Why is this? Is our obsession with leaders and neglect of followers rational? Is it grounded in an intellectually rigorous analysis of what transpires when change is created – or for that matter when stasis is sustained? Is it logical in light of our own experience of how people in groups and organizations really behave? Or are there other, more elusive, reasons for this ostensibly benign neglect?

This course on Followership is designed, deliberately, as a corrective. It is designed to correct for our over-emphasis on leaders and for our misguided and even mistaken under-emphasis on followers – in the workplace and in the society at large. Click here to download Followership Syllabus.

Followers
As virtually all the evidence would seem to confirm, it is widely assumed that leaders are of major importance and followers of only minor importance. This course is, again, intended as a corrective. It presumes that followers have always mattered more than is generally understood, and that for a few key reasons they matter more now than they did before. This change is not limited only to a few people in a few places. Individuals, groups, and organizations all over the world, in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, are being affected by shifts that bestow on followers more power and influence, and deprive leaders of less.

This course will consider the changing times and focus on actors who until now have been little considered and less understood. In particular we will be differentiating followers one from the other, focusing on a few key followers in a few key situations, and exploring our own roles as subordinates - which, it may be added, nearly all of us are more often than not. (Of course some of us are leaders and followers simultaneously.) Click here to download Followers Syllabus.