Preventing Toxic Leadership: Steps Any Employee Can Take Today – Alain de Sales

Welcome to lead and follow a podcast that explores how great collaboration actually happens. I’m your host, Sharna Fabiano, author of the book, lead and follow the dance of inspired teamwork. And I’m pleased to bring you the latest research insights and learning methods to help you work together better with the people around you. I help founders, solopreneurs and new leaders become great at collaborating because I’ve seen how much more becomes possible when people integrate their ideas, perspectives, and strengths in a practical way.

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Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Alon DeSalas, a postdoctoral fellow at the Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership in Brisbane, Australia. Alon recently completed his PhD in leadership and followership at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. And his research explores patterns of destructive leadership and followership in business politics and social movements and how courageous followers can overcome them.

His work has important lessons for us on many levels. And I’m so glad to have him on the show today to share some of that wisdom with us. Alon, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Sharna.

Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. I hope my explanations of these things are clearer than mud. I’m sure it will be a great conversation because you happen to be one of the very few people in the world, I think, who have earned a PhD in leadership and followership, hopefully the first of many.

So I want to start by asking you to share a little more about your background before the PhD. How did you arrive at this notion to study both leadership and followership together? Well, it depends how far back you want to go. But I’ll give you some highlights.

For those that don’t know, I grew up in India as an ethnic minority. And at the time, or even till today, India is the world’s largest democracy. And there was a lot of chess beating about the fact that India was the largest democracy when growing up. Yet, on the ground, even while walking to school and everywhere, you could see negative outcomes.

You could see people eating from bins, children not being able to go to school, people, homelessness, inadequate access to health care, a lot of things that people in the Western world take for granted. And I, at that time, remembered thinking that democracy is not the answer, perhaps it’s leadership. And then I spent as much time right from, I think, the age of 10, trying to get my experience in this whole notion of leadership. A young leader.

Yeah. And the more I got into it, the more I didn’t want to be a leader, I felt it was almost ineffective. And that you were so constrained by existing structures. And by structures, I mean, cultural norms, or laws or politics of the time.

And that continued on to I studied in England. It continued on when I was in England. And I realized that if you wanted to achieve anything, you needed not just to be a good leader, but to also be an effective follower. I never articulated it in those terms, I’ll be honest at that time.

But I did know very early on the influence that people in the teams that I was elected to lead, or appointed to lead, had on me, as the leader, that the influence was almost as strong. And quite often, there’s more followers than there are leaders. But yet, quite often, people in those roles as followers tend to abdicate their responsibility. I had a technical degree, so I did computer science.

And I thought that that was my shortcoming. So then I went back to university and I did an MBA. And then even after doing that, I still felt that there was this gap. And I distinctly remember being at this massive alumni event and asked a simple question about being able to impact outcomes when you are in a position of followership or as a follower.

And no one in the room could answer this. We’re talking people who are CEOs of companies, to senior managers in large organizations, all with MBAs. What a moment. What a moment.

I’m also kind of struck by your journey, you know, thinking like leadership is the answer and technical knowledge is the answer. And I feel like that almost mirrors what we’ve all been doing for the past 40 years or so. And, you know, assuming that all the answers lie there when actually the lived experience is somewhat different, right? As you’re realizing, I found it so interesting that you described the feeling of being a leader is almost restrictive, that you were so much more aware of how the people following you were impacting you versus the other way around.

In the PhD, one of the biggest things is that we, I discovered, at least in the followership research, is that we romanticize leaders. We romanticize leadership. And it goes to the point that we assume that we’re good at following. We just assume it.

But I think if there’s one thing the global pandemic has revealed, that how terribly poor our leaders are at following effectively, following the advice of chief medical officers and epidemiologists, they have floundered so badly. And it’s all been in the public’s eye. And I think if we do not use this moment to learn from it and we continue to romanticize leadership, it’s going to take us another 50, 100 years to get this opportunity again. It’s almost a slap in the face saying, hey, we’ve got to wake up.

Just a bit of followership history. I think Mary Follett, who nearly 100 years ago actually talked about the notion of followership. Yeah, it’s so important to remember that. This is not entirely new.

She tried to tell us. And she was a woman. So guess what? The male intelligentsia of the day ignored her.

They dismissed her. She was sidelined. So we’ve effectively wasted 100 years. Oh my gosh.

