Natural vs. Structural Leadership and Followership

Imagine you’re exhausted after a long day and just about to leave the office when your boss asks you to stay late to finish a report for the board of directors. Chances are you’ll agree—not because you admire your manager or care deeply about the board, but because you’ve signed a contract. That’s the deal: you give your time and effort in exchange for compensation, and in return, you accept certain limits on freedom and decision-making during work hours.

Most research on leadership and followership is conducted in non-natural settings such as schools, businesses, political parties, armies, and sports teams. While these environments differ, they share one thing in common: they are socially constructed environments—systems deliberately designed to organize people.

Take the workplace as an example. It’s an invention, created to coordinate labour in the production of goods and services. The relationship between employee and employer is based on a formal contract, and the entire system relies on laws and practices to function. We can’t, for example, force people to work for us. As employees, we agree to exchange our time and effort for compensation. But in doing so, we also give up a certain level of freedom and decision-making during work hours.

Structural Leadership

One of the main objectives of a constructed environment is to coordinate people’s actions. This can be done in different ways—through rules and regulations that control behaviour, and/or by giving certain people the authority to dictate what others should do. In a workplace, the latter are usually known as “managers.”

For decades, we’ve preferred the word leader over manager. The term manager is often seen as negative—someone who enforces rules, supervises, or simply “bosses people around.” Leader, in contrast, is framed as positive—someone who motivates, empowers, and collaborates with others to achieve shared goals.

But as I discuss in Why We Follow, the objective is ultimately the same: coordinating people to move in a certain direction. To avoid the endless “manager versus leader” debate, I use the term structural leadership to describe any process in which one individual has formal decision-making rights over others.

The challenge with structural leadership is that it relies on external factors—contracts, salaries, rules, or laws—to sustain collaboration. A team may follow their manager’s lead, but if the paycheck stops, most people will leave.

Natural Leadership and Followership

The opposite of socially constructed environments are natural environments—settings that emerge organically and aren’t shaped by design. Think of the way friends interact. These relationships are fluid, guided by instincts, trust, and shared interests rather than contracts or rules.

As I explain in Why We Follow, natural leadership and followership happen when people voluntarily choose whom to follow based on who they believe is best suited to achieve a specific goal at that moment.

Unlike structural leaders, natural leaders don’t hold permanent positions of power or influence. Leadership flows freely, shifting from one person to another depending on the situation. This makes collaboration more flexible, resilient, and effective, while avoiding the risks that come with fixed hierarchies or manipulative influence. In essence, it’s a dynamic, situational way of working together to achieve shared goals.

Why This Distinction Matters

It’s striking how much of our leadership thinking is shaped by research in structural environments. Yet these environments are human inventions—and therefore changeable. The workplace today looks very different from 150 years ago, and even now it varies widely between countries and companies.

If we understand natural leadership and followership better, we can design our schools, organisations, and societies in ways that encourage more engaging forms of collaboration. If we want healthier, more resilient systems, we need to bring the natural back into the structures we create. The challenge now is to rethink the environments we’ve built—and ask how they can better reflect the way people truly collaborate.