Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders (Center for Public Leadership) - Hardcover

Kellerman, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1422103684 ISBN 13: 9781422103685

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2008

Synopsis

This groundbreaking volume provides the first sweeping view of followers in relation to their leaders, deliberately departing from the leader-centric approach that dominates our thinking about leadership and management. Barbara Kellerman argues that, over time, followers have played increasingly vital roles. For two key reasons, this trend is now accelerating. Followers are becoming more important, and leaders less. Through gripping stories about a range of people and places—from multinational corporations such as Merck, to Nazi Germany, to the American military after 9/11—Kellerman makes key distinctions among five different types of followers: Isolates, Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards. And she explains how they relate not only to their leaders but also to each other. Thanks to Followership, we can finally appreciate the ways in which those with relatively fewer sources of power, authority, and influence are consequential. Moreover, they are getting bolder and more strategic. As Kellerman makes crystal clear, to fixate on leaders at the expense of followers is to do so at our peril. The latter are every bit as important as the former, which makes this book required reading for superiors and subordinates alike.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Kellerman is James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Among her many books on leadership, she is author of Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters.

Reviews

Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government professor Kellerman (Bad Leadership) shifts the focus from leadership to followership, arguing that followers are every bit as important as leaders. Defining followers as subordinates who have less power, authority and influence than their superiors, and who usually, but not always, fall into line, she notes that we are all followers at different points in time. Followers, Kellerman argues, are getting bolder and more strategic, less likely to know their place and affecting work places, to mixed results. She identifies five types of followers based upon level of engagement: Isolate, Bystander, Participant, Activist and Diehard. She explores each type, with examples ranging from Nazi Germany to Merck to the U.S. military's Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. She also explores the relationships between leaders and followers, who, Kellerman argues, should be thought of as inseparable. Followership is not about changing the rank of followers, Kellerman states, but instead about changing their response to their rank, their superiors and the situation at hand. Thorough and insightful, Kellerman provides a fascinating look at a little-explored topic, which will be of great interest to both leaders and followers. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1422103684
• ISBN 13: 9781422103685
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336