Leader/Follower Relationships

Owing to the pandemic, self-directed work at the Wilson Center, and consequential alienation from the office, my worldview of leader/follow relations has been quite narrow. With such limitations in mind, I have still learned a lot about the importance of trust and confidence within an inherent power dynamic (i.e, an expert leader and an intern) to facilitate leader-follower relations that are healthy and productive. By that, I mean a results-driven relationship that also tries to build on trust and confidence to ensure mental sanity and high-quality work. To take an example, my Pakistani media tracking role as an intern requires me to keep my supervisor posted on local news. Last week, a high-profile murder took place in a “considered safe” part of Pakistan that shook the media and the country’s womxn to the core. I found myself numb to the updates I was reading on the murder, and my news tracking work that week was slow. My supervisor, aware of the situation in Pakistan, but knowingly or not, scheduled an in-person meeting soon after (for the first time). At the meeting, instead of talking about the slow nature of my work, we discussed the mental consequences of news about violence against undeserved communities. The conversation went a long way in making me feel like an equal (in terms of respect) to my supervisor and mitigated any worries or concerns about any potential abuse of power that is highly correlated with individuals in high (formal and informal) leadership positions. The influence of one leader-follower interaction, in this case, greatly increased my respect for my leader and inspired my continuation of work the on state of patriarchy in Pakistan while I was on the cusp of giving up from news-fatigue. Looking back at it now, the leadership approach Mr. Kugelman took seems to have been in the best interests of both the leader and the follower.

On another note, in terms of leader/follower dynamics, a major strength at Wilson lies in open-door policies where anyone in the organization (at any rank) can reach out to anyone else for a conversation. At an institute with highly specialized departments, such a policy blurs the leader-follower power dynamic by allowing South Asia department interns such as myself to meet network and learn from scholars and colleagues specializing in other regions of the world. An added bonus is that by way of this policy, the information gap between leaders and followers on important political issues can narrow, and their racial/ethnic/region-specific nature can help un-teach implicit biases to followers and leaders alike. One weakness of the leader-follower relations I have observed at Wilson, though, lie in something that does not make Wilson stand out in terms of current-day norms at work in America. They are a larger critique on the leader-follower dichotomy. The “leader” seen as loosely superior to the “follower” relationship usually by virtue of pay or status, exists in a wider organizational system built for purposes of exclusionary hierarchy and rationalization of uneven experience, income, and task-related distribution. When looked at through that lens, it is in the better interests of organizations’ and institutions to review and change its leader-follower structures actively and in relation to their followers’ identities and goals. After all, one can look to Crystal Hoyt’s work, when she points to how organizational cultures and structures are more amenable to the lives of men. Or to be more specific, white and heteronormative men who, by way of numbers, still sit on top of the corporate ladder.