Developing Leaders Quarterly - issue 44 - Followership

Developing Leaders Quarterly (DLQ) is published by Ideas for Leaders, the leadership focused publishers that work with the world's premier thinkers around leadership and organizational behaviour related themes.

This issue of DLQ explores Followership. You can't be a leader without followers, so followers are critical for leadership to happen. The oddity is that relative to the research and thinking about leaders' behaviours the research and thinking around follower behaviour is much scarcer. The Followership movement has been around since the 1990s. The initial significant works on it, Robert Kelley's Power of Followership, was published in 1992, and Ira Chaleff's The Courageous Follower in 1995. Since then there has been a gradual increase in interest in the topic - but it has remained a subset of the leadership exploration, only now is it beginning to be seen as an equal and balancing part of that relationship.

Followership scholars and thinkers are at pains to underline that leadership and followership can not be completely disentangled, they are necessarily and intimately connected to each other. This issue shines a light on the topic - and we have contributions from some of today's greatest Followership experts. Marc and Samantha Hurwitz have written our opening article - together they are the driving force behind the annual Global Followership Conference, this year held in Glasgow, Scotland, and are the authors of Leadership is Only Half the Story.

We are honoured to have an article by Ira Chaleff on leader-follower dynamics and the options followers have available to them. Christian Monö writes on Natural Followership, a topic he has been exploring for almost two decades, and has recently been recognised for with the 2024 Followership Award of Distinction. While Langley Sharp, the former director of the UK's Centre for Army Leadership, and author of its recent Followership Doctrine Note, writes on followership and trust. Basil Read draws on his deep practical experience of introducing followership into various organizations, and Julie Newman walks us through her experience doing the same in a non-profit and the remarkable results it created.

As always we have several articles on other topics too - Mark McCartney on the importance of pausing and reflecting for leaders at all levels; Wendy Shepherd on the Holy Grail of Leadership Development, and our own editor, Roddy Millar on the things we can learn on leadership from the Maasai.