Followers VS Leaders

I have been wondering for ages how do we define them. Until now, I still don’t have a concrete definition for them. Does being a follower means that they could not be a leader? Should we regard a leader as a non-follower? Or can it be both?

Leadership is defined as the ability to influence the action of anyone or a group. Many people have mistaken it as controlling someone. Here is a famous quote, not all boss can be a leader, but all leader can be a boss.

Let’s break them down in steps, using myself as the example.

When someone instructs me to do something:

I will ask why and trying to find out his intention of asking before doing it. I feel very frustrated when I don’t know what I am doing. In a workplace, we can’t afford to have every single question answered. Our best bet is to perform the task, think for ourselves and ask later when our manager is not busy or when he is in a good mood. For our age we tend to be a rookie in a workplace so we can’t demand for things/answers as we are at the lowest level of the hierarchy system in the company.

When someone is leading the team and I am the team member:

I will follow orders in the area which I am not familiar with. When you have no expertise in that particular field, you would not have any credibility to lead a group especially when there is someone with both expertise and leadership in a team. However, I would quickly identify the direction which the leader is heading and act as an expressional leader behind the scene to motivate other members to follow the orders. At times, I can be good at putting the crowd together.

Sometimes being a follower can better understand how leadership fails. As a team member, we can look around to see why other members do not follow suit. We as followers understand the needs as a follower and therefore provide that need when we become leaders.

When I am leading a team:

I may not be a very good leader even though I can lead a team to achieve the objective. The reason being that I am too concern of the feelings of my team members. I tend to focus more on making sure everyone is okay with the objective, failing to prioritize the objective. I am still working on it.

Do I have the trait to be a leader? Or am I just a follower? Or both?