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The art and craft of followership
The best followers do not see themselves as inferior to leaders -- they are just in a different role
For some seven years now Robert E. Kelley has been exploring an important and neglected aspect of business -- the art and craft of being a great follower. What is good "followership"? How do we recognize it, learn it, teach it, encourage it, and make the best use of it? His study has resulted in a seminal article ("In Praise of Followers," Harvard Business Review, November/December 1988) and a forthcoming book (Followership-Leadership-Partnership).
A writer and speaker as well as adjunct professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, Kelley is also president of his own consulting firm. His most acclaimed previous book is The Gold-Collar Worker: Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Workforce. Previously he was a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and served as a senior management consultant at Stanford Research Institute.
Last fall, Healthcare Forum Journal explored the key issues of "followership" with Dr. Kelley in a free-flowing conversation.
The flip side of leadership is followership. We spend so much time focusing on leadership that we don't give any attention to the followership side of the equation.
Almost everyone plays both roles. You might be boss of a department, and have a boss over you. Even when you're a leader, you actually spend much more of your time being a follower to whomever your leader is.
Boot camp
We make a lot of assumptions about leaders and followers. We assume, for instance, that a good leader will create good followers. We assume that leaders are always effective (or they wouldn't be in that position), that followers are generally ineffective, and that the leader's job is to whip them into shape. It's like boot camp: The leaders are going to take these undisciplined, unmotivated people and turn them into a fighting unit.
Yet we say, "Leaders need to be trained." But no one has asked the question: "If they're effective to start out with, why do they need to be trained?" We have courses in leadership, as if this is not something that comes to people naturally. You have to go to classes. But we don't have any courses...