Follow

Drill Sergeant Smith was not a man who asked for your trust. He took it, methodically, over weeks of breaking you down and building you back up in the image of a soldier. By the time we walked into the gas chamber at basic training, he had already earned something from us that most leaders never get, the kind of trust that holds when everything in your body is telling you to run.

The exercise started straightforward enough. We filed in wearing our gas masks, the chamber already thick with CS gas, the kind used to disperse crowds in a riot. The first part was about trusting our equipment. Masks on, eyes forward, breathe normally. It worked. You could see the gas, feel the tension in the room, and your mask held. That part was almost manageable.

Then came the second part. Remove your mask. Shout your name, rank, and serial number. The point was to prove that while it was going to be awful, you could breathe, you wouldn't die, and you would come out the other side. Knowing that didn't make it easier. The moment that mask came off, CS gas hit your eyes, your nose, your throat, all at once. Your body's only message was get out.

Some people listened to that message. They turned for the door and ran, and the drill sergeants who had been waiting for exactly that (not their first rodeo!) tackled them before they could get there. Not out of cruelty. Because part of the training was learning that your instincts, as sharp as they feel in that moment, are not always right. Panic is not a plan.

The rest of us stood there. Coughed. Sputtered. A few people vomited. We shouted our names through burning throats and streaming eyes because DS Smith had told us to, and by that point we had enough reason to believe he wasn't going to let us die in a gas chamber in Oklahoma. When it was over, other drill sergeants walked us out and coached us through clearing our eyes and getting our breathing back. We sat in the grass afterward eating MREs in the clean air, which felt, in that moment, like the greatest thing I had ever experienced.

I have thought about that gas chamber more times than I can count in the years since. Not because it was the hardest thing I did in the Army, it wasn't, but because of what it taught me about following.

Following is not compliance. It is not doing what you are told because someone has the rank to tell you. Real following is a choice, and it is a choice that depends almost entirely on trust. In that chamber, I chose to stand there not because the Army required it but because DS Smith had spent weeks showing me, through his actions and not his words, that he knew what he was doing and that he gave a damn about the people in his charge. That is what I was following. Not the rank. The man behind it.

This matters more than most leaders want to admit, especially senior ones. You can have all the rank, title, and authority in the world and still have people who follow you only as far as they have to. Compliance without trust is just friction with a professional face on it. People do the minimum, cover themselves, and wait for you to be wrong. It is an exhausting way to run a team and a slow way to run a company into the ground.

The leaders who get genuine followership, the kind where people stand in the gas chamber instead of running for the door, are the ones who have done two things consistently.

1. They have shown that they know how to follow when the time is right, that they are not above deferring to someone who knows more, stepping back when someone else should lead, or taking direction without making it about their ego.

2. And they have shown, through repetition and consistency, that they are worth following. Not because of what they say about themselves but because of what they do when it is inconvenient or hard or when nobody is watching.

   
   

DS Smith never told us to trust him. He just kept showing up and doing the job until we did.

That is the standard. If you want people to follow you the way I followed him into that gas chamber, the question is not how you communicate your vision or what leadership framework you subscribe to. The question is whether you have done enough, consistently enough, that the people behind you believe you will be there when the gas hits.

Next up: Lead. The one everyone wants to talk about, and the hardest one to actually do.