Leadership bingo: Baudrillard’s double refusal and a future for followership

We have all been there. We are in a meeting and a #random dominates the allotted time with their career narrative. Since the pandemic, this problem has increased in its frequency. Instead of people sharing their name and role, and moving on with the discussion, “leaders” now launch into a monologue about their career, while flexing their optics, metrics and stretch targets. They fill the space of the double refusal with self-involved talk that blocks consciousness of the disconnection and disrespect between leaders and followers. The goal is to claim authority and positional power in the room rather than create space to discuss relevant content. This is post-expertise leadership. These inflated and frequently imagined career narratives puff out the importance of the “leader” while also reinforcing the double refusal. Because they lack credibility and authenticity with their workforce, it is necessary to fill the gap with irrelevant stories and self-serving bluster.

It is always difficult to know what to do in these situations, where the confidence of the supposed leader in (over)sharing a career narrative resembles Noam Chomsky at an anarcho-syndicalist conference. I now refuse to play this game. I sit in silence. I do not make them feel comfortable with their delusions. This discomfort is important, as silence is a way to re-focus listening, reorganize the positioning of power and renew followership engagement. This is, as Collinson confirmed, a way to “rethink” leadership and followership (2009). Leadership is not performed through talk and confidence. Instead, followership is revisioned through silence and reflection.

The pandemic increased the visuality – the screens – in our lives, but has also revealed the role of silence as resistance to incompetent leaders. Think about the Zoom or Teams meetings we have experienced where the screens are off, microphones are muted and the group has completely disengaged. People are present, but absent. They are displaying the double refusal through disconnection as resistance. Digitization ensures we can be present, but disconnects visual and sonic commitments with ease.

Recognizing the disengagement of followers, but not its cause, organizations manage this failure of engagement by focusing on leadership selection and leadership training. Leadership is only part of this problem. It is intriguing how rarely the leadership literature references Jean Baudrillard or even mentions the double refusal. Indeed, Google Scholar lists only 42 references to his trope in this field. There are various reasons for this lack of citation and research use. One clear cause is unpopular and uncomfortable. The double refusal unravels layers of assumptions and ideologies about leadership, and reveals the scale of follower disconnection. Other terms, such as Quiet Quitting and Burnout, place the focus on workers, rather than the failures of leadership. The double refusal sits in the failure of leadership as the origin and cause of anger and disengagement of a workforce.

Jean Baudrillard did not validate the mask that shields the Leadership Industry from diagnosing the scale of failure and disconnection. But the consequences are profound. As recognized earlier, David Frum demonstrated the consequences of the creeping organizational cancer of the double refusal: “an accumulating sub version of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters” (Frum, 2018, p. 11). This sub version of norms is seen from Andrew Tate and the incels, to JD Vance and “childless cat ladies.” Public good is parked for individualized self-interest. Small and marginal issues are puffed out in their significant to mask incompetence and a lack of expertise. Baudrillard’s double refusal is activated through Goffmanesque vanity, underperformance and bullying, and gaslighting methodologies for domination. Summoning both banality and “sub versions of norms” configures a culture of instability, confusion, agitation and a lack of focus. It lives in the seething silence of followers. It is ignored by the leaders increasing the gap from followers through the double refusal, when saying the unsayable via the prophylactic of free speech.

Leadership is not an identity. It is a set of behaviours and practices. Followership is not an identity. It is a set of behaviours and practices. A leader without followers is not a leader. They are taking a walk. They are speaking in a Zoom meeting of one, albeit with 15 darkened and muted screens.

Any leadership goal, mission or vision, depending on the noun in fashion at a particular time, must be shared with followers and recognized as valuable and relevant. If they do not validate the significance of this goal, then nothing happens. The failures of leadership emerge because there is an empty chair. Someone may sit in the seat and hold positional power, but they maintain no credibility or authenticity. If followers do not follow, then nothing is achieved. There are alternatives to this seething, muted blank screen, but they require the silence of leadership, and listening to alternatives, options and trajectories.

Followership is a small word and a small literature, but it is integral to intervening in the double refusal. Even when followership is considered, too often it is read through the lens of leadership. Instead, a productive thought experiment is to invert our thinking: followers construct leaders.