That’s a sobering thought, Alain. Yeah. So let’s get into your research, which is, I think, actually a big part of this opportunity you’re describing, because you’ve just identified some really important keys. I know that one of the things I was intrigued by was this idea of the toxic triangle.

So I wonder if you could just start with that. And I don’t want to dwell on the destructive patterns, but just to give us a kind of feel for the territory, and then we’ll go from there. Excellent. To explain the toxic triangle, I’d like people listening to visualize a triangle.

So you’ve got a triangle with three vertices. On one vertex, you’ve got what’s termed as conducive environmental factors. So these are things that I mentioned earlier. So it could be cultural.

It could be structural. It could be things that are rules and norms. You know, you rewind 200 years ago, a cultural element in the United States, at least, was slavery. So that was accepted.

That was a norm. That was a cultural or a conducive environmental factor. Then you’ve got, on the other vertex, you’ve got destructive leader. Very often, they’re extremely intelligent, highly charismatic, obviously can charm everyone.

And there’s also other patterns to look out for. So they’re narcissistic. And if we’re talking at the extreme end, they could have an ideology of hate. And then on the third vertex, we’ve got a group called susceptible followers.

And I’ll just break them down into two meta groups. One group are colluders. So they actively believe in what the destructive leader is doing. They’re also very ambitious.

Sometimes they’re more extreme than the destructive leader themselves. And the other group, you’ve got your conformers. So they also look at things out of self-interest. But quite often, they underestimate the impact of the destructive leader’s agenda.

If you visualize this, it could be a person who’s just like sees their boss doing something really bad, doesn’t really want to stand up because they’re afraid to lose their job, and they’ve got a wife and kids to support or a mortgage to pay. So they could conform because of those other factors. But collectively, the conducive environment, the destructive leader, and the susceptive followers together form what’s called the toxic triangle that leads to destructive outcomes. And destructive outcomes could be anything.

There’s varying levels of harm. One end of the spectrum would be maybe workplace bullying that has an impact on people’s mental health. Then you could have things like job losses, fraud, companies like Enron. And at the other end, you could have loss of life or even further mass genocide.

Yeah, I appreciate so much how, well, first of all, it shifts the focus away from only the leader, right? So it’s not only that there’s these toxic leaders out in the world, but that the destruction itself or the damage or the harm is coming about because of the interaction of those three things. So I feel like it really changes what we look for, you know, when we’re trying to solve problems or respond to harm, right, in the world is we can look from that three-pronged perspective. And I also appreciate how it scales, right?

You gave an example of a workplace, and then you also gave an example of genocide, which is like the largest scale harm I could think of. So that seems really useful to me. Absolutely. I’m glad you picked up on that.

So when you think of it, the toxic triangle can be overlaid in different settings, you know, maybe even domestically where you’ve got, you know, an abusive parent and the environmental factors around that where, you know, children are not independent yet. So they’re completely at their mercy, you know, of their parents. And then you can, you know, scale it up. And the other thing I also like to emphasize is leadership rather than just the leaders.

So in terms of leadership, it could involve the leader, but also those eluder followers and much to much less extent the conformer followers. So those collectively form the patterns of leadership. And for me, this is the importance of elevating followership to a higher standard, almost on par, if not higher than the leader. Because, you know, going back to what you picked up earlier about, you know, as a leader, I felt constrained by the team and the followers as well.

Again, research shows that the leaders we select are prototypical of the followership group. So interesting. They’re the ones who actually represent us more than everyone else. So, yeah, so that’s essentially, you know, the toxic triangle.

And yes, you can apply it to various different situations. And one thing I actually didn’t mention with the commusive environment is that leaders often use threats or manufacture threats. So it could be something that, hey, the economy is tanking. Therefore, the revenue is going down.

So we’re going to get rid of a whole heap of staff. And under the cloud of that, they use it strategically to get rid of people who might be challenging them. So they get more, you know, yes, men around the board or yes, women around the board. So they’re almost like manufacturing the environment.

A hundred percent. At a national scale, it could be migrants are taking our jobs or, you know, or a certain ethnic group are terrorists, you know, and that gives them the license to instill fear that then gets people to conform. And I’m specifically talking about this conformal group, mainly because colluders tend to be at the extremes. If you imagine a bell curve, on one end, you’ve got people who do things that we cannot even imagine, like your mother Teresa.

And on the other hand, you’ve got your Hitlers. And even then, we don’t come into contact with. So people at the extreme ends of the bell curve, we don’t often come into contact with. So we completely underestimate, right?

