Moving The Emphasis From The Leaders To The Followers

Some researchers prefer to move the focus away from the leader altogether and to examine instead what makes others prepared to follow these individuals. In 1988 an important article published in the Harvard Business Review, entitled “In Praise of Followers”, began to shift attention away from the machismo of leadership to the less glamorous side of the same equation: the role of ‘followership’.

What the advocates of followership recognised was that to become an effective leader, most people first had to learn how to be good followers. With few exceptions, this is as true of the corporate world as it is of military and political leaders. Aristotle noted: “He who has never learnt to obey cannot be a good commander”.

More than ever today, business executives have to operate as both leader and follower in the daily rounds of their job. Those who study leadership begin to take more interest in the ‘psychological contract’ between leader and followers. In other words, they began to ask what makes people prepared to follow one leader and unwilling to follow another.

These ideas are now changing both the way we think about leadership and the style of our leaders. This is in tune with other social and organisational developments, including the move to more participative management and the rise of industrial democracy.