If you haven’t seen the lone dancer video, and I’m sure you have, it’s here. You should watch it start to finish, it’s a wonderful lesson in leadership.
The mistake we make in leadership is thinking that the important person is the leader, the one who steps up and starts the movement. The crazy one who goes off track onto something different and then people follow but he’s not the important one. There are millions of those, they’re just crazy. The important one is the first follower, the person who sees it and says “no actually he’s right” regardless of what everybody else is doing and follows.
The first follower gets very little recognition (they often don’t want recognition).
The first follower is the person who does the right thing.
My life has been spent being the crazy one, the lone dancer, the ridiculous one. I’m ok with that but I’m humbled by the amount of first followers I have seen and come across – the ones who have propelled me to wonderful places in my career. The ones who are prepared to take a jump when it seems the jump is ridiculous.
Leaders are nothing without people to lead and leaders are nothing without first followers. While it’s important that we have people whose banner we can flock to, whose cause we can run to, it’s probably more important to be the person who runs or flocks first regardless of whether that will make us famous or rich.
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