The majority of us are in this middle group, this conformal group. And it is this group that actually holds the power, but usually abdicates that power. And they don’t think critically. And just because I am a leader in one context doesn’t mean that I’m not a conformer in another.

And that’s also what we need to think about. So I could be, for example, a CEO of a large company, but I could be maybe a volunteer within a religious organization. And I hear that there is a particular religious person that is abusing children. But, you know, I’m like, it’s not my job.

I don’t really want to do anything, you know? So I could be the same person, but completely in one context being this leader, in another context, I am just letting things slide because, I don’t know, I value my friends and my mates who I meet in this religious organization. I’ve donated so much money. I’m afraid that if I’m associated with a religious leader who’s a convicted pedophile, it’ll affect my professional life and me as a CEO or a politician.

So I’d rather sweep that under the carpet. And then at some point, and the research is showing this, is that conformers actually end up becoming colluders, which is really, really dangerous. Yeah, it’s really horrifying. But at the same time, it makes a lot of sense because the more passive you allow yourself to become, the more you amplify that destructive behavior and, in a sense, even get used to it.

So it becomes normal for you, which means your own resistance to speaking up or taking any sort of action is going to be even greater. So maybe now is a good time to bring in those courageous followers. And I think this is really one of the most powerful parts of your research because you explore what happens when we decide to show up differently in our follower role, when we decide to become, as Ira Chalif has named them, courageous followers. So what happens when courageous followers enter into this triangle?

So destructive leadership is hard to recognize, right? And sometimes we might be in it, but just not know it yet. And if we’re not actively contributing to it, I’m going to say we’re conforming, right? So it’s a pretty hard pill to swallow for all of us.

But I think it’s an important one because it raises the awareness of the fact that if we’re not actually doing something to mitigate destructive outcomes, we’re contributing. Yeah, that just reminds me of, I believe it was Howard Zinn who wrote, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. That’s right. And you really, really have to think critically to use your agency.

So imagine now you’re situated within this toxic triangle. So my research was like, and let’s say, assume that you’re not conforming and you want to do something about it. But maybe you’re not in a role or a position of a title, let’s say, within an organization to do anything about it. So what do you do?

So I looked at the concept of courageous followership, where you don’t have all the typical bases of power that are associated with leaders, but you do still have your agency. Unless you are physically restrained or mentally challenged, you always have your agency. And that’s something that I think is really, really important. So if you imagine you’re the courageous follower, you want to know what to do.

I tried to look at different patterns of behavior to see how courageous followers could shift this power balance against the destructive leadership to improve outcomes. And what I found is that they essentially need to move this middle group, these conformal followers from conforming to also start to use their agency. And the patterns over time with a lot of effort and a lot of work showed that there are conformal followers who start to behave courageously. And I looked at several historical cases spanning decades across politics, social movements, and business to try and see if there was a repeatable set of actions that people who successfully challenged destructive leaders did.

An important question to ask. Very important question. And the answer was, yes, there was. And there were actually seven behaviors that people did very often.

And I’m going to start with and I’ll describe them. And I’ll start with the first one, which is actually something that most of us do. But it’s something that you need to not do immediately. It’s usually our go-to behavior, which is confronting internally.

You know, and I prided myself on being really, really direct. You know, you have a destructive leader or boss that’s sort of going off the rails, you know, and the gut instinct is to go and, you know, I’m just going to go into the office and speak my mind, right? Yeah. Or even, you know, even if it’s not the gut instinct, I would say a lot of us probably think it’s either that or nothing.

You know, either I confront them or I can’t do anything. Absolutely. And I’m saying that there is a third alternative, which is build up your power bases. So one of the first things that you need to do is what I call marshalling credible evidence, which is nothing more than starting to carefully curate and collect evidence that can be seen by a neutral observer to be factual in nature, can be seen by the leadership also to be factual in nature, right?

So if you don’t have that evidence, then it’s just sort of, he said, she said scenario and your power bases are not as strong as the people in positions of leadership. So carefully curate it and make sure that you put yourself into a neutral third party’s position and say, well, would that neutral third party believe that this is significant enough or not? I’m not talking about leaking evidence yet. I’m not talking about any of those things.

Just talking about, you know, starting to curate that. So that is really, really important. And I think that once you’ve got your evidence, you then need to do what I termed as perspectivizing, which is a academic term for basically reframing the argument or trying to convince someone else. The fact that, hey, this is an issue and because of these reasons, and guess what?

