Essential Followership. At this stage an individual is discovering their place within the organization and requires guidance to effectively engage in necessary day to day activities. An example is a newly graduated clinician (e.g., physician, nurse practitioner) who has completed their onboarding and orientation to their first clinical job in a cardiac rehabilitation unit. This clinician will looks to others within the team to lead meetings, set the clinical schedule, present, and prioritize new quality improvement projects, develop new processes etc. In this context essential followership is expected and necessary. This individual needs to acquire tacit information about the team, build relationships with team members, develop social capital, avail themselves of opportunities to complete work valued by the team, and eventually discern leadership gaps they might fill. However, at the beginning of their journey, the individual may simply need to be given a particular mandate (e.g., their initial job description).
Strategic Followership. Many individuals may find themselves evolving beyond essential followership as they seek to enhance their position within an AHC team. While a sense of belonging can certainly be affected by cultural drivers and inclusionary best practices, alignment with an organization’s strategy (aims and goals) may help individuals to advance in their leadership aspirations. An example of strategic followership is a finance manager within a unit that reports directly to a head of a large academic department who seeks to integrate their actions with the ethos of the organizational culture around them, taking cues from senior leaders, and acts with more creativity and less oversight. Depending on an organization’s goals and culture, this leader will morph their actions accordingly to strategic alignment. For instance, the finance manager in our example may seek to find ways to reduce costs in one sector to reallocate those costs to another area of strategic importance for the department. In some settings this has been described as leading from any seat and a manifestation of distributed leadership principles.50