Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Book review

Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders. By Barbara Kellerman. Harvard Business School Press, 305 pages. $29.95. The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations. By Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff and Jean Lipman-Blumen, Eds. Jossey-Bass, 386 pages. $55.

Scads of books are written on leadership: I probably have at least two in my review pile at any time. But followership? That's another story. So, it seems intriguing that there are two new books out on the subject, both of which share a very similar red, white and black dust jacket treatment.

Coincidence? Let's assume so. Both are earnest and somewhat scholarly works aimed at explaining what "followership" is and how it is changing as leadership itself changes. Of course, this concept has been an integral part of command-and-control organizations forever: followers follow a leader. In recent years, however, the breakdown of hierarchical organizations into matrices and more collegial and autonomous structures has changed the nature of a follower, conferring more responsibility and power.

Kellerman's book details how followers matter--in her view, as much as leaders. She explores myths and truths about followers, their relationships with leaders and ways in which followers themselves differ. Followers are getting bolder, she writes, as well as more strategic, and are less inclined to sit silently by as problems fester.

A lecturer at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and its former executive director, Kellerman is actually the author or editor of a number of books on leadership. But followership is not simply the flip side of the leadership coin: she divides followers into five different types--isolates, bystanders, participants, activists and diehards--ranked by...