I’ve got evidence to back it up. Yeah. I can totally see how the evidence curation, you know, can even like, like for myself, I’m thinking if I do that, it’s going to convince me even more that I’m, you know, correct in my perceptions, right? Which then makes it easier to communicate to someone else.

100%. Something I didn’t necessarily discuss in my thesis was this concept of self-perspectivizing. Yeah. Self-perspectivizing.

And a lot of successful followers actually had this, it’s almost a splintering of their lives when they made this call. They had this internal conflict among themselves because quite often they believed in what the leader was doing. They believed in what this movement was about with their hearts and minds. It took a tremendous amount of courage to take a look in the mirror and say, you know, this, this isn’t right.

You know, I use the case of Daniel Ellsberg. Yeah, my goodness. He leaked the Pentagon Papers. Changed history.

Changed history. He actually sobbed when he realized that what he had spent his entire career advising Robert McNamara and he was so close to it all. And then suddenly he actually did a trip to Vietnam and said, oh my God, I can’t believe we’re doing this to actual people. You know, this, this change.

And it was a process. It’s not a, it’s not a light bulb moment. Often it can be, but it’s often not. It’s a, it’s a slow process where, and this I think is really, really important is you’ve got to work really hard on yourself to start to think critically, to look at multiple avenues and multiple perspectives to weigh all this evidence out.

So I think, you know, what you just said, Shana, is absolutely important because if you are not, if you haven’t convinced yourself, you’re not going to convince anyone else. And, and not based on the spin or the latest tweet or news headline, but actually looking at it and, and I think this takes a little bit of effort, which is why a lot of times people- Absolutely. Don’t do it. Right.

I’m going to call a spade a spade. We’re just lazy. We’re just lazy most of the time, right? We are, we are far, far more willing to sit on our hands and do nothing than to be proactive.

But the results will always, you know, bite us in the behind, whether it happens straight away because we’re acting courageously or whether it’s a, it’s a longer feedback cycle. And I don’t know, we end up losing our jobs. They will always come back or our reputations get tarnished, you know, or I don’t know, you sit by and a child abuse tends to continue or you elect the wrong president. Yeah.

It’s important to note that I think that it’s just difficult and to recognize, it’s almost like an innate resistance. I’m just thinking of how the body tends toward homeostasis, right? And the body is always trying to find equilibrium. And so when you consider something like as dramatic a change as shifting my allegiance or holding someone accountable, that’s a pretty big change, right?

Even if it’s not a life and death situation to the body, it might feel threatening, you know, on a kind of visceral level. And so I’m saying that out loud to kind of think if, because I’m thinking if we just recognize that, then perhaps it becomes less of an obstacle, right? If we just recognize, yeah, there’s going to be this resistance in us because our system tends towards equilibrium and we don’t want change. However, you know, we can make a choice even though it feels uncomfortable.

I think that’s where a lot of the courage comes in. A hundred percent. Yes. And I think that you said that really, really well.

I think that feeling of discomfort is, you know, is you and me growing. Totally. Right. It’s stepping into the unknown.

It’s, and you’re spot on. That requires courage and courage isn’t something mythical. It’s something that we have to practice, you know, at different opportunities. And those are transferable skills, just as reading or writing.

Yeah, very much so. So I think, not to go off on a tangent, but I don’t like sort of hard skills, soft skill distinction. I think the United Nations actually refer to what we call soft skills as functional skills. So these are the skills we require to function.

I like that a lot. Yeah. So I think courage is a functional skill and you’ve got to practice it, right? I love that.

I love that. That’s a perspectivizing in itself, right? Courage is a functional skill. Yeah.

I want to hear about all these other, the rest of the list. Alain, what happens after perspectivizing? So, okay. So you’ve got this concept of perspectivizing, but then there’s also the target of who you’re perspectivizing or who you choose to.

So there’s what I call building and maintaining coalitions. So, you know, if you’re going to perspectivize, I would advocate strongly not to go to one of those colludal followers who support this destructive leader, you know, be selective and strategic. And you’ve got to start to pick the right followers. And share this perspective.

And once you’ve built this critical mass, you’ve now got to work really, really hard to maintain those coalition. And at that stage, your perspectivizing can take a different scale. You can start to grow what I call boundary spanning, which you need to start to boundary span and you can boundary span in two different ways. For those not familiar with the term, let’s assume you’re within a destructive leadership situation.

