Busy, quiet or questioning? Understanding followership styles in tech teams

Someone volunteers to start building before the proposal has been questioned. Someone else spots three problems but has stopped offering ways to investigate them. A quieter colleague has something useful to add and is waiting to be asked.

Who is contributing well?

You can’t answer that by counting comments in the meeting or tickets completed afterwards. You need to understand how people are thinking, how they are participating and what the working environment allows them to do.

A followership model used in British Army doctrine offers a useful starting point. Applied carefully to tech teams, it can help you improve the conversation before deciding what to build.

What the model describes

The British Army’s 2023 Followership Doctrine Note presents five behavioural styles using a model based on Robert Kelley’s work. It considers two dimensions: independent, critical thinking and participation, from passive to active.

The five styles are exemplary, alienated, passive, conformist and pragmatist. The note also recognises that the working environment influences behaviour.

For tech, I would use the two dimensions as questions about a situation, rather than labels for colleagues. Independent thinking means examining evidence and assumptions. Active participation means making a useful contribution to the shared work. Neither requires being the loudest person in the room.

The examples and prompts below are my adaptation for a workplace discussion. They are not a validated assessment or a way to assign someone a permanent type.

One proposal, different responses

For example, a project-management software team is considering automatically archiving projects after 90 days without activity. The aim is to make current work easier to find.

An archived project would disappear from the default list. Before agreeing the feature, the team needs to decide what counts as activity, who gets warned and how a customer finds and restores an archived project. A project used for an annual event might look inactive while still being needed.

Use that same proposal to explore different responses. These are possible behaviours in a discussion, not five people to identify in your own team.

How to put it into practice

Exemplary: thinking and contributing

Purpose: Connect a useful challenge with a workable next step.

In the model, exemplary behaviour combines independent thinking with active participation.

A colleague checks the proposal against the customer’s goal: “Archiving could tidy the list, but an annual project may still matter. Can we test how customers recognise and restore one before deciding on automatic archiving?”

They could help define the test or review the evidence within an agreed amount of time. The product owner still owns the decision about scope and priority. Useful participation does not require taking responsibility for every issue you notice.

Make this easier by giving people access to the relevant context and a clear route for getting a question answered. An action can be small: a written observation, a test case or a review of the proposed customer message.

Alienated: insight without constructive involvement

Purpose: Understand what has happened to the route from concern to action.

The alienated style combines independent thinking with low or unconstructive participation.

A colleague may recognise the annual-project problem but respond, “This will be another feature customers hate,” without sharing the evidence or helping clarify the decision. Before interpreting that as their character, ask whether earlier concerns were acknowledged and whether they had time or authority to investigate.

Invite a specific contribution: “Which customer situation are you worried about, and what would help us assess it?” Then follow through. If a similar concern was previously dismissed, acknowledge that history.

Someone declining extra work because they are at capacity is giving you information about the plan. Check what they can realistically contribute and who else should own the investigation.

Passive: waiting for direction

Purpose: Check clarity and opportunity before drawing conclusions.

The passive style sits low on both participation and independent thinking.

A newer developer might implement the 90-day rule exactly as written while waiting for someone else to resolve what happens to annual projects. They may believe product questions are outside their role, or may lack the customer context needed to identify the issue.

Explain which decisions they can make and which questions should come back to the team. Ask them to walk through one customer example before implementation. Make written contributions possible so responding quickly in a meeting is not the only route into the discussion.

Quietness is not evidence of passive thinking. A colleague can examine the proposal carefully and contribute through a review comment, test or a later conversation. Look at the work and ask about the experience.

Conformist: activity without enough questioning

Purpose: Make room to examine the plan before rewarding agreement.

The conformist style combines activity with limited independent challenge.

A colleague enthusiastically creates the archive job, notification and results screen without checking whether the chosen inactivity rule fits how customers use projects. Plenty of work happens while the central assumption remains untested.

Before implementation, ask the team to name one customer situation the proposal might handle poorly. Give people time to think before the decision owner states their preferred answer. Capture the evidence needed to resolve differences.

If people have learned that agreement gets rewarded and questions create friction, change what happens when a question is raised. Thanking someone matters, but allocating time to investigate and explaining the eventual decision makes the invitation credible.

Pragmatist: contribution shaped by personal risk

Purpose: Explore what makes participation feel worthwhile or costly.

The pragmatist style changes approach according to perceived personal benefit or risk.

A colleague might support the archiving proposal when the senior stakeholder is present, then distance themselves from it when customers raise concerns. Ask what makes it difficult to state a consistent view. Are competing priorities unresolved? Do people expect blame if an experiment fails?

Clarify who owns the decision, what evidence will inform it and how the team will review the outcome. Record a disagreement without making the person responsible for proving everyone else wrong.

Protecting reasonable workload or professional boundaries is not the same as avoiding responsibility. Discuss the particular action and its effect rather than guessing someone’s motives.

A record you can use

Try a short review of one proposal:

Purpose: what customer outcome is the team trying to achieve?
Thinking: what evidence or assumption needs examining?
Participation: how can each colleague contribute within their role and capacity?
Conditions: what makes it difficult to question, investigate or follow through?
Next step: what will change, who owns it and when will the decision return?

For the archiving example, the next step could be a short review of annual-project use with an agreed customer research owner, followed by a walkthrough of how archived projects are found and restored. The product owner then decides whether the evidence supports automatic archiving, a reminder or a customer-controlled option.

Do not plot colleagues on a grid in the meeting. Use the questions to inspect the work and the conditions around it. Ask people what support would make a useful contribution possible.

What to try next

Choose one behaviour you can change in the next discussion. You might ask for the evidence behind a confident proposal, turn a broad objection into a testable question or invite a written response before making the decision.

If you lead the work, pay attention to your response as well. People need to see that independent thinking can influence what happens next, and that participation fits within a realistic workload.

The useful question is: what would help this team think clearly and contribute effectively to the decision in front of it?

Source: British Army, A British Army Followership Doctrine Note (2023), section 5, paragraph 39 and Figure 3, printed pages 11–12; model based on Robert E. Kelley, The Power of Followership (1992). The tech examples and working tools are Coded Female adaptations.