Would it surprise you that at the recent global conference of the International Leadership Association, answers to the following survey questions all were identified by attendees of the closing plenary session as “followership?”
What do we need to be teaching early leaders TODAY to prepare them for leadership in 25 years? - "Followership"
What is needed in leadership development programs? - "Followership"
What does research need to focus on NOW to prepare us for the future? - "Followership"
This overwhelming response certainly does not diminish the richness and importance of leadership or its many components, but it does seem to suggest the study and practice of leadership has reached an inflection point for the community of scholars and practitioners in our discipline.
Perhaps there is a clue in the historical development of leadership study over the last 60 years. Over the past century, leadership was examined first based on traits, then on behaviors, and more recently through the lens of transformational leadership and servant leadership. Attention seems to be shifting again toward viewing leadership as a system. Perhaps the latter helps explain the growing sense of the necessity of followership, not as secondary to leadership or even just a tertiary topic in leadership. Rather, it is a necessary component for completing the full understanding and functioning of the leadership system. A focus on or elevation of followership does not diminish leadership. Rather, it completes it.
As we continue to see elevated concerns about the re-emergence of "great man," "autocratic," "romance of leadership," "mythical characterizations" and similar perspectives of leaders on the world and organizational stage, perhaps the necessary step for the study and practice of leadership (as well as development) is to properly place followership into the equation. It is through the lens of followership where we are most reminded that organizations (and nations) are full of people who are not just passive commodities to be cajoled and controlled. Rather, they are communities and collectives of humans with inherent equal worth regardless of whether they are serving in a leader or follower role at any given moment. Lest some leaders forget or choose to disregard, people are humans of diverse gifting, talents, voice, (and even weaknesses) that are better and stronger together. Followership confronts us with that reality in ways that the study of leadership alone has not done well or at least not done fully to this point.
In our textbook on the Essentials of Followership, we describe a critically important outcome of an appropriate application of both the leader/leadership and follower/followership elements of the system: we have the opportunity to create richer communities of purpose. The time is now... as well as for the next 25 years and beyond. The world needs leadership and followership to take their rightful places beside each other as part of the whole system.
Leaders matter. Followers matter just as much.
Leadership matters. Followership matters just as much.
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