Are you just out for a walk? Forced Followership -vs- Inspirational Followership

     My friend Chief Master Sergeant (Ret) Anthony Brinkley, who is now the CEO of "On the Brink Consulting," Once told me that if someone was leading and no one was following, then that person was just out for a walk.  When I thought about what Brink said, I realized that the implied concept of leadership is that more than one person must participate. The second implied concept is, one of the people must lead and the other must follow.  Although it sounds obvious, many people in leadership positions fail to realize that it is their responsibility to increase a followers willingness to participate in the leader/follower relationship.  With that in mind, a military leader has the ability to put all of his subordinates in a formation and march them in any direction.  That is easy enough to understand. In essence, forced followership. In the civilian world, although it does not sound right, leaders are also working with a forced followership.  Employees need money, that is why they get and keep a job.  The concept of forced followership is proven by volunteer civic organizations. Volunteers that do not have a greater purpose for participating, quickly quit the organization never to return.  Military and civilian leaders must find a way to inspire followership and get people to follow without coercion.  Voluntary followership might begin with an idea, monetary compensation or some other reason, but to insure long term survivability of a group, leaders have to provide compelling reasons, to the follower, to continue the relationship.  When a leader inspires followers with epic leadership concepts like, duty, honor, country and context like "this will change the world" or "your mom would be proud" followers get personally invested and inspired to raise their game to levels beyond just showing up for work.  
Inspirational followership produces better results for a leader because followers are internally compelled to work by respected character traits entrenched in our psyche.  The military uses words like duty honor and country and there is no reason why civilian counterparts can't use them as well.  The concept behind inspirational leadership is simple: If the leader inspires a follower in the right way, neither one of them ever has to walk alone.