One way to boundary span is to go beyond the dominion of the destructive leader. So if you’re within a company, I would recommend even informally seeking the opinion of people outside of the company and support. So that’s one way of doing it. And that could be, I don’t know, your union representative.

It could be the media. It could be seeking legal advice. It could be a variety of those different things. But it’s absolutely critical.

Boundary spanning was a necessary condition. And don’t forget, those people that you’re speaking to are also members of your coalition. So you’re also building coalitions as you boundary span. And of course, sharing that evidence and of course, perspectivizing.

Right. So they all kind of stack and amplify each other. Yeah. That’s so useful to know.

The task is staggering, but it is somewhat comforting to see how the things do accumulate and build power. And that’s it. It’s building power. You’re building your power bases, right?

Don’t forget, you’re confronting a leader who’s intelligent and already has power bases that are flowing towards them. It’s to their advantage. You’re trying to pivot that. Right.

So you can also boundary span horizontally. So people will say, well, what if I’m trying to confront the president of a country? In a really humble way, and I’m here in Australia, I’ll try and make an observation of why Donald Trump didn’t leave office despite the collecting of credible evidence and the media and so on and so forth. And while I was aware that when, and I’m going to contrast it with the Nixon presidency, you know, now, you know, Nixon didn’t get impeached.

He resigned because he knew the writing was on the wall. And yes, I know the Democrats controlled both the Senate and Congress at the time, but they still needed a super majority to remove him from office. They still got enough Republicans to basically vote, you know, to cross the floor. And one of the reasons is that in the 1970s, the Democrats actually showed more patience.

They were willing to boundary span. And the only thing that’s within America that’s equivalent in power to the president is the judiciary. So they went all the way to the Supreme Court, right? And they got those Nixon tapes, the smoking guns, so to speak.

And it’s once they got that, it started to perspectivize. People started to change their opinions. There was the president actually telling people to do these things, right? And that started, and the Democrats under the Trump presidency did not have the patience to do that.

You know, they did not enforce subpoenas. They didn’t actually get the documents, the so-called perfect phone call. They never actually went as far as going all the way to the Supreme Court. They were more worried about politicizing everything during, you know, the year of the re-election, the presidential re-election, rather than doing what was right, which was actually getting to the truth.

And if you just focus on doing what is right, you get the right outcome. And I’m not, I’m here in Australia. I’m not going to say whether the right outcome was keeping Trump in office or not. All I’m saying is that they didn’t pursue the truth.

And this is the last element of those seven, which is, well, there’s two, is intensifying. This is an element of grit, right? The more that, destructive leaders aren’t going to go away quickly. So you’ve got to intensify your efforts.

You’ve got to intensify your evidence building, collecting of evidence, your coalition building, your perspectivizing, your boundary spanning, and it’s iterative. So you’ve got to keep repeating, repeating that process. And there’s one thing above all, and this is important. Once you’ve collected your power bases, you’ve got to do something that, it’s a word I coined in my thesis called Rubiconizing.

So it’s basically from Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, right? So you’ve got to cross the Rubicon. You’ve got to commit decisively to, at some point you’re saying, hey, you know what? I’m going to stand up for this because, and I’m willing to bear the consequences, whatever those consequences might be.

And I think that while there might, quite often people will overestimate the short-term pain, they often underestimate the long-term pain, the long-term pain of not standing up, right? Yeah, it’s so interesting to view those through this lens, in terms of the process of what happened, how evidence was or was not gathered, and then share it out with the public, how long or how short that process was, and so forth. Because as you’re saying, the perspectivizing, right, the changing of people’s understanding takes time, and it also requires boundary spanning, stepping across the lines of say, politics, business, academia, community groups, etc. There simply might not have been enough time during the Trump impeachment for that to happen, right, for that perspectivizing and boundary spanning to do their work.

As you’re describing this, I’m reminded of another podcast that I listen to. It’s called Gaslit Nation, and it’s hosted by two incredibly courageous journalists. I would name them incredibly courageous followers, Sarah Kenzior and Andrea Chalupa. They report on corruption and rising autocracy both in the U.

S. and abroad, and one of the themes in their reporting is exactly what you’re saying, the need for thorough, lengthy, extensive, time-consuming, very public investigations, or sharing out of the evidence, radical transparency. They argue, as you are now, that the time required for that is worth it, even that it’s essential in order to have a chance at holding anyone accountable for their actions. I also feel like it must be said that, of course, we will never know whether a longer process with public hearings and subpoenas and so forth would have made a difference to the outcome in this case.

We just don’t know. However, it’s still really instructive to look at this in terms of the sequencing you’ve laid out and to notice where effort was spent or, in some cases, not spent. Yeah, yeah, no, look, and it’s far from me to comment on the internal going-ons of, you know, domestic politics in the United States being all the way here. But at the same time, being all the way here, the emotion from it is taken out, and I, you know, I was sort of observing it neutrally, or as neutrally as I could, to—and ironically, at the time, I was actually studying Watergate.

I was actually looking through these behaviors and seeing how there was no patience on the Democrat side this time. They just want to rush it. And when you rush that, you’re actually affecting, you know, you’re adversely affecting perspectivizing because people then feel that there wasn’t enough due diligence, right? Perspectivizing is in a switch.

It’s a slow burn. Like, you know how often sometimes we believe something so strongly, and it takes so long for us to change our minds. And it requires a lot of effort and pain. And yes, you need to go down in the polls, you know?

Yeah, that’s a really good point. I mean, it’s definitely something I think, you know, back to discomfort, you know, we don’t want to acknowledge that these things, like changing a destructive pattern, right, as you’ve laid it out or as, you know, as it appears, whether on a domestic scale or on an international scale, is time consuming, right? It can’t be done quickly. And so the need to accept that, that it’s going to take time, that it is possible, but it takes time, and it’s painful in your words.

Could you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that? Because I think it’s important to face it in a sense, you know, the short term versus long term. I’ll give you another example. Again, it might be a bit extreme, but it’s visual.

So one of the other cases that I looked at was Gandhi in South Africa. Now, if you think that challenging the US presidency is tough, imagine challenging the British Empire at its peak. Yeah, it’s hard to imagine. Right.

The judiciary was in favor of imperialism. All the politicians, or most of the politicians were, and Gandhi, by his own admission, said that he wasn’t particularly bright. He wasn’t your stereotypical leader. He didn’t have, you know, strappingly broad shoulders, or he hated public speaking.

He wasn’t charismatic. So he tried to create almost this oasis of courageous follower development, if I was to coin that, you know, and that just came into my head right now. He actually got little communes, he had these farms where people who wanted to resist would come and they would stay there. He realized that he wanted to do peaceful civil disobedience, right?

So he wasn’t training them to shoot weapons. And ironically, I think he actually said it takes far more courage to not shoot a gun than to shoot a gun, right? Because if you’re standing up and resisting people without a gun, you know, you require a lot more bravery, right? So he got these people to come in and he had to perspectivize to convince them not to be violent, right?

I recommend his autobiography to most people if you haven’t. It’s My Experiments with Truth and Nonviolence. I almost think it should be taught in schools. And he got these people to practice sleeping without a mattress on cold floors to mimic what they would experience if they got arrested for peaceful civil disobedience, right?

And he got them to eat prison food and he got them to wake up at 6am and do exercises and have cold showers, right? And he did it himself. And he said, look, if we’re going to protest, I want us to build our resolve to such an extent that the oppressors cannot break us. Incredible, right?

How did he boundary span? Again, he boundary spanned. He couldn’t boundary span beyond the dominion of the British Empire. He sorted it.

But he tapped into the suffragette movement in the UK at the time. Where women wanted to vote and he got them to be to support him. He knew that in India, the people who are Hindus or Muslims or different ethnic minorities were separated. And he unified them to common purpose.

And it’s probably the only time in Indian history that they were actually work together. And actually, I want to catch myself in the moment. It wasn’t just him. It was him and a whole group of other courageous followers.

Just the same as the Muslim leaders at the time or the Muslim courageous followers, I should say, at the time. I really love this phrase you just coined, Alain. I want to celebrate it. The oasis of courageous follower development.

Now, we may not need to do the same things that Gandhi and his collaborators did. But I wonder if we can create our own versions in the present day of oases of courageous follower development, maybe in our workplaces or in our communities. Is there anything else from this particular case that you find especially relevant for us today in our exploration of courageous followership? There was one other point, I think, which is really, really important.

And it goes back to what I was saying at the start. That leadership and followership are dichotomous roles that we both play all the time. So yes, Gandhi, if I say Gandhi, you think leader. But at the same time, he was a follower within the British Empire.