Provocative research is reimagining this future. Almeida et al. welcome leaderless followers (2021). Aghaei et al. demonstrate new theories of followership in response to unethical leadership behaviour (2023). Carsten and Uhl-Bien have built a career enriching followership and the “crimes” of obedience to poor leaders (2013). Güntner et al. have investigated followership resistance in response to destructive leaders (2021). This remarkable literature is rendering followership as disconnected from its binary pairing of leadership. The ethics, decency, silence and resistance of followers is enabling a transformative organizational culture.

Follower is an underutilized word. It is easier to discuss employees, workers, hired help or staff. Yet workplaces are dominated by followers, not leaders. Too often, leadership training remains the focus. Followership carries a bit too much Tolkien in its semiotic briefcase. Money is made in the leadership industry. The capacity and power of followership is sliced by precariat workers, and contract and casualized staff. Indeed, empowered followers, questioning the ethics of the post-Global Financial Crisis workforce, inhibits profits and positive brand recognition.

Most of us, most of the time, must do what others instruct us to do. The double refusal is passive, slowing the completion of tasks or focusing on compliance rather than excellent. To improve this organizational culture of mediocrity relies on the authenticity, engagement, trust and desire of followers. Instead of undertaking this difficult work in followership values, behaviours, practices and community building, too many organizations trade CEOs and CFOs like cards in a game of Go Fish. Through weakness, failure and incompetence, a bizarre corrective narrative remains: if the best leaders can be selected, then the institution will be successful. Once more, it is important to remember that leadership is not an identity. It is a set of behaviours and practices.

Followership is a set of decisions about listening, activity, commitment, motivation, behaviour and responsibility. If followers are only studied to understand leadership, then our view of work, achievement and life is truncated. The double refusal remains if followers do not follow. No leadership seminar in the world will make any difference to the disconnection of followers if they refuse to follow.

With followership added to an organizational vocabulary, the focus of the working environment changes to the development of active, independent critical thinkers, who also build teams and innovative collaborations through the sharing of goals. James Maroosis recognized the one crucial skill for followers: “response-abilities” (2008). These two words capture the capacity to learn, be interactive and adapt. Deep thinking is required, which is based on active listening and reflecting on the views and approaches of others. This is the building of horizontal relationships, rather than hierarchies. Therefore, response-abilities remain the concept that transcends the double refusal, by building authentic, meaningful and collaborative tasks and goals.

No one is born to lead. Strength and confidence are overrated. Too easily, confidence becomes overconfidence, strength transforms into bullying and aggression manifests into toxicity. Historic injustices are maintained. With an inverted follower-centric model of work, the double refusal can be breached. The lens can be reversed (Ferrari, Bugli, & Coker, 2025). Followership is not a preparation for leadership, a way to manage up or exclusive of leadership. The best leaders must remain followers. Followership is a way of thinking about power, work, meaning and inclusivity. Through listening and thinking, relationships and communication systems are built.

It is timely to return to the Baudrillard-inspired double refusal: the refusal to lead and the refusal to be led. Incompetent yet overconfident leaders fill in the gap between leadership and followership with the slogans on my bingo card. Their incompetence is confirmed through empty signifiers, and followers disconnect, often with disgust.

Most of us as citizen-workers have disconnected from our leaders because we do not trust them. They are not credible. They are brittle. They do not know what they are doing. This situation of weak leaders is made even worse because – following on from the Peter Principle (Peter & Hull, 1969) – they surround themselves with other incompetent leaders so that their fragility is not revealed.

In professional development leadership sessions, we often value being active, speaking up and showing courage. My leadership bingo card provides a script for this behaviour. Instead, there is value in listening, learning and silence. Instead of my leadership bingo card, there is another option. This time, the bingo card is not about talk, optics and spin. It is not filling the spaces of the double refusal with nonsense (Figure 2).

Bridging the double refusal requires a new bingo card for meetings, founded on listening, learning and silence. This bingo card is not about talk, but research, expertise and thinking. Through respect and reflection, compassion and openness, a follower-centric leadership culture can be built that values integrity and transparency, rather than ego and optics. These are response-abilities. The double refusal is displaced for an engaged workplace that builds both mattering and meaning.

Tara Brabazon is the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University. Her previous roles have included Dean, Head of School and Head of Department. She has published 20 books and over 350 refereed articles and book chapters. She is a writer for the Times Higher Education, creates podcasts and vlogs and writes, narrates and produces audiobooks. Tara has won six teaching awards, having worked in ten universities in four countries. In 2019, she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education. Her most recent books include 12 Rules for (academic) life and (Re)start: moving from despair to defiance.