Why leaders can’t do leadership alone?

Let’s Focus on Followers and Followership

Followers and Followership

The role of followers and followership in leadership is often overlooked or misunderstood. We know that leaders don’t do leadership alone — leadership is constructed by leaders and followers working together. This week we will explore followership.

There are thousands of books and tens of thousands of writings on leadership, and the vast majority of them leave followers out of the equation. What we are going to do is “reverse the lens” and focus on the follower.

For Development: Change your perspective. Think about the times that you have been in a follower role. How did you behave? Were you the kind of follower that a leader would want to have on the team? (Were you the kind of leader YOU would want to have on your team?).

What about those team members you have worked with who were most valuable? How did they behave? What were their strengths?

Think about times that your followers or your team members let you down? Why? What did they fail to do? What did they do that wasn’t helpful?

A leader can learn a lot by studying followers and the follower role. How can you be a better follower? How can you, as a leader, develop followers?