It’s more organized than Level 1. It’s also more rigid.

In We’re All In, I described what I witnessed as a young officer in the U.S. Army in West Germany in the mid-1970s. It was, looking back, a perfect example of a Follower culture at scale.

The Army was in crisis. The clash of a draftee Army with a new volunteer Army created a huge cultural divide.  Widespread public disapproval after Vietnam War, the rise of illegal drug use, the continuing effects of racial tension — all converged at once. As young officers, we had to contend with riots in the barracks and other illegal behaviors among Soldiers. Discipline was difficult at times. Our vehicles lacked spare parts, ammunition, and fuel for the training exercises we badly needed. We were, in the plainest terms, becoming a hollow force.

The system was built on compliance. People did what they were told when they were told to do it, and when the direction wasn’t clear, they waited. Initiative was not rewarded. The leadership was centralized and controlling. The culture had no real azimuth — no shared sense of mission that people actually believed in and acted on.

It took years and the strong intervention of leadership at the highest levels to pull the Army out of that abyss. Those of us who survived said later the shift almost came too late. We were simply reluctant to anticipate the need for change.  Tradition is both a curse and a blessing when it comes to culture.

That is the Follower culture’s greatest danger. It doesn’t collapse suddenly. It hollows out slowly, quietly, until the crisis is almost impossible to ignore.

What the Follower Culture Looks Like

The case study of the Army notwithstanding, the Level 2 Follower culture is a step above the Nametag culture in some important ways. There is more structure. People generally show up and do their jobs. The organization functions. But the engine running underneath that functioning is compliance: “do as I say.”

Leadership in a Follower culture is highly centralized and controlling. Decisions flow in one direction — down. The “how” of every significant task is prescribed, and when a situation arises that the procedures don’t cover, people wait for someone in charge to write new procedures before they act. There is real comfort in this for the workforce. Follow the standard operating procedures and you can’t be wrong. Step outside them and you’re exposed.

A mission statement may exist. It probably lives on a wall somewhere near the entrance, or in a slide deck that gets dusted off once a year for the leadership review. Most people in the organization couldn’t tell you what it says. More importantly, they couldn’t tell you why it matters to their daily work, because no one has ever connected those two things for them.

Meetings in a Follower culture are low-value events. One person speaks. Everyone else attends. The focus is consistently on what didn’t get done, what targets weren’t hit, and who is responsible for the gap. Leaders play the blame game. There is very little forward-looking conversation and almost no genuine dialogue. People learn quickly that meetings are not a safe place to share ideas, so they don’t.

The Good Idea Fairy

One of the most recognizable features of the Follower culture is what I call the “Good Idea Fairy”, or GIF. After I wrote about this concept in my 2017 blog, a bank executive reached out and shared a story that illustrated it perfectly.

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Enjoy the journey!