to "diehards" who are wholly committed. Her central finding is quietly devastating for most leaders: the vast majority of people in organizations fall somewhere in the compliant middle. True followers, people who are deeply bought in, fully engaged, and willing to go beyond what's required, are rare. Not because something is wrong with people. But because real followership has a much higher threshold than we typically acknowledge.
That threshold is not respect, but trust.
And specifically: trust that someone has your best interests at heart. Trust that they are aligned with your beliefs and values. Trust in their capabilities, and their integrity to seek help when something is beyond their reach. And with all of that in place as a prerequisite, trust that they will take responsibility for your well-being and treat it seriously.
Organizational psychologists Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman identified these same three components in their foundational 1995 model of interpersonal trust: ability, benevolence, and integrity. All three must be present. Remove any one of them and what you have is not trust. It's hoping for the best.
Followership Is Personal Before It Is Professional
My partner has observed that my son would follow me to the ends of the earth. He's right. My son trusts my values, my capabilities, my love for him, and my commitment to his thriving, including my willingness to say I don't know and find someone who does. That's not loyalty born of obligation. That's followership born of earned, deep trust.
And it's exactly what I give my partner. Because he has earned it. I know without question that he would lay his life down for me, and that when he asks something of me, I don't need to evaluate whether it's in my best interest. I already know the answer.
Ira Chaleff, author of The Courageous Follower, makes the point that this kind of followership isn't passive. It takes courage. Not the courage to comply, but the courage to trust fully. To release the constant self-protective calculation most of us run in the background of every relationship.
That is extraordinarily rare. And in most organizational contexts, it isn't necessary. But in a startup? It's everything.
What Startups Actually Run On
A startup is a small group of people who want to change something significant enough that they formed a company to do it, either because it hasn’t yet been done, or because they believe it can be done better. In the early days, you are often a handful of people in a garage, or on Zoom calls at odd hours, scraping together to keep something alive with duct tape, paperclips, coffee, and sheer belief.
Before there are job descriptions. Before there are employment contracts. Before there is a product that works or a customer who's paying.
There is only: Do I trust this person? Do I believe in what they believe? Am I willing to bet a significant piece of my life on both?
A large-scale study published in PNAS found that founder character traits, not product, not market, not funding, are the strongest predictor of startup success. The mechanism matters: early employees are making followership decisions, not employment decisions. They're not evaluating a job offer. They're evaluating a founder. They are asking, consciously or not, whether this person has the ability, the integrity, and the genuine care for their well-being to be worth following into the unknown.
Building a startup isn't just building a company. It's investing in the future of its founders, and if it goes well enough, eventually asking others to do the same. The promise implicit in that ask is enormous. It says: whatever it takes, I will do it. And I will not forget that you trusted me.
How Founders Build Followership
Most founders focus on the product, the pitch, and the hire. Very few think deliberately about how to become someone worth following. Here's what the research, and what I've observed over two decades of working inside and alongside scaling organizations, suggests you actually need to do.
Be transparent about what you don't know.Mayer's trust model is clear: competence alone doesn't build trust. Integrity does. And integrity, in a startup context, means being honest about the edges of your knowledge and seeking help beyond them. The founders who pretend to have all the answers are precisely the ones who erode trust fastest when reality doesn't cooperate.
Make your values explicit and then live them visibly.Culture isn't what you write on the wall. It's what you celebrate, what you tolerate, and what you call out, including when it's uncomfortable or inconvenient. Early employees are watching everything. They're deciding whether your stated values and your actual behavior are aligned.
Take the well-being of your people seriously, and say so.This is not an HR strategy but, a genuine commitment. When your team knows that their success and yours are genuinely, irreversibly tied together, not just on paper but in the way you make decisions, followership becomes possible. Covey called it the speed of trust: when trust is high, everything accelerates. When it's low, everything costs more.
Hire for integrity and belief before you hire for skill. In the early days especially, the people around you will shape the unwritten rules of your culture permanently. They become your first managers. They model what the company actually values. Hire people who genuinely believe in what you're building, and be honest enough about your vision that the people who don't will self-select out.
Earn followership in the market the same way you earn it internally.The brands that build true followership with customers are the ones that demonstrate, consistently, that they are aligned with what their customers believe, that they are capable of delivering, and that they genuinely care about outcomes. That is not a marketing strategy. That is trust at scale.
My partner asked me who I follow. It's a short list, and every person on it has earned their place through the same slow, serious work of demonstrating that they can be trusted: fully, and not conditionally.
Most leaders want followers. Very few do the work to deserve them.
The ones who do? They build something that lasts.