He didn’t have, he wasn’t elected to office. He didn’t come from a super wealthy family. He gained, so again, boundary spanning, he gained his authority in some sense because he was a lawyer and he could speak a few languages. So he gained his, he boundary spanned to the intellectual domain and he leaned on that and people trusted him because of that.

How did he perspectivize? He started his own newspaper, right? And he got that out there and people started to read it across the British Empire. Indians in America at the time felt, were sympathizers and they started to subscribe to this newspaper.

He charged people a nominal amount and that raised money to support the community, you know? So there was a lot of different things. So again, and people left. There were people who weren’t as courageous, who quit the movement or out of fear.

And it was understandably so. They were beaten mercilessly. They were imprisoned. So people would leave.

You would understandably be very, very fearful. Yeah, it really gives me an appreciation of the scope and also the length of time commitment right to this. So many contemporary activists and investigative journalists that I read now also speak about this really long view and, you know, just getting your mind around like a generation of commitment rather than, oh, the next election. No, it’s, you know, that’s not as productive a way to think as like, what are we doing over the next 20 years?

So like I’ve been slowly trying to think more long term, which, you know, then changes what you decide to do today. And I’m wondering if we could leave listeners with some thoughts on courage, because, you know, on one hand, like a social movement is such a large, overwhelming thing. But wherever we are, we can connect with our own courage, right? And then it’s ready.

You know, it’s more practiced, as you’re saying. It becomes more of a functional skill. What would you say to listeners, wherever they are, to connect with their courage? Look, I think it’s a really good question.

I think every opportunity is an opportunity to practice courage. You know, you could be, you know, playing basketball on the weekends in a locker room and there’s casual sexism or casual racism. You know what? That’s your opportunity to practice, right?

I’m not saying that you’ve got to be nasty to the people in the room. In fact, that’s another skill you’ve got to practice, you know, is being able to perspectivize, for want of a better word, again, in a kind way, kind to yourself, kind to the people who are maybe saying something racist or sexist or discriminatory in whatever way, but also kind to people who are not in the room, right? That’s what you’re doing. And a lot of people who are really, really successful in their careers and the research services, they’re actually better or they were better followers than they were leaders.

You know, another reason not to overemphasize leadership training. It’s usually the, you know, when you’re looking at some of these measurement scales for followership, people at the high end of organizations sometimes do better than those in the beginning, which is, again, fascinating. But they’ve actually practiced courage. I’m talking about the good leaders.

Practice courage over and over and over again. And the other thing I’d also like to leave us with is, so I also studied a business case and looked at business events with regard to destructive leadership. And of all of them, even though it’s not easy, it’s easier in the Western business world to be courageous than not, you know? And I’d say that because we’re fortunate enough to be living in societies governed by rules and laws.

You know, we can challenge discrimination. We can whistleblow. We can go to the media. We now live in an age of social media.

We all have more of a voice than ever before. And I think that it’s a lot easier if you’re within a business setting, you know? At the same time, I also believe that quite often in business settings, you know, authoritarianism tends to rear its head because even though we live in larger democratic societies, businesses are often run in an autocratic fashion. You know, we don’t vote for our managers.

We don’t vote for their bonuses. We don’t vote for their promotions, right? But we could. Wouldn’t that be something?

I would love that. Let’s perspectivize that. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think so. Democratic corporations. Yeah. Alain, I want to thank you so much for sharing this research with us.

And in fact, thank you for doing the research. I so much appreciate how practical it is, how easy to understand it is, and how it kind of pulls back the curtain on any level of toxic triangle that we might be looking at, whether it’s the very small scale domestic or whether the very large scale national or international. It’s so valuable to have that sequencing and to be able to see what’s required in order to interrupt that kind of harm. I know you’re looking for collaborators for potential new research projects, and some listeners might want to reach out to you to ask further questions or just to find out what you’re doing.

So what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you? Yeah, sure. Happy for people to reach out to me on LinkedIn. So just find me by my name.

I’ll be sure to put that in the show notes as well. Thank you once again for sharing your stories and your insight with us. I always learn so much when we speak, so I very much look forward to the next time. Best of luck until then.

Thank you for having me on. And yeah, all the best with the podcasting. You have been listening to the Lead & Follow podcast. Special thanks to Glover Gill for composing our music.

And a huge thank you to all of you who support the show. It really means a lot. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or consider joining the Lead & Follow fan club for as little as $3 a month. There’s a link at the bottom of the show notes.