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Effective Followership
You must know how to follow before you can lead.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we all play the role of follower much of
the time--regardless of our position. Interestingly, effective
followers share many of the same characteristics as effective leaders.
As a result, cultivating followership skills can be an excellent way to
become a more effective leader. Followership can also be called "leading up,"
"managing up," or "leading from the middle."
Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer
Throughout history there have been leaders who
made disastrous decisions. In this article, Michael A. Roberto
argues that poor decisions are usually caused by poor decision-making processes.
One of the most important things a
leader can do when he/she needs to make an important decision, he writes, is to
"decide
how to decide." The process chosen by the
leader can have a huge impact on both the quality of the decision and
the organization's buy-in when implementing it. Dr. Roberto dispels several myths about how decisions
are made in organizations (e.g. "Myth 4: Managers Analyze and Then
Decide") and provides some great insights into how leadership styles,
cognitive biases and organizational defensive routines can get in the
way of effective decision making. This article was published as
Chapter 1 of Roberto's terrific book
Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer.
Reproduced by GovLeaders.org with the kind permission of
Pearson Education.
Dynamic
Followership: The Prerequisite for Effective Leadership
Lt. Col. Sharon LaTour and Lt. Col. Vicki Rast (both USAF) assert that
supervisors can--and must--play a vital role in developing the next
generation of leaders by teaching their subordinates to become dynamic
followers. They provide an excellent description of dynamic followership and suggest a list of follower competencies
that employees should cultivate.
Originally
published in the Winter 2004 issue if
Air
& Space Power Journal. Reproduced by GovLeaders.org with
permission.
Courageous Followers, Courageous Leaders
Subordinates have a key role to play
in helping their supervisors improve their leadership skills, argues Ira Chaleff. Rather than complain about the
faults of our superiors, we all have a responsibility to help them
leverage their strengths and address any fatal flaws they may have. Chaleff observes that those who go to the trouble of cultivating
relationships of trust with their superiors and then offer honest
feedback to them can make a huge impact on the quality of
leadership in their organizations.
This article provides a taste of the
kinds of leadership stories Michael Useem covers in his book
Leading Up.
Includes a number of compelling examples of upward
leadership--both good and bad and suggests a number of strategies
that executives can implement to encourage employees to
help keep their bosses on the right track.
The Ten Rules of Good Followership
[PDF]
Col. Phillip Meilinger (USAF) argues that we need to pay more attention to the
qualities that define good followership given that "all of us will be followers
more often than we will be leaders." Most of his rules of good
followership require significant courage and integrity. Public servants
who live by these rules will not only be effective staffers but will also be
well on their way to becoming leaders of character. This article was
published in
AU-24 Concepts for Air Force Leadership, a superb collection of leadership
articles, most of which were written by senior military leaders.
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