Useful Commute: How Followers Are Changing Leaders

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  retep6301/22/08 Report as spam
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  the most important thing leaders need

  In all due respect to Professor Kellerman's separating followers into five behavioural categories, but I have reason to question.
  Why should looking at followers in the same way we've been unsuccessfully looking at leaders result in anything not equally disappointing?
  
  After all, the leadership discussion has, for the most part told us that leadership is about behaviour (situational approach) and personality (trait approach). Yet, we are still very much unable to explain (let alone, predict) why one person is a better leader than another. Neither have we been able to establish any sort of unifying theoretical frameworks on the subject of leadership.
  
  Interesting approaches are coming from psychologists, taking an evolutionary approach to leadership AND followership. After all, it is only our confusion between leading and ?having a career? that has made following something disreputable. Even though most of us, including the leaders, would agree to spend more time following than leading.
  
  Leadership is not so much about the individual; it's about getting the job done better in a group, because the group had decided that it is advantageous to have a leader, BEFORE deciding on who exactly that should be.
  
  It is argued that these are the important aspects when deciding on whom to follow:
  
  1. A convincing success strategy
  
  2. A shared reality, creating a group sense of purpose
  
  3. Solving problems along the way to reaching the overlying goal
  
  4. Enforcing the ?right? decisions by exerting power
  
  The key to leadership lies in accomplishing the group objective. The leader, as an individual, is neither that relevant, nor really important, to some extent replaceable. What is however very relevant is the following fifth aspect.
  
  5. Securing power in ensuring legitimisation from followers.
  
  So instead of categorising followers, maybe we should concentrate more on understanding why they chose to be lead in the first place.

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  kgorman@...01/25/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Useful Commute: How Followers Are Changing Leaders

  In their book "Launching a Leadership Revolution", Woodward and Brady state the case that in effect there is an art and a science to leadership, and both can be improved and strengthened over time. There is an underlaying assumption that all of us are leaders, and as roles and situations change, we can all take on roles of following and leading. But their basic underlining view that in the science aspect of leadership, there is really a multiple step progress of leadership development, from learning to following before leadership even begins. An the role an rise of the leader depends upon a vision that is cast and the hunger of the rising leader for improvement and learning. It's the 'servant' leaders who are going to listen to those following them, positional leaders will just 'wash out'.