Mary Parker Follett and the Power of Empowering Leadership
Mary Parker Follett stands as one of the most prescient yet underappreciated figures in the history of management theory and organizational psychology. Born in 1868 in Quincy, Massachusetts, she emerged from an era when business was dominated by rigid hierarchies and command-and-control management styles. Yet her revolutionary ideas about distributed leadership and collective intelligence were remarkably ahead of their time. She anticipated by nearly a century the collaborative and empowering management philosophies that would eventually transform modern workplaces.
Follett famously stated that “Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.” This fundamentally challenged the prevailing assumptions of her era about how organizations should function. This wasn’t merely theoretical musing—it emerged from her extensive practical work with businesses, schools, and communities struggling to navigate the complexity of industrial America.
Understanding the Origins of Empowering Leadership
Follett’s path to becoming a management theorist was anything but conventional. After graduating from Radcliffe College, one of the few pathways available to ambitious women of her generation, she spent nearly two decades immersed in social work and community organizing in Boston. She established the Boston Placement Bureau to help unemployed workers find jobs. She founded several community centers devoted to addressing urban social problems. This hands-on experience with human motivation, group dynamics, and organizational challenges provided the empirical foundation for her later theoretical work. She observed firsthand how people responded to different leadership approaches. She became convinced that the most effective leaders weren’t those who commanded obedience but those who could inspire voluntary cooperation and active participation from their teams. Unlike many management theorists who worked purely from academia or abstract principles, Follett grounded her ideas in lived experience and careful observation of actual human behavior in organizational settings.
Many people don’t realize that Follett was navigating her career as a woman in a profoundly male-dominated field during the early twentieth century. Her academic credentials and professional insights were often dismissed or minimized because of her gender. She had to work twice as hard to be heard in business circles dominated by men. She never married, which was unusual for women of her era, and dedicated herself entirely to her intellectual and professional pursuits.
She spent considerable time in Britain during the latter part of her life, where she received better recognition and more celebration than in her native America. Follett died in 1933, relatively obscure outside of academic circles. Yet her ideas would eventually reshape how we understand organizations and leadership. In many ways, her marginalization during her lifetime—due to both her gender and the unconventional nature of her thinking—meant that her revolutionary insights didn’t receive the attention they deserved until decades after her death.
Leadership is not defined by exercise of power
The context in which Follett developed this understanding of leadership was one of significant labor unrest and industrial conflict. The early twentieth century witnessed some of the most violent and bitter labor disputes in American history. Management and workers often viewed each other as fundamentally antagonistic forces. Scientific management, popularized by Frederick Taylor and others, emphasized efficiency and worker compliance rather than engagement or development. Against this backdrop, Follett proposed something genuinely radical.
She believed that leaders should develop the capacities and decision-making abilities of those being led. She believed that organizations were most effective when leaders saw their role not as commanding from on high but as enabling others to grow into fuller versions of themselves. Her concept of “power with” rather than “power over” directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom that effective leadership required centralized authority and careful control. She argued that true leaders understood that their strength lay not in what they could command but in what they could inspire others to become.
One of the most powerful aspects of Follett’s philosophy was her insistence that leadership was fundamentally about creating more leaders, not more followers. This idea has profound implications that are often overlooked even by those familiar with the quote. She was arguing that leaders should ultimately measure their success by the degree to which they had developed the capabilities of their team members. Those individuals would then be able to lead effectively themselves. This represented a complete inversion of the traditional pyramid organizational structure where power concentrated at the top and diminished as you descended through the ranks.
Follett envisioned organizations as networks of mutual influence and responsibility. The capacity for leadership would be distributed throughout. In a modern context, we might recognize this in concepts like self-managed teams, peer leadership, and the flat organizational structures that innovative companies have experimented with. Yet Follett was articulating these ideas when most businesses still operated according to strict military-style hierarchies. The boss made decisions and workers executed them without question.
Creating More Leaders as Your Legacy Impact
Follett’s ideas have had an enormous cultural impact, though delayed in coming. Starting in the 1960s and accelerating through the late twentieth century, management scholars and practitioners began rediscovering her work. They recognized its profound relevance. Business schools began incorporating her insights into leadership courses. Her ideas influenced the development of theories around transformational leadership, servant leadership, and organizational learning. Today, technology companies, creative agencies, and forward-thinking organizations across industries cite her concepts when explaining their flattened hierarchies and emphasis on employee development. Her emphasis on dialogue and collaborative problem-solving became central to modern change management and organizational development practices. Notably, her work has also been celebrated by feminist scholars as anticipating many insights about power, authority, and collective decision-making. These insights would later become central to feminist organizational theory.
What makes this quote resonate so powerfully today is that it speaks to fundamental human needs and contemporary organizational realities. In an economy increasingly driven by knowledge work and innovation, the ability to attract, develop, and retain