FOLLOWERS TAKE THE LEAD

FOLLOWERS TAKE THE LEAD Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders By Barbara Kellerman (Harvard Business School Press, 336 pp., $29.951

Reviewed by Pam Leigh * * *

Followership opens with author Barbara Kellerman's synopsis of the George Orwell short story "Shooting an Elephant."

This cautionary tale written in the mid-1930s possesses a disturbing ending, but the tale is well-chosen to illuminate Kellerman's thesis that followers are important. However there's only one small problem, she says: "As Orwell's tale makes plain, exactly who are the leaders and who are the followers is not always completely clear."

A book on followership departs from the leader-centric approach that dominates current management literature, or what Kellerman refers to as the "leadership industry." But who can doubt its importance as a topic when confronted with the ubiquitous news stories of the many CEOs who have recently toppled from their high perches. This seismic shift in the previous balance of power between leaders and followers offers a contemporary cautionary tale: leaders who ignore or dismiss their followers do so at their own peril.

Kellerman's thesis is that just as leaders fall into categories on a continuum from good to bad, so, too, do followers. The challenge in distinguishing between a good or a bad follower (as with a good or bad leader) depends on your fundamental values, and what you think of the leader and the followers in a particular situation.

Before Kellerman gets to the meat of her thesis-her take on the five types of followers-she traces the circuitous path of followership. She takes us on a mini history lesson, first back to the mid-170Os and the beginnings of political dissent, and that century's famous revolutions. She then examines the origins of our fear of following, and documents the changes that occurred in how we defined leadership both before and after World War II, and especially during the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s. Kellerman shows what a powerful tool the Internet, and particularly blogging, has become in changing the dynamic between those who hold positions of power and those who do not.

While the author's voice in these chapters sometimes bears witness to her current position as a James MacGregor Burns lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Kellerman's historical perspective is peppered with enough interesting examples to illustrate her points-from Professor Stanley Milgram's infamous experiments on obedience, to current events, such as what befell talk show host Don Imus-that the reader gladly stays with her.

Our reward, and where we finally get to the good stuff, is a thoroughly engrossing part two, in which the four types of engaged followers are described. (The fifth type, the isolate, is dispensed within six pages since there's not much to say about a follower who is completely detached. As the author says, "isolates have a problem. Isolates are a problem.")

As for the other four types-the bystander, the participant, the activist, and the diehard-Kellerman illustrates exactly the kind of power, for better or worse, each of these follower types can wield.

Rather than just tell us what her categories mean, Kellerman shows us the power behind the actions or inactions of the four types. Just as Orwell's short story drives home his points, so do Kellerman's well-chosen short stories illustrate hers. In chapters devoted to each type, she describes real-life historical events (for example, Nazi Germany, Merck and the Vioxx debacle, Boston's crisis in the Catholic Church, and Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan) in which a particular type of follower dominated. In so doing, she captures the profile of the follower type and provides the reader with a concrete understanding of how followers behave and why.

In her final chapter, "Transformations," Kellerman talks about how followership is changing the workplace and the public arena. For the workplace, she provides suggestions of effective followership tools, such as managing up, quiet resistance, and collective action. For the public arena, she lists 18 action steps we each can take to counteract the low level of civic and political engagement that characterizes America today.

This read is worth three cups of a deep-roasted brew.

Pam Leigh is a freelance writer from Restart, Virginia; pleighwriter@earthlink.net.

Copyright American Society for Training and Development Apr 2008
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved