My previous article, "A gap in our field: Leadership in language education," prompted several readers to respond. Many of the messages posted and emails sent confirmed that, compared with books on methodology and other areas in our field, this area of leadership in English language teaching (ELT) does appear to have been relatively overlooked, apart from a few helpful and useful books, referred to in the previous piece.

We have, then, decided to make this a series of articles, and we hope to hear from more readers about their experiences of leadership in ELT. The first point to make is that “experiences of leadership in ELT” does not only refer to ESL professionals who have been or who are in leadership roles. In the same way that there are far more students than there are teachers, there are far more "followers" than there are "leaders."

This may seem like an obvious fact, but when we look at the tens of thousands of books and papers on leadership in other areas, such as business and heath care, we can see that the vast majority of them are about experiences of leading, not experiences of following.

In the same way that the voices of the learners are often conspicuous by their absence in many studies that claim to be about teaching and learning, the voices of the "followers" are similarly absent in the leadership literature.

The language of following

One of the relatively few books to focus on this particular aspect of leadership is "The Art of Followership: How great followers create great leaders and organizations" (2008) by Ronald Riggio, Ira Chaleff and Jean Limpan-Blumen. In the opening chapter of the edited collection, Robert Kelly states, “The field of followership is still in its infancy.”

This is in marked contrast to the field of leadership, which has been written about for a long time, some have claimed, going back to Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old Chinese classic "The Art of War." That raises an interesting question about why we have so many decades, and even centuries, of writing on leadership, but so little about followership.

One of the reasons for that, according to Kelly, relates to language, as he notes in his section on "The Language of Followership": “If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, 'You need to come up with a word other than follower because it is socially unacceptable,' I would be much wealthier today. 'If you had a sexier, easier term,' they say, 'then you would be able to sell this concept much more easily.' My response is always, 'I would be glad to do that as soon as we get rid of the word leader. One you’re ready to do that, then we can talk.'"

While it is good to see that Kelly appreciates the importance of language, it is perhaps not so helpful to suggest that we get rid of words like "leader" and "leadership." But he does make the important point that it can be difficult for people to conceptualize the idea of followership as easily as they can leadership.

The relationship between what we call things and how we think about them can be heavily influenced by the names we give them. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has any ideas for alternatives to "followership," but until then, we can continue to use the word and the idea as it is currently being employed.

Teachers as followers

One of the interesting by-products of the move to learner-centered teaching is that more teachers are now willing to give control of the lesson over to their learners. This can be a bold and even brave move, as the lesson plans that many of us were required to complete as part of our own teacher education go out the window once you give control of the lesson to the learners. I still see lesson plans with notes such as: "9:15 a.m.: Teacher introduces and explains task. 9:20 a.m.: Students begin task. 9:45 a.m.: Students complete task."

The idea that all the students will understand the task in the same period of time, and then all complete the task in the same period of time is, at best, extremely overoptimistic. At worst, such lesson planning goes against the idea of "individualizing learning," which — like learner-centered teaching — has been one of the big movements in our field over the years.

Whenever I see a teacher letting go of her/his lesson plan, and allowing the students to take the lesson in directions that s/he had not planned, I am always impressed by those moments, which reflect a great deal of trust having been built-up between the teacher and the students.

What teachers are demonstrating in those moments, in addition to trust, is their willingness and ability to follow, in this case, their students. Therefore, it is possible that teachers — perhaps language teachers especially — are particularly good at the kind of following that the contributors to the Riggio, Chaleff and Limpan-Blumen collection wrote about and advocated.

Leadership lessons: Learning to follow

In the business field, one of the most famous leadership gurus is Warren Bennis. On the back cover of the "The Art of Followership" he wrote that: “In many ways, great followership is harder than leadership. It has more dangers and fewer rewards, and it must routinely be exercised with much more subtly. But great followership has never been more important.”

In my experience of learning and leading ELT organizations in England, Hong Kong, Canada and elsewhere, I have found that many of us are so overwhelmed with being placed in a leadership role for which we have usually had little or nor formal training [as I wrote in the first piece in this series] that we forget all that we know about how to follow.

As I also wrote in the first piece in this series, a quote usually attributed to the 19th century French Revolutionary Alexendre Ledru-Rollin is: "There go my people. I must find out where they are going — so I can lead them." This may have been one of the first instances of a leader going on record as saying, in effect, that he would have to learn how to follow first, before he could learn how to lead. Let's hope it won't be the last.