Inspiring examples of followership
One of the reasons it’s hard to get people interested in followership is that not only is it hard to swallow our pride and admit to our role as servants, but that there are so few inspiring examples of followership in our culture.
Inspiring stories of leadership abound:
· Hannibal crossing the Alps with his army of elephants
· John F Kennedy enthusiastically declaring the United States would go to the moon
· Sir Edmond Hillary reaching the summit of Mt Everest
But in the case of Hillary, he definitely had a true master of followership in his sherpa Tenzing Norgay.
Here is someone employed as a guide, navigator and beast of burden to accompany his master to the top of the world.
It’s hard to really grasp the sacrifice and tough decisions Tenzing must have made to serve.
Did he simply stoicly bear the load given to him, or did he take play an active role in the decisions made by the expedition?
Was he anticipating the needs of his master?
Did he use initiative and specific domain knowledge to give more to the task than asked?
Probably. It's certainly worth thinking how we would act in a similar circumstance.
There is some doubt about whether Hillary even made it to the summit first, but here is a true example of a faithful servant getting on with the business of doing his job.
These are the sorts of topics I want to cover in future blogs.
For the time being though - at least we can say: we followers have heroes too.
posted by Phil Willis at 7:24 AM
1 Comments:
It's taken me a while to get here, so now that I'm here... I believe there are PLENTY of stories of inspiring followership. To me, you could also contrast leadership versus "followership" as being leverage versus individual contribution. When you do, the "followers" become a lot more voluminous and noticable (and their moniker is also less tarnished).
Leaders are those who influence/direct/coerce/whatever groups of people to achieve something that one person could not do on their own. That's the reason why their achievements often seem larger and may be more celebrated.
Individual contributors become impressive when they do something that is outstanding in the context of a single person. Some notable individual contributors? Neil Armstrong, Albert Einstein, Michael Jordan, John Coltrane playing in Miles Davis' band...
This list looks impressive to me. You? I'm sure that no-one ever referred to these people as "followers", however, if you look at their contexts they could all be called that.
So, my follow-up question is this. Without the individual contributors listed above, would the same collective achievements have happened (manned moon exploration, nuclear weapons/energy, the dominance of the Chicago Bulls, the album Kind of Blue)? Maybe (in which case leadership may have played a part), maybe not. Food for thought...
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