About the Book
LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP ALIGN TO ACHIEVE SOMETHING OF SIGNIFICANCE: PURPOSESHIP
After more than a hundred years of study and many thousands of publications in search of the holy grail of specific leader traits, behaviors, or styles to create more productive organizations, the leadership discipline has given rise to many insights and ideas that work...sometimes. Certainly, leaders matter and findings in the field suggest some consistent character, competence, and conduct dimensions that tend to align to good leadership.
However, the focus on leaders and leadership often has led to overlooking or underestimating the importance of followers and followership. Followers often have been associated with passive roles and doing what they are told. The result has been a mindset in both the discipline as well as society at large that leaders are more important than followers: The result has been a mindset in both the discipline as well as society-at-large that leaders are more important than followers and that people should strive to be a leader and not a follower. Quite simply, those ideas are wrong. Followers matter just as much as leaders to achieving organizational purpose.
PURPOSESHIP
In Essentials of Followership: Rethinking the Leadership Paradigm with Purpose, Linville and Rennaker explore the growing field of followership and discover that followers matter far more than we think they do. Although the simple act of following might be considered passive, followership is something entirely different. Effective followers are proactive. They demonstrate engagement, constructive challenge, critical thinking, leader/other support, and collaboration.
While leaders exert leadership influence on followers, followers exert followership influence on leaders and other followers. Leader and follower roles shift to meet an organizational challenge even if formal titles do not change. Leaders and followers serve a common purpose. What matters most is that leaders and followers understand how best to work together in order to attain and sustain the purposes they share.