I was thinking about the time, energy and effort we put into making people more effective leaders. People have made careers out of it although it seems – to me at least – like Mexican food. Helen Amery called it out the other day as a volume issue.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just make people better followers? There’s a whole suite of followship skills which LnD could market:
- Developing trust with insincere people
- Learning to believe anything/everything someone says
- Being inspired by uninspirational people
- Being passionate in an uncommitted environment
- Understanding mixed messages
- Working with indecisive people
- Taking blame with confidence
- Appreciating the learning points of the excessive workload
- Giving up ideas for the credit of others
- Working without praise
- Being manipulated with appreciation
Followship skills can be delivered at scale, will be cheaper than leadership development and can be forced through with hierarchical and authoritarian process.
We wouldn’t do this – it’s both unethical and highly dysfunctional and completely outside the LnD ethic.
However, isn’t followship what business wants?
Lost and Desperate 
[…] The term instruction feels very order-like. Are LnD also expecting people to be followers? […]
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[…] Monday’s post came from reading yet another article on what leaders need to do to be effective. I did a brief count up and found just over 100 articles published in the last month which were all saying the same thing. I asked myself what the outcome might be that these articles were expecting, and that’s where the idea of followship came to be. It wrote itself as a stream of consciousness after I’d had the initial thought […]
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[…] do and the relationship between them will determine what we do – or more accurately – don’t do. In the current times, the relationship between them is more strained than ever as organisations […]
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