http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/ 15 On the Flip Side of Leadership with Barbara Kellerman en Copyright 2009 Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:33:25 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=4.2-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Hate to say "I told you so." (Not really.) But . . . I told you so. In my most recent book, "Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders," I wrote that as a result of two changes, one recent and the other even more recent, 21st century leaders are losing power and influence while followers are gaining more. First, the various rights revolutions that climaxed in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to an unprecedented decline in respect for authority. As Todd Gitlin, an expert on that period, writes, "Today, on every political and cultural front, the question is not whether to question authority but which authority to question." While this is not a syndrome altogether new -- in the 19th century De Tocqueville wrote that Americans had a "general distaste for accepting any man's word as proof of anything" -- the anti-authority movements of the http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/06/irans-lessons-on-followership.html http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/06/irans-lessons-on-followership.html Technology Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:33:25 -0500 The American people have got in the habit of shooting a man down for one gig gone awry. As Timothy Geithner discovered on Tuesday, his one bad turn was all it took for us to judge him so weak a performer that it will be difficult, maybe impossible, for him to recover. Geithner came on the scene with some baggage - there was that unpaid tax bill and a stint as president of the Federal Reserve that now seems less than stellar. Still the question arises: Why do we rush to judgment of a man and matter of such overweening importance? From where stems this sense of our entitlement? Blame it on the popular culture, which has affected, or maybe infected, the political culture. I call it "the American Idolization" of American life, for it is the Fox TV show American Idol and its multiple progeny that have taught us http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/american-idol-contestant-timothy-geithner.html http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/american-idol-contestant-timothy-geithner.html Public opinion Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:16:55 -0500 When will they learn? Leaders today are vulnerable, as never before, to pressures from once-mute followers who now have the cultural temerity and technological capacity to protest loud and clear. President Barack Obama, for example, seems not to have understood that when you transition from campaigning to governing you are accountable to countless constituents, large numbers of whom are not ardent fans. He failed to appreciate that people both in and out of government would not simply accept, with nary a note of dissent, a string of appointees with tax problems. As a result he felt forced, just days after taking office, publicly to admit, "I screwed up." Apart from the indignity of the phrase, there was the indignity of a man who had morphed nearly overnight from riding high to eating humble pie. Political leaders are not the only ones who still don't get it. The nation's business leaders http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/popes-presidents-and-public-opinion.html http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/popes-presidents-and-public-opinion.html Followership Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:15:31 -0500 Leaders matter. But -- Obama-mania notwithstanding -- they don't matter as much as we think. Moreover they matter less now than they ever did before. Our fixation on leaders is not only misguided, it's downright mistaken. Leader-centrism confuses or denies the complexities of history, which include a cast of characters whom I call followers. Followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors. Though we associate the word "follower" with weakness, timorousness, and even failure - every one wants to be a leader, no one wants to be a follower - in fact leaders must, by definition, have at least one follower. And just as we tend to overestimate the power of leaders, so we usually underestimate the power of followers. Consider the war in Gaza. In times past, decisions in this part of the world were made by leaders -- by kings, presidents, and http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/bottoms-up-why-followers-matter.html http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/followership/2009/02/bottoms-up-why-followers-matter.html Followership Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:47:54 -0500