Followership: how followers are creating change and changing leaders

There is no leader without at least one follower that's obvious. But this groundbreaking volume is the first to provide a sweeping view of followers both in their own right and in relation to their leaders. It deliberately departs from the leader centric approach that has for too long dominated our thinking about leadership and management. Barbara Kellerman argues that followers have always mattered more than we generally understand and that they matter more now than they ever did before. Moreover the trend is accelerating. Followers are becoming more important, and leaders less. Through gripping stories about a range of people and place from multinational corporations such as Merck, to Nazi Germany, to the American military after 9/11, Kellerman makes all-important distinctions among five different types of followers: Isolates, Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards. And she explains the significance not only of how they relate to their leaders, but also of how they relate to each other. Followership enables us to see how people with relatively fewer sources of power, authority, and influence matter. They matter when they do something and they matter even when they do little or nothing. In these rapidly changing times, and 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. Barbara Kellerman's exciting book Followership offers breakthrough insights into why and how people relate to their leaders and focuses on the importance of the relationship between leaders and followers. Every leader should read this book to understand how to become more effective in leading.