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Aug 4, 2008

"One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you." --Dennis A. Peer

What Leaders Should Know About Followers

There is no leader without at least one follower -- that's obvious. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders' development rather than followers' or mistakenly assume that followers are amorphous, all one and the same. As a result, we hardly notice, for example, that followers who tag along mindlessly are altogether different from those who are deeply devoted. In reality, the distinctions among followers in groups and organizations are every bit as consequential as those among leaders. This Harvard Business Review article shares more.