Leading, Following or Sitting Around?

Leadership needs leaders and followers. Indeed, Harvard scholar and leadership author Barbara Kellerman suggests that, “Followers are more important to leaders than leaders are to followers.”

But in their attempts to develop leadership, do organisations support the role of followers as much as they support the role of leaders?

Much of my recent consulting and coaching has focused on the reciprocal nature of leadership and followership.  I’m increasingly observing that both of these roles are discretionary and interchangeable.  There can be a boss and subordinate, but they only become leader and follower if both make the respective choice to lead, and to follow.  It’s the job of both leaders and followers to create the powerful leadership relationships needed to make this happen.

So even though leaders might get the glory, don’t be afraid to be a great follower too, because without followers, there are no leaders!

And now the question: Can we create leadership simply by training leaders, or should we focus more on followers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

A Question of Leadership

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein

People often look to their leaders for answers to some hard questions. But if leaders had all the answers they probably wouldn’t need followers. In fact, the great leaders knew they didn’t have all the answers, but they made sure they asked the important questions. By asking great questions, leaders put important issues on the agenda and mobilise followers in search of answers. And some of the most powerful questions we might start asking relate to leadership itself.

So what are the powerful leadership questions we should be asking today? I recently asked a group of Deakin University Alumni to nominate the most important leadership question they would ask of a panel of world leadership experts. Their broad-ranging responses covered concepts including:

• definitions of leadership,
• relationships between leaders and followers,
• bad leaders,
• leadership image and credibility,
• leader personality and circumstance,
• influence and motivation,
• establishing a vision, and
• developing leadership skills.

What is your most important leadership question? And who is it you should be asking?