If there is a buzzword that describes today’s student aspirations, it’s leadership. Every year students devote dozens of hours to pursuing leadership roles and trying to acquire more impressive titles and responsible sounding duties to fill college applications and job resumes.

Meanwhile, hundreds of books are written extolling the seemingly endless virtues of leadership while countless conferences and workshops are organized to build and discuss it.

Yet for all the emphasis on the power of leadership and its many benefits I cannot help but think something important is missing from the conversation. It was not until I was at a recent leadership conference that I realized what the missing element was, for all our talk of what makes a great leader we have forgotten what makes a good supporter.

A supporter is obviously the opposite of a leader: someone who follows the path rather than blazes a trail, who observes the present rather than dreams of the future, and who follows the instructions rather than issues them.

However, they are opposites who need each other to survive and overcome their respective flaws. A world run entirely by leaders would be a chaotic place where nothing got done because everyone would be ordering everyone else about. On the flip side, a world filled entirely with supporters would be a stagnant place, as no one would push boundaries. What’s needed is a balance between the two factions so that both many reach their full potential.

The key to this balance is to recognize two essential facts. One, simply not everyone can become a leader, and that acting like everyone can only diminish leadership’s power and invites in mediocre and egotistical leaders. This, of course, doesn’t mean that a leader cannot come from anywhere but there are limits as to how many there can be to still be effective.

The second is that most people by circumstance and temperament are supporters in one way or another. There is a tendency to view them all as ignorant followers devoting blind obedience to something or someone but this is not a fair analysis. While it is true that there is a danger in supporters degenerating into blind followers this is only because we do not equip them with the proper tool to prevent it.

Considering the vast amounts of time and type that have been devoted to what makes a good leader and what skills are essential for leadership I feel comfortable in ignoring it in favor of focusing on the less-explored topic of what makes a good and effective supporter.

What I believe to be the most important element of a good supporter is critical thinking. I’m sure most people consider critical thinking to be almost exclusively a skill reserved for leaders. While critical thinking is vital to leadership it is also important to instill in supporters because one of the keys to being a good supporter is to develop good judgment of what a person follows.

If a person is going to devote their time and energy to someone or something they must be able to articulate why they do so and recognize when the thing they have been following has slipped down a dark path.

I fully believe that many of the greatest atrocities in history could have been prevented if the great mass of supporters had questioned their leaders and recognized what they were doing as wrong. I am also convinced that a more discerning support base would improve the quality of these we elevate into positions of leadership.

Beyond critical thinking, the rest of the qualities of a good supporter are fairly straightforward loyalty, humility, selfless, faith, integrity and countless more. The ultimate key to being a good supporter is to not just be able to follow but to do so in an intelligent and just manner.

Teaching our students how to be good and intelligent supporters in addition to being determined and courageous leaders we can begin the process of turning them into better citizens.

By developing the talents of the entire population rather than those of a gifted few we can raise the general quality of society and while it will not make the world a perfect place, it is the start to making it a better one.