Followership and Servant Leadership in the Army, Compared

Followership is the capacity and willingness to follow a leader — carrying out direction competently, and raising disagreement before a decision rather than after it. Servant leadership is leading by serving: developing the people you are responsible for instead of simply directing them. In the Army the two are not opposites, and not sequential career stages. ADP 6-22 treats leading and following as simultaneous responsibilities.

That last point is where most people get stuck. If you are working through a compare-and-contrast assignment, the definitions are the easy half. The confusing half is how one soldier is supposed to do both at once without one canceling out the other.

Doctrine has a specific answer, and it starts with how much independent judgment a subordinate is actually expected to bring.

What followership means in Army doctrine

Followership is described in doctrine-derived summaries as the capacity and willingness to follow a leader, and as adapting and applying the organization’s values and principles while responding to a leader’s influence. The wording is careful. It does not say obeying. It says responding, which leaves room for judgment, initiative, and honest reporting.

The line that does the most work sits in ADP 6-22 itself: every Army leader is subordinate to someone, so all leaders are also followers. A team leader follows a squad leader. A battalion commander follows a brigade commander. There is no rank at which the following stops. The same publication states that effective Army organizations depend on the willingness of leaders and subordinates alike to serve faithfully and competently in both roles — putting the two on the same footing rather than ranking one above the other.

That is why doctrine holds that effective followership demands the same attributes and competencies as leading. A follower is not running a reduced version of the leader’s skill set. They are running the same one, pointed in a different direction.

What servant leadership means

Servant leadership comes out of Robert Greenleaf’s work rather than Army doctrine, and it inverts the usual order: the leader’s first obligation is the growth and development of the people they are responsible for, personally and professionally. The ten characteristics most often recited in Army coursework — listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community — come from Larry Spears’s distillation of Greenleaf, though you will find them attributed to ADP 6-22 in more than one essay online. Worth knowing before you cite them.

Notice which word is on that list and which one is missing. Persuasion is there. Authority is not. That is precisely the part that transfers to someone junior, who has plenty of the first and none of the second. A DTIC monograph on the subject argues that servant-leadership characteristics complement Army leadership doctrine rather than replace it, which is the honest reading: an overlay on the existing framework, not a competing model.

How followership and servant leadership fit together in the Army

Across the essay sources that dominate this search, one distinction gets repeated more than any other: the leader has the final call and the follower does not, and a follower who disagrees still completes the task. That is accurate, and it deserves unpacking, because stated flatly it makes the two concepts sound like they pull in opposite directions — one serves, the other obeys.

They do not. The sequence is what resolves it. Doctrine expects disagreement to be voiced while the decision is still open, not swallowed beforehand and not relitigated afterward. Say your piece honestly while the question is live; once the call is made, execute it as if it were your own. Staying quiet to avoid friction is not good followership. It is a failure to deliver your part, and it leaves the person above you making a call on incomplete information.

The five types of followership

Robert Kelley’s 1992 typology is the most useful tool available for this topic, and it is almost entirely absent from the top-ranking results. He sorted followers along two axes — independent critical thinking and active engagement — which produces five styles.

Exemplary followers

High on both axes. They think for themselves and engage fully: they take initiative, offer an honest assessment when nobody asked for one, and still execute whatever decision comes back. This is the style worth studying, because it looks almost identical to servant leadership with the position stripped out.

Conformist followers

Actively engaged, but dependent in their thinking. They say yes to whatever is asked and lean on the leader’s judgment instead of their own. Willing and hard-working, and silent at exactly the moment their input would have been worth something.

Alienated followers

Independent thinkers who have disengaged. They see the problems clearly and channel that clarity into cynicism rather than contribution. The critique arrives; the effort does not.

Passive followers

Low on both axes. They wait for direction and act reactively, doing what is assigned and nothing past it. They function only under supervision, because neither judgment nor initiative is being supplied from their side.

Pragmatist followers

Moderate on both. They hedge, avoid committing to a position, and move with whatever the majority supports. This is usually a deliberate choice rather than a lack of capability — safety through non-commitment.

Most people recognize their own default somewhere in that list, and the recognition tends to be uncomfortable. The label matters far less than an accurate read, and these are habits rather than fixed types, so it is worth checking where your habits sit instead of assuming you already know.

Practicing both at the same time

If the two roles genuinely run in parallel, the practical question is what you do differently on Monday. Professional commentary from AUSA makes the case that followership is a competence you practice deliberately rather than a default state you fall into, which turns the whole comparison from a definitions exercise into a development one.

Three habits carry most of it. Communicate with the person above you on a schedule instead of only when something breaks — a short one-on-one every week or two, prepared for in advance, with notes taken. Report honestly, including the parts that reflect badly on you, and bring the problem with at least an attempt at a solution attached to it. And take the initiative inside the space you do control: volunteer to prepare the brief, organize the detail, pass on what you have learned to whoever needs it next. That last one is servant leadership at the scale actually available to you right now.

The skills underneath both roles

Read back over those habits and notice how little of it depends on rank. It is about how you handle a relationship with the person above you, how you contribute past your own lane, and how you disagree without damaging anything.

Working with Your Manager is the civilian equivalent of followership, built on the same foundation: treat the relationship as a partnership rather than a chain of command, understand the constraints the person above you is working under, deliver your part, and accept that disagreement is allowed. The mechanics are unglamorous — recurring one-on-ones you actually prepare for, honesty when it costs you something, aligning with your manager before you take a position elsewhere, and never running them down to other people. Different institution, identical skill.

Influence covers the servant-leadership half. The kind that does not come from position has to be earned through reputation instead: delivering consistently, taking responsibility for outcomes wider than your own assignment, and taking initiative — being willing to ask, volunteering to organize, following through after the meeting ends. Serving the people around you turns out to be one of the more durable ways to build it.

Teamwork holds the piece that resolves the apparent conflict: speak up honestly while a decision is open, then commit to it fully once it is made. It also covers what exemplary followership looks like sideways rather than upward — being excellent at your own role while respecting everyone else’s, sharing what you know instead of holding it, and being reliable enough that people stop checking on you.

Those three sit inside a set of twelve work skills that the free Job Skills Test measures, all of them learnable rather than innate. So if the five styles above prompted an uncomfortable guess about your own defaults, you can find out which to build instead of guessing at it.

Some of this probably already describes how you operate. Maybe you are the one who says the awkward thing while there is still time for it to matter, or who shows up prepared to a meeting nobody else prepared for. Those are not traits you either received or missed out on. They are habits, and the ones you do not have yet can be built without you turning into a different person.

The parts that do not come naturally are worth attention now rather than later, because this particular skill set compounds: the more people depend on your judgment, the more it matters whether you can be honest upward and still execute loyally. By working out what these two concepts actually mean instead of copying a definition into an assignment, you have already done the part most people skip.

Find out where your own skills stand

You know what both roles ask for. What is left is finding out which parts you already do well. The free Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills that shows where you stand across all twelve — including the manager relationship, influence, and teamwork habits that followership and servant leadership both run on — and points you to the one or two that will make the biggest difference for you right now. Take it, look at your two lowest scores, and pick one to work on this month.

Take the skills test

Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.