A Leadership Quality That Gets Overlooked…. But Shouldn’t

At the end of each basketball season, the great coach and teacher John Wooden made it his practice to pick a topic of interest to him and to do a “deep dive” study into that topic in a manner that would bolster Wooden’s coaching ability, his strategies, and his team.

With UConn having secured its second straight NCAA D1 Men’s basketball championship, the Gamecocks of South Carolina winning the NCAA D1 Women’s crown, and my Golden State Warriors being bounced from the NBA Play-in Tournament, my basketball season is officially over.

Thus, it is time for me to pick my study topic for the 2024-2025 executive search season!

And the winner is…

Followership.

I can trace my interest in the topic of leadership all the way back to middle school, when I watched my big sister, Randee, get elected president of her high school’s student government. I was a point guard in basketball, the position which is the “floor general,” directing the game’s action and the flow. Studying organizational behavior in college planted the seeds of my interest in leadership in business settings.

I was drawn to the executive search industry because of the opportunity to help organizations solve their most pressing leadership needs while doing that across myriad industries, geographies, and business models. That I have had the chance to realize that opportunity for over three decades has been immensely fulfilling.

But as my focus has been on the leadership and governance of organizations of all types, I have, for the most part, overlooked the engine that drives performance (or scuttles it) in any setting…

Followership.

Thus, I am going to explore the following questions over the course of this year:

What are the personal attributes of great followers? What does “great followership” look like?
Where do we find great followership – and poor followership?
Why is followership necessary and important? Is it?
How does an organization develop great followers?
Who (of an earthbound nature) should we follow?

Rather than overcommit, I may or may not share the results I find to these questions (how is THAT for being wishy-washy?). I mean, John Wooden didn’t necessarily shout about what he had learned from a mountain top…

He just went and won more championships.

To get started – here is a classic 1988 Harvard Business Review article on the topic of followership: In Praise of Followers.