 How do we become great leaders focused on accomplishing our mission? It starts with being a great follower. Welcome back leaders and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Very few great leaders started out their careers right at the top of their field. Most of them had to spend a lot of years developing their leadership skills and technical expertise as they rose up to the top. Now we can look at this as having to pay our dues before it's our turn to be in charge or we can look at it as an opportunity to study under great leaders as we develop our leadership skills as well. It's important to remember that in order to become great leaders we have to be great followers first. Being a great follower demonstrates patience respect and trust for those leaders appointed over us in our organization and it also sets a really good example for those who follow you on how you expect them to act and behave as followers. Almost every single one of us has some kind of boss we have to answer to and how you react to your boss both in person and when they're not around shows that your team how much you value followership. So if your boss makes a decision that you don't agree with what do you do when they leave the room? Do you accept and support the decision in front of your team or do you badmouth your boss and talk about what a bad leader he is? How you react in those situations is going to set the example for how your team reacts when you leave the room. This example can become a very real situation. Sometimes our boss does make a decision that we don't agree with and because we care about our organization we care about accomplishing our mission and we care about our boss it leaves us with some conflict about how to handle it. We want to be good followers and support the boss's decision but we also don't want to prevent our organization from being able to achieve what we're setting out to do. One tool that we have in a situation like this is called the one challenge rule. The one challenge rule gives us an option when we think the boss might not be making the best decision. What it basically means is that we take one opportunity after the boss has made his decision to make our case for why a different decision should be made. Use this opportunity to present as much supporting evidence as you have and highlight what the risks may be that the boss may not have considered in his or her decision. Once you do that if the boss decides to get with the original decision you accept it you support the boss and you go off and you implement the decision. I like to say you got it boss after that's done. Now one thing that's important to note this is not for big public forums where they've gathered everyone together to announce a big policy decision or initiative. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to stand up in the middle of an auditorium and challenge the boss after the policy decision has been decided upon and is being announced company wide. But you never know give it a try your results may vary. One final note on all of this is how successful you'll be using the one challenge rule depends on how strong your relationship with your bosses. But if you come at it from a place of genuine caring about the mission the organization and your boss's success and reputation it's usually received pretty well because your boss knows that you have their back. It's also important to calibrate your perceptions about what's going on in this situation and decide if you should approach your boss in public or in private when you execute your one challenge. And if you should focus on a lot of supporting evidence or focus on the big picture it's really highly dependent on the situation the problem that's being worked and the people involved. That's today's tip for being a good follower and a great leader at the same time. Tell us in the comments what you think makes a great follower and come back later in the week we're going to have a blog post on followership and the best way for you to get a hold of that click subscribe that globe off to the right that'll get you subscribed to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching today I appreciate it as always and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.