About Followership

How can you build harmonious relations with team and hierarchy? How to best speak up with your hierarchy when you need to challenge their opinions or decisions? How to find a better balance between supportiveness and courage to disagree – and speak your truth? How can you encourage your team members to do the same with you? These are some of the questions frequently asked to us, practitioners of Followership.

But what is Followership?

Followership defines a role (not a person’s identity) and the tasks/actions accomplished by someone in a subordinate role. It can also be considered as a specific skill-set that complements leadership, a role within a hierarchical organization, among others.

Followership is about supporting leaders and helping them to lead well/better. It is not about submission, but about complementarity, wisdom and collaborative culture. Leadership is not just done by a leader, and followership is not just done by followers. These two roles are normally interconnected and interchangeable, and both roles share the responsibility of a common purpose and mission. In a nutshell, it is about a work culture where followers will help leaders to be better leaders, and leaders will help followers to be better followers.

Like a “dance” where the two roles co-create an outstanding performance that values wisdom over autocracy, collaboration over submission, harmony over competition, and a sense of togetherness over a sense of obligation.

In today’s disrupted reality, this model is more important than ever, to create collective meaning, to heal and recover from multiple crisis, and to build organizations and work cultures that are profoundly human, cooperative and sustainable.

The Community

We are a community of academics and practitioners certified in the application of Courageous Followership concept in curricula, workshops and organizational culture. We are educators dedicated to teaching people followership in order to be strong and courageous. This website contains training resources and discussion spaces to support one another in sharing the principles and practices of Courageous Followership. We are committed to helping improve outcomes by teaching leadership together with followership.

Several of us are also a part of the International Leadership Association’s (ILA) Followership Member Community.

Interested in becoming a member?

Members can access our library of resources, attend educational webinars, interact with colleagues, share experiences, participate in forums, request assistance and more. All graduates of a Courageous Follower Train the Trainer Program and other approved followership educators are invited to join this community. To inquire about membership or attending an upcoming Courageous Follower training, please fill out the Contact form.